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Advice to Kent Wildlife Trust

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Enquiry

From
Kent Wildlife Trust
Date advice given
22 August 2017
Enquiry type
Email

I would be most grateful if you could please add Kent Wildlife Trust to your list of consultees for Manston Airport. I attach our recent letter to RiverOak for your information.

I would also like to know if it is possible for Kent Wildlife Trust to be added to the Planning Inspectorate’s list for early engagement at the Scoping stage of projects? Whilst I understand that we are not statutory consultees as listed in your guidance, it is very difficult if we are not made aware of major projects until after the Scoping Opinion has been issued. This has happened more than once recently, with this project and also Vattenfall Thanet Extension. Is there anything at all that can be done about this despite being non-statutory? I would be most grateful for a response on this request, although I appreciate that you may need to refer my request to another colleague

Advice given

As you correctly state the Kent Wildlife Trust is not a prescribed consultation body for the purposes of EIA scoping under the Planning Act 2008. Applicants can carry out wider scoping consultation (ie with non-prescribed bodies) but their approach in this regard is discretionary.

The Planning Inspectorate does not compile a list of non-statutory consultees to send updates to during the Pre-application stage of the process; for example to notify of the publication of a scoping report. There is functionality on the project-specific webpage for each project for anybody to sign-up for email updates, but those updates are not activated until an application is formally submitted to the Planning Inspectorate at the Acceptance stage.

The onus is on applicants to keep their stakeholders informed about a project at the Pre-application stage of the process. To that end we can only also advise for you to engage proactively with relevant applicants and monitor their, and our, websites for any updates.