How can Redbridge claim there is no need for "Environmental Impact Assessment" for the Seven Kings Car Park Development?

 A concerned resident wrote the email below to Redbridge Council on 11th September. The claim is made that Redbridge Council does not need an  "Environmental Impact Assessment" for the Seven Kings Car Park planning application.

What's going on here? Surely the air and sound quality needs to be monitored before a decision can be made that the pollution can be "appropriately mitigated"

The Council needs to answer the resident. The  lack of "Environmental Impact Assessment" undermines the June 2020 commitment made by Cllr Athwal of a cumulative impact assessment of developments. If the Council can say "impacts could be appropriately mitigated” without evidence it begs the question that the Council has done an about turn and binned the cumulative impact report.

Resident email follows

I hope you are well during these exceptional and uncertain times.

We are quite concerned as to the recent decision regarding the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for planning application 2354/20 (Car park at 706-720 High Road Goodmayes). Andrew Smith (case officer) has assessed it as “NOT REQUIRED” citing the build as “not in a sensitive area and impacts could be appropriately mitigated”. However in the same sentence he accepts that “it is above the relevant (number of units) threshold”.  No empirical evidence as to why this decision was reached has been provided nor is it factually correct from the data we have e.g: a correlation between postcodes with the highest asthma cases and proximity to the High Road where the builds are proposed (see attached).

 

The only published environmental data the council has currently is almost two years old and using diffusion data that is incomplete and irrelevant to the major build sites proposed along the High Road/Crossrail Corridor. 

Moreover, it has already been shown (as per the Tesco Goodmayes application 4309/19) that the decision to approve the Tesco EIA was deficient including a lack of diffusion data in the affected areas (see attached showing no monitors close to the major developments).

Finally, I have been made aware that there is a “Combined Development Site EIA Report” being conducted by the council, if this is the case then it would seem even more incorrect to draw any environmental conclusions until this report is made available.

 

Taking all these points into account, I would suggest the council does not have sufficient data to draw any conclusive assertions regarding the environmental impacts and ask;

1.      You consider reversing the above decision by Andrew Smith for the non requirement of an EIA for application 2354/20

2.      No further major planning applications are approved by the planning committee or Council until there is a higher degree of confidence the data being supplied by the applicant’s correlates with independently produced data; ideally by looking at the combined EIA from the Council, the Annual Status Report 2019 when it is eventually produced and any professionally commissioned reports from campaign groups

Thank you for your time. I look forward to your response.