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Contaminated Land Responsibilities

The management of contaminated land in the UK is administered by many Acts of parliament including those giving rise to waste management legislation, groundwater protection legislation, planning legislation and pollution prevention and control legislation. Whilst much of this (in particular IPPC legislation) aims to protect the environment from current industrial operations sites that have been contaminated by historical use have slipped between the cracks. Current estimates of land contaminated through historical use suggest that between 100,000 and 200,000 hectares of land may be affected.

Part IIA of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, (or more accurately section 57 of the Environment Act 1995, which inserts the relevant sections into the 1990 Act) aims to deal with this issue. It places specific responsibility on Local Authorities as the main regulator and is the first Act to define Contaminated Land in law. This definition is that Contaminated Land is ‘any land which appears to the Local Authority in whose area it is situated to be in such a condition, by reason of substances in, on or under the land, that:-

(a) SIGNIFICANT HARM is being caused or there is a significant possibility of such harm being caused; or
(b) POLLUTION OF CONTROLLED WATERS is being, or is likely to be caused’

These web pages provide guidance for Local Authorities on managing their contaminated land responsibilities and introduces GroundView from AEA Energy & Environment (part of the AEA Group).

We have developed GroundView to enable Local Authorities to manage the PartIIA task. Users can prioritise activity, identify potentially contaminated sites from historical data, consider this information together with other data and track the risk posed to public health and the environment, using a simple GIS-based management system.

The GroundView system is the leading Part IIA management tool and has a track record of six years of use at Oxford City Council (our first customer). Since this time GroundView has been chosen by more than fifty other Local Authorities up and down the country.