Health Impact Assessments are a tool to assess how policies or projects can contribute to improving the health and wellbeing of the population. They are not currently a mandatory requirement nationally but they are increasingly being promoted by the Scottish Parliament, the Greater London Authority and by the Welsh Assembly. Therefore developers should be starting to consider how their projects will impact on the health and health inequalities of the communities that they are looking to transform, as there is increasing evidence that a well-produced health impact assessment can provide support for planning applications.
Assessing the impact of a development both from an environmental and social perspective, will increase the sustainability and long-term viability of a development and potentially could allow developers to charge a higher property premium on projects that have taken these factors into account. With competition for land being at a premium, this could prove to be a differentiating factor for developers that embrace these principles.
At the recent IEMA Conference in Westminster a number of the speakers where promoting the use of Health Impact Assessments. In addition the speaker that was talking about “Big Society” (from Planning Aid England) highlighted two case studies for developments (one in Bristol the other in Shropshire) where a broad community consultation had identified that health was high on most peoples agendas. This suggests that if the public is going to be more involved with planning decisions, a health impact assessment could be a very positive thing to do if you want to speed up the planning process. It is worth checking out the presentations from the conference – they are stored on http://www.iema.net/conferences/iemaconference/2010