The limits of drafting for an Environmental Statement

The Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017 require an Environmental Statement to be prepared by competent experts, and they require the developer to submit a statement setting out the relevant expertise or qualifications of those experts. That single requirement decides what drafting assistance can and cannot do on an EIA scheme. Software does not hold qualifications, and no amount of well-structured text satisfies regulation 18.

So the useful question is not whether an Environmental Statement can be drafted automatically. It is which parts of an EIA programme are writing tasks and which are evidence tasks.

What the regulations require of the authors

Regulation 18 sets out what an Environmental Statement must contain, and Schedule 4 lists the information in full: a description of the development, the reasonable alternatives studied and the main reasons for the option chosen, a description of the relevant aspects of the current state of the environment, the likely effects on them, the mitigation proposed, and a non-technical summary.

Alongside that sits the competence requirement. The developer has to be satisfied the statement was prepared by competent experts, and must say who they were and what qualifies them. Local planning authorities check this. An Environmental Impact Assessment accompanied by a vague competence statement is one of the easier things for a validation officer to reject.

Competence is chapter by chapter, not scheme wide. The ecologist who signs the ecology chapter is not competent to sign the noise chapter, and a coordinating consultant who assembles the document is not thereby competent in every discipline inside it. We have looked at how this works in practice in our note on competent experts and the EIA Regulations 2017.

Screening and scoping as the first decisions

Before any chapter is written, two decisions shape the whole programme.

Screening determines whether EIA is required at all. Schedule 1 development always requires it. Schedule 2 development requires it where the scheme exceeds the applicable threshold or is in a sensitive area, and is likely to have significant effects judged against the selection criteria in Schedule 3. A developer can request a screening opinion from the authority, which normally has three weeks to adopt one.

Scoping is optional and almost always worth doing. A scoping opinion, which the authority normally has five weeks to provide, records which effects will be assessed, which will be scoped out, and what methods will be used. It is the document that prevents a consultee asking for a wholly new assessment at week 14 of a 16 week determination period.

Neither decision is a drafting exercise. Both turn on professional judgement about likely significance, and both create a record that the authority will hold you to.

Which chapters depend on field survey

Most of them. This is the part that surprises people who assume an Environmental Statement is mainly a writing job.

• Ecology needs habitat survey, protected species survey in the right season, and often a full year of data. Bat emergence surveys run from May to September. Great crested newt environmental DNA sampling has a window from mid-April to the end of June.
• Noise needs baseline monitoring at representative positions, over representative periods, avoiding school holidays.
• Air quality needs monitoring data, diffusion tube records and dispersion modelling with a validated meteorological dataset.
• Ground conditions need a desk study, then intrusive investigation, then laboratory analysis.
• Transport needs classified counts in neutral months and, usually, junction modelling.
• Heritage and archaeology need a desk-based assessment and frequently trial trenching.
• Landscape needs viewpoint work at the right time of year, with winter views where deciduous screening matters.

None of that can be written in advance of the data. An assessment chapter that describes a baseline nobody measured is not a draft. It is a fabrication, and it is the failure mode worth guarding against hardest on an EIA scheme.

The role of a coordinating author

Someone has to make the document work as a whole, and that role is real. The coordinator sets a consistent description of the development across every chapter, holds the assessment methodology and significance criteria to one standard, and produces the two chapters that only exist at the whole-document level: cumulative effects, and the interaction between effects.

Cumulative assessment is where coordination shows. It requires an agreed list of other committed development, a consistent treatment of each in every topic chapter, and a judgement about combined significance that no single specialist can make alone.

The coordinator also owns the internal consistency check. A scheme described as 240 units in the transport chapter and 238 in the air quality chapter will be picked up, and it undermines confidence in everything else.

Where drafting assistance does help

There is real work that assistance does well, and pretending otherwise is not useful either.

Structure is the obvious one. Setting out a chapter to match Schedule 4, with the required headings in the required order, removes a class of omission that costs time at validation. Policy context sections, which restate national and local policy applicable to a topic, are drafting tasks provided the citations are checked against the current published text.

The non-technical summary is the other clear case, and it is discussed below.

Consistency checking across a 600 page document is a task that suits automation better than it suits a tired graduate at 11pm. So is flagging gaps. PlanScope's drafts insert a [TO BE CONFIRMED] marker wherever a site-specific fact is missing rather than supplying a plausible number, which is the behaviour you want in an EIA context.

What assistance cannot do is form the professional judgement about significance, carry the competence the regulations require, or sign anything. Those stay with the named experts, and you can find reviewers through the professional directory.

The non-technical summary and its audience

Schedule 4 requires a non-technical summary, and it is the chapter most often written last and worst. Its audience is a resident, a parish councillor or a member of the planning committee, not a specialist.

A good summary states what is proposed, what the main effects are, whether they are adverse or beneficial, how large, and what will be done about them. It avoids the phrase minor adverse without saying what minor adverse means in ordinary words. It carries a plan the reader can orient themselves on.

This is a writing problem, and drafting support helps with it, provided every conclusion is lifted from the assessment chapters rather than restated from memory. The summary must not soften a finding. Where a chapter concludes a moderate adverse residual effect on landscape character, the summary says so.

Consequences of a deficient statement

An authority cannot grant permission for EIA development without considering the environmental information. If the statement is incomplete, the authority will request further information, and the clock keeps running against a 16 week determination period that was already tight.

The more serious risk is legal. A decision taken on the basis of an Environmental Statement that omitted a required assessment is open to challenge, and the remedy is quashing the permission. That risk is carried by the developer, not by whoever drafted the text.

Environmental Impact Assessment is a report type where competent experts are legally required under the 2017 Regulations. Treat any AI-assisted draft as a starting point for those experts rather than a substitute for them. See PlanScope pricing if you want to draft the structure and policy context while your specialists complete the survey work.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.