Stroud's Sustainability Appraisals

Last week I spent many hours pouring through 100 plus pages of yet another consultation document - as part of the new planning system future planning policy documents will need to be accompanied by Sustainability Appraisals. These will examine such issues and how they feed into the policies of the relevant plan. The council has commissioned a scoping report for future sustainability appraisals and they were after comments.

Photo: budding new shoots

The scoping report is intended to define the key environmental and sustainability issues for the whole of Stroud District. It is available on Stroud District website - I, along with Cllr Sarah Lunnon, put together a response from the Green party - see our comments here. Here is the intro to our report:

The production of this sustainability scoping document is to be welcomed, as is the process of consultation that is taking place. Our major comment of the document is that while it raises many important issues of sustainability it fails to address sufficiently key sustainability issues of robustness of the local economy, climate change and local food and fuel security (energy production).

Sections on waste and climate change appear less robust than Stroud District Councils own Environment Strategy paper and are not satisfactorily integrated into other sections. Indeed by listing climate change as chapter 10 it seems to suggest equal weight is attached to this as the other areas of consideration. We consider that the issue of reducing carbon emissions is so important that it should be included in the majority of the SA / SEA objectives.

In many ways this appears to be a “business-as-usual” approach when what is needed is more radical action.

We welcome the opportunity to have further discussion and input into this important report.