Today's entry is a round-up of miscellaneous developments relating to infrastructure applications that will be of interest to those involved in other projects.
The 16th application was made under the Planning Act regime on Friday - the first to the Planning Inspectorate - for an upgrade of junction 10a of the M1, promoted by Luton Borough Council. Time for a project update, and first, a graphic that graphically (of course) illustrates the progress each application has made. I can forward a larger version of the graphic if you are particularly interested.
Rookery South - SPP
The Rookery South energy from waste project is currently undergoing Special Parliamentary Procedure (SPP), having been approved by the then Infrastructure Planning Commission nearly nine months ago on 13 October. On 9 July it will pass the milestone of having spent longer undergoing SPP than it spent being examined and decided by the IPC (i.e. the magenta line will be longer than the blue plus white lines).
A committee of three MPs (Brian Binley, Bill Esterson and Paul Uppal) and three peers (Lords Dear, Faulkner of Worcester and Geddes) has been established and is holding its first meeting (in private) tomorrow. They will no doubt decide when they are going to hold hearings into the five 'petitions' that were made against the Rookery South Development Consent Order (DCO) earlier this year and subsequently accepted as valid. Given that the House of Commons rises for the summer on 17 July, I don't expect much progress this side of the autumn.
The same fate is likely to befall other applications where the promoter is neither a local authority or a statutory undertaker, so the government should get a move on and implement the reform of this part of the Planning Act it signalled on budget day in March.
Kentish Flats - the inspector's DCO
The Kentish Flats offshore windfarm application has taken an interesting turn where the examining inspector issued his own draft of the DCO for comment on Friday. It is certainly interesting to see how the different panels and single inspectors are dealing with each examination. I expect that practice will tend to diverge and converge as things are tried out and are either felt to work or not.
Various - statements of common ground
One area where there does appear to be convergence is the inspector(s) telling the promoter what statements of common ground to prepare. The most recent letters inviting parties to preliminary meetings have all done this. See previous blog entry that keeps track of applications' status with links to key documents.
Hinkley Point C - issue-specific hearing
The Hinkley Point C issue-specific hearing on the DCO took place last week and merited its own blog entry - see here. The project webpage now contains exactly 2000 documents - this would be a useful case study for reviewing the ease of finding particular ones, e.g always putting them in date order, naming conventions.
Examining inspectors
A total of 29 appointments of examining inspectors has been made so far, involving 21 different inspectors (six have been appointed twice and one, Emrys Parry, is on his third gig). There have been six single inspectors, six panels of three and one of five. Following the Localism Act changes the only permitted panel sizes are one, three, four or five. [I have revised this because I originally omitted the Brig y Cwm inspectors]
Rampion windfarm - consultation notice
And finally, there is no getting away from the Planning Act regime. I was relaxing one recent Sunday, poring over the Observer colour supplement, when what should I see heading up the 'life and style' pages, but a pre-application consultation notice for the proposed Rampion offshore windfarm. Given that there are dahlias and hydrangeas on the other side of the page, perhaps the typesetters confused the windfarm with the flower of the same name.
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