Budget cuts on Contaminated Land Capital Grant Programme put further pressure on homeowners

Bidding for the Contaminated Land Capital Grant Programme (CLCGP) has opened for 2011, and will run until 27th May 2011. Money from the CLCGP is used by Local Authorities and The Environment Agency (EA) to fund intrusive site investigations and subsequent remediation works on contaminated land and has funded over 1,100 projects in the last 10 years. The CLCGP, previously run by Defra, and now administered by the EA, has seen its budget cut by nearly 80% in the last year. Local Authorities were allocated £17.5m of this money at the start of the previous year, with the EA allocated £2.439m. This was reduced during the year to £10m for Local Authorities and £1.9m for the EA, and has now fallen to just £4.35m to be shared between both Local Authorities and the EA in approximately the same proportions, a cut of 78% within the last 12 months. Funding for the same programme in Wales has been entirely removed by the Welsh Assembly for the year 2011/2012.

If central government money is not available to fund these projects, there are two likely scenarios for those Local Authorities without significant internal funding for Contaminated Land:

Local Authorities simply decide to stop proactively investigating sites under their Contaminated land Inspection Strategy, and instead concentrate on remediating sites purely through the planning regime. This approach would, however, not be considered to represent an adequate discharge of an Authority’s duties under Part IIA of the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) 1990.
As liability for remediation costs can be allocated to current land owners (even if they were not responsible for such pollution, or even aware of its existence) as Part B liable persons under the EPA 1990, the removal of these grants may lead to home owners and land owners being pursued to pay for necessary remedial works on their properties.

It has been indicated by the EA that preference for funding will be given to ongoing remediation projects, rather than new investigations. Therefore, suspected contamination is more likely to go unnoticed by the regulatory authorities. With the burden of financial responsibility for remediation falling more squarely upon property owners there is as great a need as ever for the accurate identification of such risks during transactions.

Drew Hardy, Technical Support Manager (Environmental Consultancy) at GroundSure