Sustainability Appraisal

The purpose of sustainability appraisal is to appraise the social, environmental and economic effects of strategies and policies in a development plan document or supplementary planning document from the outset of the preparation process.  This is to ensure that decisions are made that accord with sustainable development.  A sustainability appraisal is one of the tests of soundness for a development plan document.

The sustainability appraisal process incorporates a strategic environmental assessment (external link) in line with government guidance.  This concentrates purely on the environmental impacts of a plan at a strategic level.

Core Strategy Appraisal

Preferred Options

We carried out a range of sustainability appraisal tasks in parallel to the Core Strategy as it developed.  Our findings from these earlier stages of appraisal are contained in the supporting documents below.

Sustainability Appraisal Report

• Core Strategy 'Preferred Options' Sustainability Appraisal Report (May 2009) (.pdf, 1094Kb)
• Appendix A: Workshop Attendees (.pdf, 37Kb)
• Appendix B: Changes made to Policy Principles (.pdf, 55Kb)
• Appendix C: Appraisal tables for Spatial Policy Principles (.pdf, 188Kb)
• Appendix D: Appraisal tables for Core Policy Principles (.pdf, 512Kb)
• Appendix E: Appraisal tables for key strategic sites (.pdf, 361Kb)
• Appendix F: Appraisal framework for key sites (.pdf, 53Kb)

Supporting documents

We carried out a range of sustainability appraisal tasks in parallel to the core Strategy as it developed.  Our findings from these earlier stages of appraisal are contained in the supporting documents below.

Scoping

The first stage of the sustainability appraisal involved producing a scoping report.  This contains background information, evidence and sets out our methodologies for carrying out appraisals.

• Sustainability Appraisal Scoping Report for the Local Development Framework (.pdf, 1094Kb)
• Non-technical summary of the Scoping Report (.pdf, 676Kb)

We have also produced a series of topic papers which support the scoping report.

Issues and options

We carried out appraisals on a number of policy options as we developed the Core Strategy, this helped to inform our preferred options.  The folliowing interim reports outline our findings from this earlier stage of the process.

• Interim Sustainability Appraisal Report: Broad Spatial Options (.pdf, 611Kb)
• Interim Sustainability Appraisal Report: Thematic Options (.pdf, 431Kb)

You can also view information on the previous stage under Sustainability Appraisal archive.

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