Sustainable drainage systems and what it means to you

DEFRA announced earlier this month that sustainable drainage systems, or SuDS, are to be mandatory by 2024 for new developments.

As a landscape architecture and engineering design studio that champions creating nature-based solutions, the SuDS requirement makes great sense to us.

We are including SuDS in more and more of our projects across the UK and they make a difference. Here, Lisa Sawyer, our Director of Civil Engineering, explains more about SuDS and the legal changes:

Q: What are SuDS?

A: Sustainable drainage systems are designed to locally manage stormwater as close to its source as it is possible and to mimic natural drainage. For them to work most effectively, the use of SuDS should be considered at the earliest stages of a site selection and design. The provision of SuDS are increasingly going to be a prerequisite of planning permission.

Q: What is the legal change?

A: Schedule 3 of the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act proposed that SuDS became a legal requirement for any development over 100sq/m and would have to be implemented in the design stage of development. 

Schedule 3 designated the local authority as the SuDS Approving Body (SAB) who would be required to adopt and maintain the approved drainage systems that served more than one property and which were not part of the public highway.

Q: How does the implementation of Schedule 3 vary across England and the devolved governments of Scotland and Wales?

A: Wales adopted Schedule 3 in January 2019. Developers must demonstrate their compliance during their planning application and the SuDS scheme adopted by the local authority (SAB) upon completion. The SAB approval process is however separate to the planning process and therefore needs to ideally run concurrently. You are able to gain planning permission with drainage conditions but then struggle to get SAB approval which has caught out some developers when programming of a scheme.

Q: What is happening in Scotland?

A: Scotland didn’t adopt Schedule 3, instead it implemented SuDS into planning legislation. Scotland has built a SuDS policy into local planning laws, stipulating SuDS as part of new developments and compelling Scottish Water to adopt compliant schemes. 

Q: What about England?

A: England hasn’t adopted Schedule 3 just yet. Currently it has amended the National Planning Policy Framework as an alternative, stipulating that SuDS should be incorporated into developments of 10 dwellings or larger unless demonstrated to be inappropriate by the developer, with the developer taking responsibility for determining adoption of the SuDS scheme.

·         If you would like to know more about how SuDS could benefit your project, please get in touch with Lisa. Her email is lisa@landstudio-uk.com