Planning and environmental permitting
The way we plan and design the built environment can have a profound impact on people’s health and well-being.
Our well-being includes our quality of life, our prosperity, our physical and mental health and the communities around us. The main purpose of the planning system in Wales is to ensure sustainable development, making sure that current needs are met but not at the cost of future generations to meet their own needs. Public Health Wales has set out long term priorities for health including how we will improve people’s well-being and reduce inequalities in health. One way to help achieve this is through us working with partners such as land use planners and policy makers.
Our role
Every planning application in Wales is considered in line with local and/or national planning policy. Public Health Wales (alongside health boards in Wales) is a consultee and is often asked by planners to assess risks of proposed developments and offer public health advice. This ensures that important health issues are taken into account during decision-making processes. Sometimes a Health Impact Assessment might be required; if so, then we work closely with the Wales Health Impact Assessment Support Unit (WHIASU) to ensure a co-ordinated approach is taken to consider and assess wide-ranging health and wellbeing issues.
It is recognised that there is an increasing need for public health professionals to engage in the early planning stages of national and local policy and pre-application stages for major developments. We are working with our partners to increase ‘upstream’ engagement so that we take advantage of opportunities to embed public health as a core consideration in planning policy and practice. We have helped produced a guide for practitioners on integrating public health and planning.
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