Sustainability Appraisal

North Somerset Council are required to carry out a Sustainability Appraisal (SA) of the Core Strategy. This incorporates the requirements of EU Directive 2001/42/EC (known as the Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive) but includes economic and social factors as well as environmental ones.

SA seeks to identify, describe and evaluate the likely significant effects of implementing a plan and compares these with reasonable alternatives, such as maintaining existing policies or doing without a plan. This helps to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the various options and can suggest ways that the plan policies can be further refined.

The sustainability appraisal comprises a number of document:

• Sustainability Appraisal Scoping report
• Strategies and Initiatives document

A series of Topic Papers were prepared early in the process to inform the Issues and Options stage as follows:

• Culture, Leisure and Tourism
• Demography, Deprivation and Social Exclusion
• Economic Development
• Housing 
• Natural Environment
• Resources
• Retail Hierachy and Provision
• Settlement Function and Hierarchy
• Settlement Function and Hierarchy Appendix A
• Spatial Portrait of North Somerset
• Sustainable Construction and Design Quality  
• Transport and Communications

Main report (2011):

• Sustainability Appraisal: Main Report (pdf, Feb 11, 1.2MB)
• Appriasal tables (pdf, Feb 11, 3MB)
• Core Strategy Monitoring Framework  (pdf, Feb 11, 241kb)

  Sustainability Appraisal: Non-Technical Summary (pdf, Feb 11, 192kb)

For more information contact our Planning Policy team.