Mr. Philip Nugent:

It will make the process of carrying out EIAs on developments that are close to or in an SAC much more complex.

In terms of subsidiarity, some member states so far have raised concerns that the draft directive breaches the subsidiarity principle by imposing mandatory timeframes which the existing directive does not do. Other areas that have been identified as potential breaches of subsidiarity would be around the issue of scoping. Under the existing directive, scoping and EIA are discretionary and by that I mean a developer can ask a competent authority to scope what should go into the environmental impact statement, which will now be an environmental report. Under the new proposals, that will become mandatory. Even where somebody is quite satisfied that they know what needs to go into an environmental impact statement, the competent authority will none the less in all cases have to provide that scoping. That will add potentially to the costs of competent authorities or, more likely, to those of project sponsors because those costs would have to be passed on. It has been argued so far that is an unnecessary cost and it goes beyond the requirement of the directive because the Commission has not shown how that would lead to improved protection of the environment. Those are a couple of the areas the Deputy raised.