Case studies of EIA in practice - Introduction to Environmental Impact Assessment - page 279

information provided about the health risks posed by the development. One participant
commented “I am not a scientist and I found it very difficult to understand. I felt as
though they were trying to blind me with figures and technical terms. The residents
that I have spoken to who went to have a look at the environmental statement felt
exactly the same; they didn't really understand the assessment.” These criticisms are
partly related to the tight timescale for the contact group process, although non-experts
will always need to have a degree of trust in those providing technical information in
EIA. Snary suggests that such trust could have been increased by the use of
independent consultants or an independent third party to summarize and validate the
information presented.
• Limited impact on the development proposals. The contact group meetings appear to
have had only limited impacts on the scheme proposals. The project manager for the
development stated that the process had resulted in changes to the architecture of the
scheme (in particular the colour of the buildings) and improvements to the traffic
assessment. However, apart from these relatively minor changes, many participants
were sceptical about how else the views of the group had affected the proposals. These
findings are not surprising, given the fact that the meetings took place at such a late
stage in the planning, design and EIA work for the scheme.
• Low levels of trust in the developer and consultants. All participants had only low or
moderate levels of trust in the developer and its consultants. Reasons for low levels of
trust included a feeling that the developer was bound to be biased because its aim was
to gain planning permission, a view that group members were only being provided
with part of the information about health risks and concerns over the competency of
the EIA consultants.
• The process failed to resolve fundamental concerns about the proposal All but one of
the participants still had relatively strong risk-related concerns about the proposal at
the end of the contact group process. Therefore,
although the contact group was able to better inform key local
stakeholders about the risks posed by emissions, it was unable to convince
the majority of the group that the risks were acceptable and that waste-to-
energy incineration was an appropriate waste management solution.
(Snary 2002)
This is despite the fact that, as we have seen, the Portsmouth
incinerator proposal emerged as part of a county-wide waste strategy that
was developed through an extensive and innovative public involvement
exercise. Snary attributes this to inadequacies in the earlier strategic-level
consultation exercise, which had failed to reach a consensus on the
appropriate role of waste-to-energy incineration in the county's waste
strategy and which most of the contact group members had been unaware
of prior to joining the group. It was also unclear how the views expressed
in the strategic consultation had influenced the county's developing waste
strategy.
In her evaluation of the Hampshire contact group process, Petts (2003) reaches broadly
similar conclusions: