Submission of the draft ES to the IPC, and the decision not to request a scoping opinion from the IPC.

You recently submitted a s.46 notification to us and as part of the notification you included a draft Environmental Statement (ES). Whilst we are interested to see the draft ES please note that under Section 51(2) of the Planning Act 2008 the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) cannot give advice about the merits of a particular application, or proposed application. Therefore we cannot review the draft ES provided as part of the s.42 consultation material.
We note that you have previously stated you do not intend to request a Scoping Opinion from the IPC. We fully recognise that there is no statutory obligation for you to do so but the decision whether or not to request a Scoping Opinion from the IPC should be taken based on your own specialist advice. As a general point the IPC highlights the importance of explaining clearly within the ES why certain topics are not covered by the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) (scoped out). This is of particular importance where issues were raised by key statutory consultees and not specifically confirmed as being scoped out within a Scoping Opinion under the Infrastructure Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) 2009 regs (EIA regs), for example, alternatives and air quality.
The IPC will need to come to a view about whether the final ES when submitted contains all necessary information. In doing this the IPC will need to consider the ES taking into account Regulation 12 at acceptance and Regulation 17 (EIA regs) during examination.