Advice to Thames Water Utilities Ltd
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- From
- Thames Water Utilities Ltd
- Date advice given
- 4 September 2012
- Enquiry type
- Post
Advice on Consultation report draft.
Advice given
Dealing with Late Responses
With regard to late respondents and their respective responses, if TWUL intend to include all late respondents in their Consultation report then this should be explicitly stated. However, if the lateness of the response has affected the ability of TWUL to respond to the matters raised then it is in TWUL?s interest to flag the reasons why. Here I am referring to your ability to amend the proposals, rather than just respond to the points raised in the CR.
Data Protection Act Issues
As you will be aware, the primary purpose of the Consultation Report (CR) is 'to capture and reflect upon all of the responses received from these three distinct pre-application consultee groups and explain how the developer has met its duty in the preparation of the application to have regard to the views expressed'. Other than the statutory requirements of s59 (2) of the 2008 Act and regulation 7 of the APFP Regulations 2009, there is no statutory requirement for the names and addresses of s44 persons to be supplied within the CR.
I can see how the wording of the Advice Note has raised this issue in your minds and I?ll certainly reflect on that as part of any future review of AN14. However, I think as part of the narrative in the explanatory text at the front of the CR it would be useful if you explained that you have sought to protect the personal details of private individuals and in particular affected persons (AP) in reporting on the pre app consultation. Perhaps you could confirm how you have exercised your due diligence in identifying the APs during the course of the pre app consultation phase, until the point of submission. This is perhaps something you intend to do anyway, but I?ll state it here for reasons of clarity.
During and after acceptance, we may have to respond to Interested Parties, including affected persons, who may question how you (TWUL) had regard to their response in your Consultation Report, and how we (PINS) were able to verify this.
EDF (Hinkley) gave each respondent a tracking reference which they used in their schedule of responses in the CR. It would be useful from our perspective if, in addition to identifying the type of respondent, you did the same - this would be anonymous. If we needed to verify that a landowner, or anyone else for that matter, had been consulted then we could ask you for your tracking schedule which would include respondents? personal details in order to find where that individual is referred to in the CR. This schedule would not be submitted along with the application documents to avoid any ambiguity about what is and is not an application document. Only PINS would be entitled to request it and see it because of our statutory role in the process. No other Interested Party (including LAs) would be entitled to see that document. The Data Protection Act allows only bodies with a statutory role in a process to have access to personal details. You would need to verify my interpretation with your own legal team but that is my understanding.
A balance needs to be struck between dealing with 23,000 + affected persons and reporting on the consultation in a manageable way. I think you have broadly achieved this based on the draft CR chapter you sent through, with the addition of individual tracking refs. In any tracking schedule (as described above) the Examining Authority would definitely find it useful later on in the examination if they were able to cross refer between this and plot references on the Land Plans and / or refs in the BoR.
In practice, I think that with the site based approach to reporting you have adopted, and assuming your description of the views expressed is accurate, an AP or any other respondent should be able to find and recognise the points they have raised and this should reduce the likelihood of us needing to request additional information from you at acceptance, although access to any tracking schedule of the type suggested would probably be requested at some point due to it potential usefulness.
CUMULATIVE IMPACTS
Further to your call the other day, I have spoken to my colleagues in Environmental Services about your wish to report on Cumulative Impacts on a site by site basis in the ES. They have indicated that they would benefit from further explanation as to your reasoning for this approach in an email. In general we (PINS) are reluctant to provide advice to applicants about what should be in an ES, so I'm not going to promise you anything definitive at this stage.