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SEA - Legislation and Procedures in the Community
Summary

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This study has been undertaken by the EIA Centre of the University of Manchester with the following two objectives:

1. To prepare a brief overview of the current status of SEA legislation and procedures in the Member States.
2. To prepare three case studies, in different Member States, showing how SEA principles could be transposed into existing decision-making procedures at the strategic level.

The report is divided into two parts corresponding to the two objectives and the contents of each are summarised below.

SEA Legislation and Procedures in the Member States

The methodology followed in undertaking this review is described in Chapter 2. It involved preparing a standardised questionnaire for completion by the Member State representatives on the Committee of National EIA Experts in the 15 current Member States, plus Norway. All national experts responded but, in certain respects, the information they were able to supply was not fully comprehensive nor sufficiently detailed for certain purposes of analysis. These limitations, in otherwise very useful data, need to be taken into consideration in the interpretation and use of the findings.

The available information was assembled and analysed, on a comparative country basis, and the findings are summarised in three sections of Chapter 3, supplemented by a series of tables in the annex to the chapter. The overall conclusions and the review are presented in Chapter 4, supplemented by the tables in its annex.

The key points emerging from the review of Member State experience include the following:

• Formal decision-making processes for policies, plans and programmes (PPPs) exist, within the European Union, in each of the sectors specified in the study. However, within individual Member States the sectoral coverage is not comprehensive and the provisions which do exist vary considerably between them. Given this heterogeneity, any SEA instrument, which is to be applied at the level of the European Union, will need to be highly adaptable if it is to be integrated within existing planning procedures.
• Some elements of environmental assessment are to be found within PPP appraisal in all of the countries surveyed. Its extent is growing but there are considerable gaps and these vary both between countries and between different sectors within the same country (provision is greatest in the land use planning-sector and least in the industry and tourism sectors). The instruments used to implement these assessment procedures are also very diverse - laws and other statutory instruments, cabinet and ministerial decisions, circulars and advice notes - and are applied at different administrative levels - national, regional and local.
• The extent to which basic SEA requirements (as indicated in Table 1) are met is variable. The environmental assessment provisions relating to some PPPs in some Member States appear to meet most basic requirements but there are many other PPPs, across the EU, where this does not seem to be the case. The key deficiencies which have been identified include: weaknesses in the documentation of the environmental assessment; the absence of essential contents in the assessment report; deficiencies in the provisions relating to consultation and opportunities for public comment; and failures in integrating the environmental assessment process within decision-making procedures for the PPPs.

The overall conclusion is that these deficiencies are not unsurmountable but specific measures are necessary to remedy the situation; and certain of these measures should be initiated by the Commission. These are examined in the final section of this summary.

Three Case Studies

The three case studies which have been prepared relate to a land use plan (in the United Kingdom), a forestry plan (in Spain) and a transport plan (in Germany). Each was prepared by a different local consultant, according to a standard checklist of questions (described in Chapter 5), and they are presented in Chapters 7 - 9 respectively.

The findings derived from the three case studies are analysed, on a comparative basis, in Chapter 6. The format of this analysis is similar to that used in the first part of the study but it is applied at a greater level of detail. The principal findings include the following:

• The planning context of the three plans, and the nature of the three plans themselves, are very different in a number of important respects. This mirrors the heterogeneity in planning systems which was highlighted in the more general over-view in Part A. At the same time, each of them contains provisions for taking environmental considerations into account in the planning process - in this sense all three are potentially suitable `hosts' for meeting an SEA requirement.
• However, in all three cases, compliance with basic SEA requirements, as described in Table 1, was incomplete - even though, in a number of respects, their environmental assessments were probably of above average quality. The nature and extent to which this was so varied considerably between the cases but included examples of incomplete or ambiguous requirements relating to assessment reporting, methodological deficiencies, deficiencies in provisions relating to consultation and public comment, and weaknesses in integrating assessment findings into the decision-making process.

Nevertheless, none of the deficiencies was considered to be insuperable, although it was recognised that some of the obstacles to good quality SEA practice would require careful handling.

Suggestions For Follow-Up Work

The case for follow-up work to this study for the Commission is based, first of all, on the view that some form of strategic-level environmental assessment of policies, plans and programmes is a potentially important instrument for integrating environmental considerations into decision-making procedures within the principal sectors of the economy. The second element of the justification is that, given it is a strategic-level policy instrument, the EU has a specific contribution to make in addressing some of the deficiencies in SEA provisions and practice which have been identified in this study. The types of initiatives by the Commission which could be helpful in this context, and which follow most directly from the findings in the two parts of the study, are listed below:

1. Support for the preparation of additional case studies which, in conjunction with the three studies already prepared, could be of practical assistance to those undertaking SEA studies and those engaged in preparing SEA guidance materials and providing SEA training courses. Section 6.6 provides further details on the types of case studies that might be undertaken and how they might be prepared.
2. Make fuller use, as part of the supporting measures for the Commission's SEA initiative, of experience gained in meeting environmental information requirements for Structural Fund applications. This could be particularly helpful in the case of Member States with Objective 1 regions, where SEA developments may be lagging behind those elsewhere in the Union.
3. Continuation (in co-operation with Member States) of the Commission's existing programme of research, information dissemination and training relating to SEA. Within this, it should give particular emphasis to raising general awareness and increasing the relatively low level of understanding of strategic-level environmental assessment which exists at the moment.