How Flight helps Ecology Consultancies tackle Environmental Assessment challenges

25 November 2025

Environmental assessment sits at the heart of modern planning and ecological decision-making.

Whether it’s EIA, SEA, SA, or future Environmental Outcome Reports (EOR), ecology consultancies play a critical role in collecting evidence, predicting effects and designing mitigation that enables sustainable development.

But the system is under strain.

The PAS/DLUHC Environmental Assessment Barriers Report highlights deep-rooted operational challenges: inconsistent data, overly cautious processes, enormous paperwork volumes, lack of monitoring, confusion about purpose, and capacity shortages across both councils and consultants.

For UK ecology consultancies, especially SMEs, these challenges translate directly into operational bottlenecks, margin pressure, rework, compliance risk and reduced competitiveness.

This blog summarises the key barriers surfaced in the PAS workshops (67 councils, multiple deep-dive technical sessions), reframed through the lens of ecology consulting.

It also shows how Flight, our modular operational software platform designed for consultancies, can help tackle these issues head-on.

1. Accessibility: Too much paperwork, not enough clarity

Environmental assessments have become huge, complex and inaccessible:

• Environmental Statements (ES) can span hundreds of pages
• Data is scattered and difficult to interrogate
• Excessive scoping driven by fear of legal challenge
• “Cut and paste” sections harm trust and credibility
• Councils struggle to extract the “significant effects” buried in documentation
• Public and elected member engagement is very low
• Non-technical summaries often read like PR, not objective explanation

For ecology consultancies, this means:

• More time writing reports than doing ecology
• Low differentiation (reports look similar across providers)
• High risk of client frustration from slow turnaround
• Increased scrutiny from councils and statutory consultees

How Flight helps

✓ Standardised, domain-specific templates
Create clear, consistent, ecology-aligned report templates that reduce writing time and increase clarity.

✓ Centralised, structured data
Field data, monitoring results, survey notes and GIS inputs are stored in one place — improving the quality and accessibility of the final output.

✓ Integrated QA & version control
Avoid embarrassing cut-and-paste mistakes with built-in quality checks and collaborative editing.

✓ Automated non-technical summaries
Produce concise, accessible summaries derived directly from structured data to avoid PR-style bias.

2. Conflation of purpose: Mixing assessment with planning judgement

PAS found widespread confusion across councils, developers and consultants between:

• EIA vs SEA vs SA
• Assessing environmental effects vs weighing planning policy
• Identifying significance vs identifying mitigation
• Plan-making vs assessment
• “Acceptability” of a project vs environmental evidence

This leads to:

• Reports retrofitted to justify pre-determined schemes
• Mischaracterisation of ecological effects
• Tension between planners, consultees and ecologists
• Loss of trust in the assessment process

How Flight helps

✓ Clear workflow stage definitions
Flight separates data collection → assessment → options → mitigation → reporting into distinct workflow phases.

✓ Guidance embedded into the process
Use in-platform templates and checklists aligned with CIEEM, IEMA and PAS best practice.

✓ Transparent decision-making records
Every assumption, significance rationale and mitigation decision is logged and timestamped.

✓ Collaboration with planning consultants
Shared access prevents conflation of planning judgement with ecological significance.

3. Caution, litigation fear and over-scoping

Councils and consultants are adopting increasingly risk-averse behaviours due to:

• Fear of judicial reviews and legal challenges
• Lack of guidance
• Shortage of in-house expertise
• Developers pressuring for rapid decisions

This results in:

• All possible effects being scoped in “just in case”
• Excessive, unnecessary surveys
• Increased project duration and cost
• Reduced ability to push back on poor submissions

How Flight helps

✓ Structured scoping frameworks
Use consistent criteria to determine significance and scope, reducing unnecessary survey work.

✓ Embedded precedent & knowledge base
Store internal best practice, historic case data and previous assessment logic.

✓ Competence tracking
Record the qualifications and experience of your ecologists to demonstrate “competent expert” status to councils and clients.

✓ Risk flagging & escalation
Identify where legal risk is high and route to senior ecologists or external specialists.

4. Monitoring: The missing link in environmental assessment

PAS confirms monitoring is the weakest part of the entire environmental assessment regime because:

• Councils lack resources
• Monitoring frameworks are “aspirational” with no realistic data access
• Developers rarely follow through on commitments
• Long-term ecological change is difficult to track
• Data is inconsistent, non-standardised, and not linked back to assessments
• Ecology monitoring demands repeated visits over many years

For consultancies, this causes:

• Lost long-term revenue
• Lack of ecological continuity
• Confusion over mitigation effectiveness
• Risk of clients being non-compliant
• Difficulty proving value in post-consent phases

How Flight helps

✓ Recurring monitoring schedules
Automated reminders for 1-, 2-, 5- or 10-year monitoring requirements.

