Screening and scoping opinions: the EIA procedure

An EIA screening opinion is a formal answer from the local planning authority on whether your Schedule 2 development is likely to have effects on the environment substantial enough to require an environmental statement. You can request one before you apply, the authority has three weeks to adopt it, and the answer changes your programme by months either way.

Requesting it early is almost always right. Guessing is how a scheme reaches validation and is told it cannot be determined without an environmental statement nobody has started.

When to request a screening opinion

Schedule 1 to the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017 lists development where assessment is mandatory. If your scheme is in Schedule 1, screening is unnecessary and the answer is yes.

Schedule 2 is where judgement operates. It lists categories with applicable thresholds and criteria, and development in one of those categories needs assessment only where it would have likely significant effects on the environment by virtue of factors such as its nature, size or location. Urban development projects are the category most developers meet, with thresholds relating to site area and to the number of dwellings.

Two traps catch people.

The first is sensitive areas. Where any part of the site falls in a sensitive area as defined by the Regulations, including a site of special scientific interest, a National Park, a National Landscape, a World Heritage Site, a scheduled monument or a European site, the Schedule 2 thresholds fall away and the development is capable of being screened whatever its size.

The second is salami slicing. Screening looks at the development as a whole, including cumulative effects with other existing and approved development, so splitting a scheme into phases to duck a threshold does not work and is visible from the application history.

What the request must contain

A screening request has to give the authority enough to answer. The Regulations require a plan sufficient to identify the land, a description of the development including its physical characteristics and location, and a description of the aspects of the environment likely to be affected.

In practice a good request runs to fifteen or twenty pages and includes:

• A red line plan and a site location plan at a legible scale.
• A description of the proposal with the quantum, floorspace, site area and construction outline.
• The constraints, with sources, covering designations, flood zone, heritage assets, protected species records and air quality management areas.
• A structured assessment against the Schedule 3 selection criteria, which cover the characteristics of the development, its location and the type and characteristics of the potential effects.
• Any mitigation embedded in the design, described in a way the authority can rely on.
• A clear conclusion and the reasons for it.

Embedded mitigation is a contested area. Measures forming part of the design can be taken into account, and measures bolted on to avoid assessment are treated with suspicion. Describe them as design features with a stated commitment rather than as promises.

The period for responding, and what happens if it slips

The authority must adopt a screening opinion within three weeks of the request, or a longer period agreed in writing with the person making the request. It may ask for further information, and the clock effectively restarts on the material it needs.

If no opinion is adopted in time, the applicant may ask the Secretary of State for a screening direction. That direction binds the authority. It also takes time, so agreeing a short extension is often the better course where the authority is engaging.

A screening opinion adopted for a scheme is not a permanent answer. Change the quantum, change the boundary, or change the surrounding baseline enough, and the position may need revisiting.

Reading a screening opinion and its reasons

The Regulations require reasons in both directions. A positive opinion, requiring assessment, must state the main reasons with reference to the Schedule 3 criteria. A negative opinion must state the main reasons why assessment is not required, with reference to those criteria.

Read the reasons carefully even when the answer is the one you wanted. A negative opinion that lists embedded mitigation as the basis for its conclusion is telling you that those measures now have to be delivered, and any later amendment that removes one puts the screening back in play.

Where the opinion is positive and you disagree, you can ask the Secretary of State for a screening direction, and the request has to be made before the application is determined. Judicial review is the other route and it is expensive, slow and rarely proportionate for a private developer.

Scoping and why it is worth doing

A scoping opinion asks the authority what the environmental statement should cover. It is optional, the authority must consult the relevant consultation bodies, and it must respond within five weeks or a longer agreed period.

Ask for one on any scheme where assessment is required. Three reasons.

It fixes the topics, so you are not paying for chapters nobody needed and not discovering a missing topic at week eleven. It brings the statutory consultees into the discussion early, which is where most environmental statements fail. And it produces a written record of agreed methodologies, so an objector's consultant arguing later that the wrong method was used has to explain why the authority agreed it.

Send a scoping report rather than a letter. Set out each proposed topic, the proposed method, the study area, the baseline data sources and the assessment criteria, and identify topics you propose to scope out with reasons. Scoping out is where the money is saved, and it needs justifying properly.

An Environmental Impact Assessment has to be prepared by competent experts under the 2017 Regulations, so the scoping stage is also when the team is assembled. Ecology usually drives the programme, and the Preliminary Ecological Appraisal should be commissioned before scoping rather than after, so the survey seasons are known.

Programme consequences of a positive screening

Assume a year, and be pleased if it is less.

Environmental statements take six to twelve months to prepare on a typical urban scheme, driven by seasonal survey windows, modelling lead times and consultee response periods. The statutory determination period for EIA development is sixteen weeks rather than the usual thirteen for a major application, publicity requirements are heavier, and the authority may require further information under the Regulations after submission, which restarts parts of the process.

Budget accordingly. The assessment cost is usually the smaller half of the total, because the specialist surveys, monitoring and modelling that feed it carry their own fees.

Where screening is negative, the individual technical reports are still needed, they are just not bound into a single statement with a non-technical summary. Working out which ones the site attracts is the next job, and the report index sets out what a major scheme typically requires. For a site-specific starting point, enter the postcode on PlanScope before you commission anything.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Screening and scoping turn on the detail of the site and the Regulations, so 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.