The list below is a record of advice the Planning Inspectorate has provided in respect of the Planning Act 2008 process.
There is a statutory duty under section 51 of the Planning Act 2008 to record the advice that is given in relation to an application or a potential application and to make this publicly available. Advice we have provided is recorded below together with the name of the person or organisation who asked for the advice and the project it relates to. The privacy of any other personal information will be protected in accordance with our Information Charter which you should view before sending information to the Planning Inspectorate.
Note that after a project page has been created for a particular application, any advice provided that relates to it will also be published under the ‘s51 advice’ tab on the relevant project page.
Advice given between between 1 October 2009 and 14 April 2015 has been archived. View the archived advice.
Enquiry
Is an NSIP DCO Application transferable between companies prior to submission or would a new request for an NSIP Application, even though it is on the same site, have to be submitted?
Advice given
The statutory consultation duties on the applicant at the pre application stage are transferable – we are concerned that they are undertaken by a person or organisation that proposes to make a viable NSIP application.
If there was any change to the “the applicant” during the pre-application stage the issue of project viability would be pertinent. The Secretary of State will want to make sure that the project can be implemented if it is granted development consent and that adequate funding is likely to be available, particularly where compulsory acquisition of land is needed.
In procedural terms, we would check this before formally accepting the application for examination – one of the checks is to the funding statement that is a required application document. If it was clear that the funding for the project was not adequately demonstrated then we would not accept it for examination. We would be asking questions about project viability before submission and providing advice to the new or existing applicant, potentially based on their draft DCO application documents if things had got that far.
Where a project has been directed by the Secretary of State to be a Business and Commercial NSIP, as a result of the scale and nature of the proposal, there may be other factors to consider.
