WHAG Newsletters

Hi Everyone,

A change from the normal newsletter for February to cover the scoping direction analysis as this is a subject in its own right.  I'll return to the normal format in March as there is plenty of other news to catch up on.

Context for the Scoping Direction:

Bute Energy put forward a scoping request to PEDW (Planning & Environmental Decisions Wales) in July last year which set out which elements of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) it thinks should be scoped in and which scoped out. Any items Scoped Out will not be considered at all in the planning process within the EIA.

Bute Energy in total requested 39 impacts / receptors be scoped out, including all of the decommissioning stage.  On top of this within areas scoped in, parts were also requested to be scoped out or limitations placed on study areas.

PEDW taking on board all of the submissions from consultees issued a judgement (Scoping Direction) at the end of December on whether these requests were valid or in scoping out as requested there would be a risk of potential negative impacts being disregarded.

Headline Figures:

Of the 39 elements requested by Bute to be Scope out.

20 were Scoped in fully or partially by PEDW.

10 were allowed to be Scoped out but with conditions or pending review.

9 only were upheld in their original form.

Scoping Summary:

I have produced a very abbreviated summary which is attached along with the full scoping direction document if anyone would like to look in more detail.

The main reason for undertaking this summary was two fold.

1. To produce an easily viewed breakdown of the elements Bute requested to be Scoped out of the EIA and the actual PEDW decision on them after consultee input.

2. To gain a broad Idea of the view of the Statutory Consultees to the current proposal at this time.

To this end I have attached a spreadsheet with two tabs, The first “Analysis” contains the Scoped Out breakdown by section in the SR. The Second “Submissions” contains a very abbreviated summary of the responses from the Statutory Consultees.

1/ Scoped Out Elements

Lays out Bute's justification for the request, the PEDW decision and the reason for the decision. It also contains a few other highlighted comments from contributor's / PEDW, as sometimes things were scoped out within the scoped in elements or limitations placed on study areas within those elements. In sections where all elements were scoped in there are only the highlighted comments.

All the comments shown are cut and pasted both from the SR and the SD. My apologies if some seem out of context, as to limit the length I have picked small sections of text to carry over.

2/ Statutory Consultee Views

These are listed in reverse order in terms of importance to the development.  Again I have cut and pasted very small elements from the SD which I believe give an indication of the consultee's overall mind set. I've also added my own comments to those.

In this section I've included Scoping direction document page numbers to enable people to view for themselves more easily if they wish.

Comments on Scoping:

My apologies if it all seems as clear as mud. I have tried my best to simplify and compress a lot of information into something which is easy to read and understand. You can judge on how I succeeded with that.

From reading the Scoping report my feeling was Bute Energy was trying to minimise the scrutiny of this proposal.

This has been addressed in the Scoping Direction, thanks to the input from Statutory Consultees and a few local people taking the time out of their lives to contribute to the discussion.  Without rigorous examination of the proposal throughout the process the likelihood of severe long term negative impacts for the local area and communities is high.

There should be no conflict at all in being both pro green energy and working to ensure any proposal put forward is the right one for this area.  The proposal should be thoroughly and rigorously examined and should succeed only on its own merits, not due to a lack of engagement or interest.

This is not only about safeguarding the area we live in from harm, it is also about ensuring it remains an area future generations will want to live in.  The Community Benefit Fund will only benefit the community if there is one left to benefit from it.

If you or anyone you know would like to get involved in protecting our area and communities in the process then please contact via the group email or our facebook page.

Best Regards,

Chris.

WHAG Team