In February 2023, the Court of Appeal overruled an earlier High Court decision (December 2022) in relation to the ‘Tewkesbury bridge’. Tewksbury Borough Council had granted planning permission for the bridge over a railway near Ashchurch in March 2021, but this was challenged by Ashchurch Rural Parish Council.
The officer’s report to the council’s planning committee had highlighted the benefits of the bridge. Its principal function was to provide access to the site of a future residential development. The report advised that the harms associated with the future housing development should be disregarded and that the concerns raised locally about future development plans that would be enabled by the bridge were not material to the decision. The screening decision considered the bridge as a stand-alone project and ignored the housing development that it was intended to facilitate, concluding that the bridge was not likely to have significant effects and that EIA was not necessary.
The Court of Appeal concluded that the planning committee had acted irrationally by weighing the benefits of the wider development without considering the harms.
Lady Justice Andrews warned that the objectives of the EIA Regulations must not be avoided by subdividing a single project into separate parts. Similar earlier judgements called the process ‘salami-slicing’.
The ruling re-affirms the importance of giving careful consideration to the extent to which works and activities for which planning consent is sought form part of a larger project.
In practice, later parts of a wider project may not be sufficiently designed to allow a fully detailed EIA. The judgement, however, suggests that best efforts must be made to define and assess the full scope of the project and the likely activities and environmental effects, perhaps through a likely worst-case cumulative assessment, to allow the decision maker to weigh the impacts of a project against its benefits properly.
