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In my three decades working on major infrastructure projects, one issue has remained persistent: the continual reinvention of environmental management documentation. Despite construction impacts being well understood, every new project tends to recreate its Code of Construction Practice (CoP) and Construction Environmental Management Plan (CEMP) from scratch. This approach consumes time, increases risk and cost, and adds little value.
The Jubilee Line extension in the 1990s – one of the UK’s first major projects to formally develop a CoCP and CEMP – required genuinely new thinking. However, the same cannot be said today. While terminology and formatting may vary, most CoCPs and CEMPs share a fundamentally similar purpose and structure on major projects. Yet the sector continues to prepare these documents as if each project were unprecedented.
Rather than repeatedly reinventing these documents, it’s time to ask a simple question: why don’t we start with a standardised industry template and focus our effort on what really needs to be bespoke? As the UK prepares to deliver billions of pounds of nationally significant infrastructure, there has never been a better time to do things differently – and better.
CoCPs and CEMPs are more than just technical reports. They are foundational documents that are essential for securing planning consent, often forming a legal obligation once approved. They are powerful drivers of real-world outcomes, shaping how construction is delivered, protecting the environment and influencing how communities experience a project over many years.
When well crafted, these documents streamline delivery. When poorly written, they can delay projects by months, or even years. A single poorly worded sentence in these documents can carry substantial risk. For example, clauses tying progress to named specialists can inadvertently create a single point of failure and could shut down an entire site if the specialists were unavailable.
And while many organisations draw on previous experience, there is no formal feedback loop to drive continuous improvement. Documents are often passed from project to project, adapted with varying levels of understanding, and rarely revisited once construction is underway.
Across the UK, project teams spend significant time rewriting, reviewing and negotiating content that has changed little in decades. Combined with the pressure of consultation deadlines and planning milestones, teams duplicate effort on standard clauses instead of site-specific environmental risks. The inconsistency also adds unnecessary complexity and pressure on planning and statutory bodies, who must interpret differently named and structured documents.
Communities lose out too. When effort is spent debating standard clauses and less time is invested in what’s actually unique about a project, and the impacts that really matter locally. The financial implications are also substantial: extended legal review and examination discussions, and consultancy time focussed on drafting rather than improving outcomes.
Reinvesting time where it matters is one of the most tangible advantages of standardising. Time savings are often framed as efficiency gains, but the real benefit is where that time goes instead.
When teams are no longer rewriting the same clauses project after project, they can spend more time on what genuinely requires attention - engaging more meaningfully with communities, working collaboratively with regulators, strengthening mitigation in sensitive areas. Freed from debating text that has remained largely unchanged for decades, project teams can concentrate on real environmental risks. This could be noise in a sensitive location, traffic in constrained streets, protecting a valued habitat or responding to climate change.
Regulators benefit too: familiarity with a standard structure allows them to focus limited resources where scrutiny is needed most, providing greater confidence to communities and decision-makers. This shift will mean that quality of mitigation, environmental performance, community trust and social value all improve. Over time, expectations become clearer too. Communities, regulators and delivery teams begin to understand what ‘good’ looks like as a baseline, and where projects can go further.
A shared framework for CoCPs and pre-planning CEMPs, regularly reviewed and updated, could streamline consents, reduce risk and raise standards across the board. This wouldn’t be a rigid rulebook, but a living template providing core principles and standard clauses, a structured database of environmental topics, and guidance on where projects should go further by tailoring or enhancing requirements. Critically, it would be dynamic, updated based on real construction experience, legislative change and lessons learned.
With that shared baseline in place, AI could be a positive enabler – accelerating first drafts and helping teams tailor content to project needs. Human-led guardrails, governance and QA, with professional sign-off, would ensure high stakes clauses remain accurate, context specific and defensible.
The lack of standardisation in CoCPs and CEMPs is a symptom of a wider issue in how the UK delivers infrastructure, too often treating each major project as the first of its kind. The new national infrastructure body, NISTA, presents an opportunity to convene a nationally focused conversation and develop foundations for a consistent approach.
If implemented well, the benefits – time saved, costs reduced, risks lowered and outcomes improved – would far outweigh the effort required to change. Moreover, if CoCPs and CEMPs are successfully standardised, it could unlock opportunities for standardisation in other areas on infrastructure delivery.
Jonathan Ben-Ami is global environmental consulting leader at Arup
