The Environmental Audit Committee has published information it received on the compliance of the HS2 hybrid Bill process with the EU EIA Directive and the Aarhus convention.
In a letter dated 14 October 2014, committee chair Joan Walley asked transport minister Robert Goodwill whether the government had plans to produce a supplementary environmental statement (SES) when additional analysis on the environmental impacts of the planned high-speed rail link is produced; and whether the convention applied to the hybrid Bill.In his response, Goodwill confirmed that a new SES will be prepared to account for any new information provided by the further ecological surveys, which were commissioned the Bill was published in November 2013. He also said that the hybrid Bill process complied with the Aarhus convention.