The EIA Guality Mark

In 2011 IEMA has established a new standard for organisations that coordinate EIA and it was named as EIA Quality Mark and aim of this new scheme is allowing developers and consultancies that carrying out regularly Environmental Impact Assessment for making a voluntary commitment to undertake the quality of practicing and these commitments are:

1.  EIA Management
2.  EIA Team capability
3.  EIA Regulatory compliance
4.  EIA context & influence
5.  EIA content
6.  EIA presentation
7.  Improving EIA practice

The new Quality Mark looks at quality through the activities of an EIA organisation and these activities include the management and approaches to the development of staff competence and the aim of that is to improve EIA practice through submitting all the UK statuary environmental statement that have been produced to IEMA, and also by writing articles setting out views and experience of EIA practice.

IEMA used traffic light system for grading the review findings for EIA Quality Mark and grades are as follows:

•  Pass
•  Pas (revised)
•  Concerns
•  Concerns (revised)
•  Fail
•  N\A (review criteria only)

However, using EIA Quality Mark to evaluate the ES of Inch Cape Offshore Limited (ICOL) would change since, the commitment one includes a telephone review between the senior staff of the applicant’s (one member of our group) and a member of the EIA review panel once every three years and the interview will be about the management system, EIA process, ES production, external EIA communications and sub contractor management so that not only grading the ES without having any kind of monitoring or evaluating after reviewing the ES and that means the findings of senior staff would be reviewed by the panel member and grading it for commitment one then writing a brief report justifying the findings and return it to IEMA where it would be checked again by a member of IEMA’s Quality review panel and grade it as either fail or concerns then going to next step where the applicant will be required to develop an improvement plan and it will be passed only if it is accepted by IEMA.

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According to the second commitment which includes from 2 to 4 interviews every year between the panel member and members of applicant’s EIA staff to assess the applicant’s activities in order to ensure EIA Team capabilities and they will be asked about EIA team section, staff recruitment indication and monitoring, performance management & EIA team development and internal EIA communication and feedback the after the interviews it will be similar to steps after the interview in commitment one. To sum up, the first two commitments would have given greater credibility to the team after reviewing the ES which would have been subject to surveillance and re-evaluation by IEMA and thus would have been a greater motivation for the team to develop their potential for a better assessment in order to be acceptable. Commitments 3 to 6 are including the criteria that are used to evaluate the ES and every Registrants will have a randomly selected ES reviewed during each year of their EIA Quality Mark membership one review of commitments 3&4 or 5&6 will be assessed thus over 2 year each registrant will have their full compliance across commitments 3 to 6 re-evaluated. During the ES review the Panel member will grade the ES in relation to a number of sub-categories covering:

Commitment 3: criteria relate to the requirements of the UK’s EIA Regulations. Commitment 4: 1. Scoping 2. Alternatives, including iterative design 3. Consultation Commitment 5: 1. Baseline 2. Assessment 3. Environmental mitigation & management Commitment 6: 1. ES Quality 2. Non-Technical Summary (NTS) Following the ES reviews the Panel member will review the findings and grade the applicant’s overall compliance to commitments 3& 4, 5 & 6 and write up their findings in a brief summary report. This report will be returned to IEMA, where it will be quality checked by one of IEMA’s Quality Review Panel. Where the report indicates that the applicant’s compliance with any of COMs 3-6 has been graded as either ‘Concerns’ or ‘Fail’ IEMA will contact the applicant to discuss the next step.