✓ Field survey modules
Ecologists can log monitoring data instantly, even from the field.

✓ Outcome tracking
Compare predicted vs actual impacts over time and flag deviations.

✓ Mitigation follow-through management
Track what mitigation was proposed vs implemented vs successful.

✓ Monetisation of monitoring
Turn monitoring into planned recurring revenue with automated invoicing and scope tracking.

5. Inconsistency of data, subjectivity and digital friction

This is one of the largest structural problems PAS identified:

• No standardised datasets
• No consistent indicators
• Councils not ready for digital formats
• Huge variations in methods
• Subjective scoring lacks transparency
• Limited trust in national datasets
• Poor read-across between strategic (SEA/SA) and project (EIA/EcIA) levels

This increases:

• Rework
• Time lost validating data
• Confusion between ecological consultants and planners
• Uncertainty in decision-making
• Risk of challenge

How Flight helps

✓ A single source of truth for ecological data
Store all survey data in machine-readable formats, not siloed PDFs.

✓ Standardised methodology libraries
Upload internal or industry-approved methodologies for consistency across projects.

✓ Consistent indicators & metrics
Define your own set of ecological indicators for use across all assessments, optionally aligned with BNG, LNRS, EOR, local policies.

✓ Digital-friendly export formats
Produce outputs suitable for councils’ digital planning ambitions.

6. Local authority resource constraints & stakeholder delays

PAS found:

• 70% of planners lack confidence in environmental assessments
• Councils rely heavily on external ecological expertise
• Statutory consultees (Natural England, EA, National Highways) are overwhelmed
• Responses often miss deadlines or lack relevance
• Councils rarely review assessments as integrated documents
• SA/SEA outsourcing often causes long delays

For ecology consultancies, this means:

• Projects stall waiting for responses
• You spend time chasing stakeholders instead of doing ecology
• Misaligned data and misunderstanding between planners and ecologists
• Increased stress on already small teams

How Flight helps

✓ Stakeholder management tools
Log consultee deadlines, track responses, auto-send reminders and record dependencies.

✓ End-to-end project visibility
Show clients exactly where delays are occurring, protecting consultancy reputation.

✓ Efficient document management
Share securely with councils, planners, clients and statutory consultees.

✓ Integrated Gantt timeline
Automatically adjusts when consultees request extensions.

7. Timescale management: Seasonal windows, data gaps and reporting bottlenecks

Ecology is uniquely time-sensitive:

• Protected species surveys follow strict seasonal windows
• Weather affects survey viability
• Habitat assessment must align with biological cycles
• EIA/SEA timelines don’t align with ecological reality
• Long SA/SEA production processes delay planning
• Data submission often uses outdated or incompatible datasets

For consultancies:

• Missed survey windows cause multi-month project delays
• Urgent survey demands overload ecologists
• Planning teams expect unrealistic turnaround times
• Project profitability drops due to inefficiency

How Flight helps

✓ Seasonal survey calendar
Built-in scheduling prevents accidental missed windows.

✓ Resource allocation & utilisation
Match surveyors to available dates automatically.

✓ Real-time data upload
Reduce the bottleneck between field survey and report drafting.

✓ Profitability tracking
See which projects are slipping financially due to delays.

8. Skills & competency gaps across the sector

PAS notes:

• Large shortages of in-house ecological and environmental expertise
• Councils cannot confidently challenge poor EIA/EcIA work
• High staff turnover causes loss of institutional knowledge
• Planners often have limited ecological training
• External consultants face inconsistent expectations

This leads to:

• Over-scoping
• Under-scrutinised assessments
• Misinterpreted ecological evidence
• Dependency on expensive subcontractors
• Quality variation across consultancies

How Flight helps

✓ Skills matrix & competence tracking
Record qualifications, survey licences, CPD and experience – essential for demonstrating “competent expert” status.

✓ Embedded guidance & learning
Provide access to internal guidance, templates, training materials and QA checklists within workflows.

✓ A knowledge base that scales with the team
When staff change, Flight retains institutional memory.

Flight as the operations backbone for Ecology Assessment under EOR

Environmental assessment is undergoing transformation. EOR will bring more outcome-based reporting, more data, more digital workflows and more accountability for ecological monitoring over time.

Ecology consultancies will need:

• Stronger data governance
• Clear workflows
• Better monitoring systems
• Standardised methodologies
• Reduced admin overhead
• Higher competence and confidence
• Seamless collaboration across disciplines

Flight is built for exactly this.

By centralising data, standardising workflows, and supporting the end-to-end assessment lifecycle, from scoping to reporting to decade-long monitoring, Flight enables ecology consultancies to operate efficiently, confidently and profitably in an increasingly complex regulatory environment.

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