If you have submitted a planning application in Northern Ireland in the last few years, you have probably met the biodiversity checklist — usually as a line on a council validation letter, often without much explanation of what it is or who is supposed to fill it in.
The NI Biodiversity Checklist (Version 2, April 2017) is a standard screening form used across Northern Ireland councils. Its purpose is narrow and worth understanding: it exists to work out whether a proposal is likely to affect protected habitats or species, and therefore whether any further ecological work is needed before the application can be determined.
It is not a survey. It is the step that decides whether a survey is needed.
Practice varies a little between councils, but the checklist is commonly requested for new and replacement dwellings in the countryside, conversions and demolitions, works affecting trees, hedgerows or watercourses, and anything within or adjacent to a designated site such as an ASSI, SAC, SPA or Ramsar site.
The most reliable guide is your own council's validation checklist, or the validation letter itself if the application is already in.
The checklist should be completed by someone with the ecological knowledge to answer its questions properly and to justify the answers. In practice, a checklist submitted with no supporting evidence, or one that answers “no” to everything without explaining why, tends to come back.
The evidence behind a sound checklist is a desk study of designated sites and species records for the area, plus a walkover of the site itself. That is what allows a negative answer to actually stand up.
A checklist that identifies a potential constraint is not usually bad news, and it does not necessarily mean the application is in trouble. It normally means one more piece of work is needed, and the checklist should tell you what.
The three that come up most often are:
Plenty of sites are screened out entirely at checklist stage, and that is a genuinely useful outcome: it closes the ecology question off in writing.
The cost of a checklist is small relative to the cost of a stalled application. What tends to cause delay is not the checklist itself but a checklist that a case officer cannot rely on — no desk study, no site visit, no justification.
If you are an agent submitting several applications a year, it is worth having the checklist done properly as a matter of course rather than treating it as a form to be completed at the last minute.
It is a validation requirement rather than a statutory form in its own right. Councils use it to satisfy their duties in relation to protected habitats and species, and an application can be held as invalid without it where the validation checklist requires one.
In principle the form can be completed by an applicant, but the answers need to be evidenced. In practice councils expect it to be completed by someone with the relevant ecological knowledge, and a poorly evidenced checklist usually results in a further information request.
Typically one to two weeks from the site visit. It is not season-dependent, so it can be started at any time of year.
Written by John Corry of Corry Ecology, CIEEM member. General guidance only — every site is different, so take advice on your own proposal.
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