Today's entry reports on the publication of Local Impact Reports for the proposed Hinkley Point C nuclear power station.
For applications for nationally significant infrastructure projects, Local Impact Reports (LIRs) are prepared by host, and if they wish, neighbouring, local authorities. They express the authorities' view of the expected impacts of the project on their areas. LIRs have a special status when it comes to making a decision on an application: other than National Policy Statements (NPSs), they are the only documents that must be specifically taken into account when deciding whether the adverse impacts outweigh the benefits.
Until last week only around a dozen LIRs had been published so far in relation to any project - see this blog entry for links to them. 3 May was the deadline for LIRs to be submitted for the proposed Hinkley Point C nuclear power station and six councils have chosen to do so: Somerset, West Somerset and Sedgemoor (the host authorities), Bath and North East Somerset, North Somerset and Taunton Deane. The LIRs were published yesterday and can be found here.
The host authorities have submitted a joint LIR, and it is a whopper - the main report is 652 pages long with a separate 12-page executive summary. The LIR is accompanied by a further 12,500 pages of appendices weighing in at an inbox-breaking 710 megabytes. That's fewer than a quarter of the number of pages comprising the application, though.
EDF Energy, the project promoter, also has to consider 65 'written representations' (WRs), the fuller representations that those who originally made reps may submit (the original ones being rather confusingly called 'relevant representations'). Given that there were just under 1200 relevant representations, 65 isn't that many, and the councils that submitted LIRs chose not to submit WRs as well, although they could have done. Two more councils did submit WRs - Cumbria and South Somerset. The first of these is interesting in the context of paragraph 2.11.4 of the Nuclear Power NPS. In total that's still another 1775 pages for EDF to go through by the deadline for comments on LIRs and WRs, which is less than two weeks away.
Spare a thought for the panel of five examining inspectors, which has to read all this too, plus EDF's own submission and 11 'statements of common ground' (which I tend to think are more helpful if they say what is still at issue).
Never mind the width, what about the quality? I can safely say that the host authorities do think that there will be something of a local impact caused by the project. The executive summary is a good place to see this. Somerset identify around 35 key negative impacts, and none positive (although the first bullet at 1.5.2.4 suggests there are some); the two district councils identify 16, but the latter do acknowledge that there will be some positive benefits.
This is probably the high point of the Hinkley Point C examination rollercoaster in terms of volume of information versus length of time for it to be considered, athough it's not entirely downhill from here.
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