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Assisting regulatory enforcers in their aims to comply with
environmental law, guidelines and standards. |
In these times of increasing cuts to public sector spending we will increasingly see regulatory enforcer's ability to thoroughly assess the integrity of documentation presented in support of planning and environmental license applications eroded owing to lack of resources. This in turn will inevitably lead to a decrease in the quality of the documents submitted. When submitting documents in support of planning or environmental licenses they are read within the context of an extremely complex set of laws, guides and standards.
Custodiet are an independent organisation established to assess the efficacy documents submitted in support of proposed projects in the hope that we might highlight inadequacies. After all; law's effectiveness is governed by the level of enforcement applied.
Custodiet actively search for planning and environmental licensing documents via public access, we target areas across the UK, and work at Local, District and National Levels.
Alternatively documents can be submitted to Custodiet by under resourced regulators for independent scrutiny. All submitted documents will be returned with after a compliance check is completed.
In our first year we aim to establish a team of professional environmental and ecological scrutineers who will aim to identify 10 incompliant reports in a target of 433 principal authorities.
| County Councils | Unitary Authorities | London Boroughs | Metropolitan Boroughs | District Councils | Scottish Unitary Authorities | Welsh Unitary Authorities |
| 27 | 55 | 32 | 36 | 201 | 32 | 22 |
A report will be completed for each document that is identified as inadequate and this will be presented to the relevant authority. Their responsibilities will be highlighted along with any prosecutions or financial disincentives to which they may have made themselves vulnerable.
It is hoped that by highlighting these hidden costs to relevant authorities, internal compliance checking will be warranted a higher level of spending as a precautionary measure, and at the very least will highlight the reports inadequacy so that the originator might be addressed and a correctly written report submitted in its place.
Custodiet are current in the process of seeking funding and are not in a position to start verifying any submitting documents, however if you wish to contact us, or have any questions or suggestions we would be very happy to hear from you.
Please mail us at office@custodiet.org