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.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general
guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought
about your specific circumstances.
Specific Questions relating to this article should be addressed directly to the author.
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