Environmental Protection

Contaminated land

We have a long and proud history as an industrial base. Over the past 200 years the list of industries that have operated in the area include shipbuilding, aircraft, chemical and motor manufacturing, electricity generation and asbestos processing.

Sadly standards within industry and the legal controls that could be applied were much lower than are expected today. This has resulted in the ground being polluted by both the wastes from the industries and in some cases the raw products.

The effect that many of these substances had on either people or the environment was not understood and therefore little care was taken.

This is a problem across the whole country, and even across the whole world where industry exists or has existed on a large scale.

To enable the problems that contamination has caused to be dealt with the law was improved and from April 2000 each council has had a duty to publish a strategy laying out how it will inspect and deal with contaminated land in its area.

The Contaminated Land Inspection Strategy was adopted by us in June 2001. We now ensure that the legacy of the past is dealt with through 3 main routes:

The first is to identify land that may be contaminated and to use the powers that are given in the law to inspect and if necessary to clean up land
The second is to ensure that when development is planned on land that may be contaminated, a full site inspection and risk assessment is carried out to enable the land to be cleaned up to make the land fit for it's proposed use. This is the commonest way in which contaminated land is addressed
The third is deal with any urgent situations that may arise where there is the possibility that human health is at risk

This work is carried out with the help and knowledge of other experts, particularly the Environment Agency and the Primary Care Trust.

As the work of inspection proceeds the results of the studies will be published on this website in a non-technical form.