Start making sense

Making contaminated land habitable is to a large extent a confidence game. Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Is it cost effective? Is sustainable? And, crucially, is it safe?

While the Government's target of three million new homes by 2020 may now appear a tad unrealistic - it would require build rates to soar from an estimated 60,000 this year (down from 175,000 last year) to 240,000 per annum over the next decade - the present lull is inevitably a temporary one.

Recession or not, future generations need somewhere to live, work and play. According to the National Land Use Database of Previously Developed Land, England alone has 62,130 hectares of previously used land, 26,510 of which is suitable for build. {mosimage}

Central to unlocking this startlingly abundant resource is a need to improve the quality of land condition assessments so that the most cost- and time-effective remediation options can be selected.

AGS helps bolster confidence where it is needed by facilitating constructive debate and championing solutions to pertinent concerns.

SGVs

In recent years, AGS has done its utmost to clarify the ambiguity surrounding the Soil Guideline Values (SGVs), potentially a costeffective way of simplifying the risk assessment process by ruling out certain contaminants or avoiding the need for complex quantitative risk assessments.

However, SGVs have since their publication been dogged by confusion about how they relate to planning and the determination of contaminated land under Part IIa of the Environmental Protection Act 1990.

In 2004, the Cabinet office established a Soil Guideline Value Task Force (SGVTF) comprising regulators and industry representatives to examine this and other issues.

DEFRA subsequently initiated a review, leading to the publication of a discussion document entitled The Way Forward on 24 November 2006.

Many of the issues raised in the document have yet to be resolved, although a guidance note issued by DEFRA last year has declared that SGVs cannot be used to determine if a site should be classified under Part IIa and that local authorities should make this call based on best reasonable advice.

This clarified the situation somewhat but, in reality, little has changed. SGVs are still trigger values that, if exceeded, necessitate site-specific risk assessments. As before, robust site investigation regimes coupled with a rigorous analysis of site data remain critical.
In July 2008, DEFRA withdraw all ten extant SGVS, and the industry awaits the revised versions, due to arrive this March, with bated breath.

In the meantime, there are several initiatives to develop Generic Assessment Criteria (GAC) that can be used by the contaminated land community. Several companies are establishing their own using the parameters issued by the Environment Agency, whereas the Land Quality Management (LQM) and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) are setting up a workshop to refine the GACs they derived in 2006.

AGS is also likely to be involved, having been asked to assist the Environmental Industries Commission (EIC) in deriving a new set of GACs.

Although AGS welcomes these initiatives and is looking forward to working with EIC, it is concerned that numbers from hailing from multiple sources could potentially lead to more confusion. As a result, it is seeking to initiate dialogue between the various organisations, including DEFRA, to see if a coordinate set of GACs can be achieved.

Skills gap
Developers need assurances before they tackle brownfield sites. They need to know what they are dealing with, and they must trust the advisors they use.

At present, this is no easy task - contaminated land legislation is a complex and unpredictable subject, and there is a regrettable lack of skilled assessors to make sense of it all. AGS is pleased to note that people are increasingly turning to those with Specialist in Land Condition (SiLC) certification.

Developed to support the Urban Task Force's Land Condition Record in 1999, SiLC is indisputably the most high profile, respected professional qualification related to contaminated land.

The breadth of knowledge and experience the qualification calls for is extremely rigorous and essential for the safe, measured and effective transformation of UK's contaminated land legacy into useable sites.

SiLC's credibility is on the rise, with major developers such as National Grid Properties looking for it during the consultant evaluation process and local authorities such as Vale Royal Borough Council stating that it will only work with companies who employ SiLCregistered professionals.

Consultants and assessors are being equally proactive. For example RSK Group, the UK's largest privately owned, multidisciplinary consultancy, is acutely aware that the UK's contaminated land problem is shared and is committed to raising the profile of SiLC as a means of improving assessment standards across the board.

It has made it company policy that any RSK employee with the requisite experience should sit the SiLC exams. It is pre-empting legislation, raising its own credibility and forcing the issue. Many of RSK's peers take a similar view, and a movement is building, but SiLC's main problem is that not enough people have taken the exam - there are only 130
certified assessors in the UK right now.

To get to the point where a SiLC-registered professional is involved with every UK brownfield site - the ideal scenario - the figure needs to hit at least 500.

Currently, Planning Policy Statement 23: Planning and Pollution Control Annex 2: Development on Land Affected by Contamination states that all investigations of land potentially affected by contamination "should be carried out by or under the direction of a suitably qualified competent person."

Here competence is defined as a person that is "normally" expected to be a chartered member of an appropriate professional body (i.e. Institution of Civil Engineers, Geological Society of London, Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Institution of Environmental Management) with "relevant experience of investigation contaminated sites". SiLC is alluded to for signing off Land Condition Records, but that's it.

Recent developments suggest this may not be the case for much longer. In 2004, a Home Builders Federation document entitled suggested that certification to a standard of SiLC's stature would be a highly progressive step forward for land assessment. After discussions with the Remediation Licensing Task Force, the proposal was adopted by English Partnerships' National Brownfield Strategy.

This year, the contaminated land skills vacuum was high on the agenda at English Partnerships' National Brownfield Conference, prompting the draft Brownfield Skills Strategy (published by the Academy for Sustainable Communities and English Partnerships), to identify the development of a Land Condition Skills Development Framework as a key action.

Further signs of encouragement came earlier this year when funding from English Partnerships was proffered to SiLC to produce a Technical Development Framework that would raise the qualification's profile and encourage more industry engagement, particularly from young graduates.

At present, one of the major impediments to SiLC becoming more influential is its perceived impenetrability. For example, a person only becomes eligible to seek the certification after racking up eight years of industry experience. All well and good, but this has meant it has dropped off the priority radar of many highly skilled people.

The Technical Development Framework should ease this problem and assist newly qualified graduates in developing an accelerated path to the qualification.  In many ways, SiLC has done all the hard work already. The set-up is robust and the quality of assessor it produces is beyond dispute. It just needs to reach out more to its potential participants. The future of contaminated land assessment standards is already here. Many people just don't know it yet!