5.0 MONITORING
5.1 As required under Section 19 of the Environmental Assessment (Scotland) Act 2005, consideration has been given to measures for monitoring significant environmental effects of SPP3.
5.2 The assessment has highlighted a number of potential environmental issues arising from the SPP3, which should form a focus for future monitoring. Each development plan will be subjected to an SEA, and Scottish Ministers are required to take the information from this into account particularly when approving and potentially modifying strategic development plans. In other words, ongoing environmental monitoring forms an integral part of the Scottish Government's influence over the hierarchy of development plans.
5.3 Whilst it is not proposed that an additional monitoring programme is taken forward by the Scottish Government at the national level, it is recognised that it would be beneficial to periodically review more local level data to identify any nationally significant issues or trends that emerge over the coming years, and therefore ensure any unforeseen or significant environmental effects of SPP3 are identified and addressed within future policy making.
5.4 In terms of data sources, the Scottish Government will be monitoring the delivery of the SPP as a whole, primarily through housing land audits and development plan action programmes. In addition, the increased requirements for development plan monitoring will provide a useful source of information for each development plan area. These and other data sources (referred to in Appendix 1) should be periodically reviewed over the coming years in order to substantiate the following potential environmental effects of the SPP:
- Overall spatial patterns of housing development across Scotland as a whole. This should be identifiable within a national overview of the Housing Land Audit and development plan monitoring information.
- Any unexpected or particularly significant concentrations of house building activity within local authority areas. This should help to highlight possible environmental 'hotspots', and to ensure that closer attention is paid to the recommended mitigation measures within the development plans for these areas.
- Potential for increased rates of house-building to result in pressure on specific environmental resources. In particular, the possible environmental effects arising from the above spatial distribution of development should be examined, including on landscape, water, soil, air quality, landscape and cultural heritage. These may be difficult to identify from broader datasets, but could be identified through consideration of local level environmental information which will be gathered to inform the SEA of development plans.
- Rates of domestic and housing construction waste generated by the housing sector as a whole, and the contribution of new house-building rates to existing trends.
- Energy consumption and efficiency of the domestic sector, and the contribution which additional new built makes to this overall.
- The relationship between new housing construction and infrastructure capacity, including water supplies, drainage and sewage, public transportation and road transport capacity and congestion. Again, it is unlikely that this can be clearly identified at a national level, but these issues are expected to be explored and recorded at the development planning level, where effects are expected to be significant.
5.5 The Scottish Government will also monitor process related outputs in order to identify the overall effectiveness of the SPP including:
- the number and quality of sustainable settlement strategies that are being prepared by local authorities;
- progress which is made towards collaborative working to deliver a substantial increase in housing; and
- the coverage and quality of capacity analysis undertaken by local authorities to inform housing land allocations.