Health impact assessment in the UK planning system: the possibilities and limits of community engagement

This paper explores the use of health impact assessment (HIA) as a means of facilitating community engagement in spatial planning. The paper discusses the background to the development of HIA as a tool for assessing the likely impact of policies and wider changes on health with a view to building those into planning and decision-making, and describes the evolution of HIA into more participatory forms. It then goes on to describe a case-study of plans for a waste incinerator in an inner-city area in the UK, where HIA was used in response to community concerns about the development as a means of building in the views of local people to the decision-making around the plan. We describe in detail how the HIA was conducted and additional research undertaken within a timescale set by the planning processes. We discuss the difficulties involved in conducting any kind of research-based HIA so rapidly and in a situation of multiple, competing stakeholder interests. We argue that although the HIA failed to influence the final decisions in this particular instance it does, nonetheless, provide a model for how to create 'knowledge spaces' in which different perspectives and information can be brought around the table to create more democratic approaches to planning for waste.