Land contamination

Contaminated land is land which has substances that can cause harm or is likely to cause major pollution to controlled waters.

To meet the definition of contaminated land, it must involve the following:

contaminant
pathway
receptor

Environmental search

To find out whether a piece of land might be affected by contamination, you can request an Environmental Search. Please include a site plan to confirm the extent of the land that you are asking about in your application.

Request an environmental search

A fee does not need to be paid for requests that only ask whether a site has been highlighted for further investigation under Part II A of the Environmental Protection Act.

£150 fee will need to be paid for any further questions, such as:

historical land use
adjacent uses
previous investigations

Our duties

We are responsible for enforcing the contaminated land legislation. Our Health and Environmental Services specialists can advise on land contamination issues including:

supplying information
assessing if site investigations and remedial measures are completed properly.

As part of our duties we will:

carry out inspections of all land within the district that may be contaminated
ensure that developed land is suitable for its use
keep a public register of designated contaminated land sites

We have published a Contaminated Land Strategy [PDF, 0.6MB] outlining how it will carry out these duties.

Our public register of the remediation of contaminated land is available on the links below:

The public register does not include:

details of historic land use
details of land that could be potentially contaminated
information on sites that have been remediated through the planning and development control process.