Meeting Your Obligations
The previous page on this website provides a brief outline on Part IIA. But what must Local Authorities actually do.
The first task for you has been the preparation of your inspection strategies. These have had to be produced over different timescales dependent on where you are. No timetable for the implementation of the regime on Northern Ireland has yet been set.
After this date strategy implementation begins. The timescales for carrying out inspections are open and many of you are in different stages of the process. Within the process you also a need to:
- be rational ordered and efficient which implies a need to justify your actions;
- identify the most pressing and serious problems first and concentrate resources on the areas where Contaminated Land is most likely to be found. Within this is a need to prioritise sites for investigation and remediation
- communicate information to others and respond to information and complaints from members of the public, businesses and voluntary organisations. In this area there is a fine line to be walked between your obligations to provide information, compounded by Acts such as the environmental information regulations, and the general sense of nervousness individuals feel about blight.
The process for many of you means going through cycles of information gathering, prioritisation of effort followed by further information gathering and decision-making. Some of the information required may necessitate site work (trial pits, boreholes and sampling). In many cases the first part has been the consideration of historical data on land use, current use in terms of receptors as well as data on environmental setting encompassing groundwater and surface water information as well as geological and archaeological information in a GIS framework. As time goes on further data is gathered that is textual in nature, site reports, monitoring data and consultants / developers reports may need to be added.
AEA Energy & Environment has produced a specialist tool to help in all these areas of site prioritisation, information management and reporting to others. Our system is called GroundView and is THE leading tool to help with Part IIA.
