Summary of consultees and government response August 2018

Between 5 and 26 April 2018 the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) held an informal consultation on the types and sizes of nationally significant water resources infrastructure in the Planning Act 2008 (‘the Planning Act’). The consultation can be found at: https://consult.defra.gov.uk/water/npsinfrastructure-types-and-sizes.The consultation was a follow up to an earlier consultation, which asked for views on the development of the National Policy Statement (NPS) for Water Resources Infrastructure and proposals to amend the definitions of nationally significant water resources infrastructure set out in the Planning Act to which the NPS will apply. That consultation closed in December 2018 and the government response was published in April 2018. This consultation set out a number of specific proposals for amendments to the Planning Act, and asked for respondents to indicate whether or not they agreed with these proposals and to provide any reasoning to support their position. The purpose of this document is to summarise responses to the questions set out in the April 2018 consultation and to provide the government’s response. This summary is a high level overview of the main messages from respondents. It aims to reflect the views offered but, inevitably, it is not possible to describe all the responses in detail. 5. We are grateful to the organisations and individuals who responded to the consultation. These responses have been considered when amending the Planning Act. We are in the process of developing a NPS for Water Resources Infrastructure and will be consulting on this draft in autumn 2018.  Click here to read the report