Memorandum by the Environment Agency (UWP
96)
THE PROPOSED URBAN WHITE PAPER
1. INTRODUCTION
The Environment Agency looks forward to the
publication of the Urban White Paper, and agrees with the Report
of the Urban Task Force that sustainable cities, where there is
a balance between people and the environment, must be the way
forward in achieving long term sustainable development.
The Environment Agency's primary aim is to protect
and improve the environment and to make a contribution towards
the delivery of sustainable development through the integrated
management of air, land and water. The Agency does this through
regulation and enforcement but also by influencing and educating
industry, landowners and others to reduce their environmental
impacts.
In this memorandum, the Agency considers the
recommendations of the Report of the Urban Task Force (the "report")
and makes suggestions for provisions to be included in the proposed
Urban White Paper (the "white paper"). Specific consideration
is given to the management of contaminated land, as the report
made recommendations for action by the Agency in relation to "cleaning
up the land".
2. OVERVIEW
2.1 The importance of the environment to urban
regeneration
People expect to enjoy the benefits of clean
air, land and water and access to local open spaces with a diverse
wildlife. The Agency considers that the white paper must recognise
environmental quality as a fundamental and positive component
of urban regeneration. A high quality urban environment that is
actively sought as a preferred location for residential or commercial
uses is likely to be characterised by its good environmental attributes.
A new approach for identifying key environmental
features, based on the concept of environmental capital, is being
researched jointly by the Agency, English Nature, English Heritage
and the Countryside Agency. Environmental capital considers the
environmental functions and services to people provided by natural
features, such as open spaces, streams, woodland or wildlife,
and built features, such as existing buildings and utilities.
It considers the mundane but important, as well as the rarer and
more interesting, features and it takes account of how easily
these can be recreated or their functionality transferred. The
white paper should stress the importance of assessing the environmental
attributes of existing and new urban features.
In higher density developments, the provision
of access to good quality open space is a critical design feature.
River corridors can often fulfil an important function in this
respect. They are one of the few remnants of the "natural"
world left in many urban situations. There are opportunities to
open up watercourses buried in culverts and to re-profile hard
engineered banks of rivers, to improve access. The Agency has
completed a range of such projects already and sees scope for
more in the future.
2.2 ENVIRONMENTAL
CONSIDERATIONS WITHIN
SPATIAL PLANNING
The report addresses the "footprint"
of urban development, including the land taken for new building,
the resources needed for construction and the adequacy of services
such as transport. However, there are other significant environmental
considerations that the white paper should address:
— the water resources needed to support
urban economic growth and the stress this can place on natural
systems, particularly in Southern England where climate change
will reduce summer rainfall;
— the waste management facilities necessary
to service a community, especially the arrangements for final
disposal of waste to landfill or incinerators, including the timely
provision of new facilities, to meet growing requirements;
— provision in new developments for
features such as recycling and composting points and segregated
waste collections, district heating schemes and combined heat
and power facilities;
— the future management of flooding,
particularly the impact of new building in the flood plain of
rivers. This reduces flood storage and creates impermeable surfaces
(which cause rainfall to run quickly off the land, adding to flooding
problems and preventing the recharging of ground waters).
Development plans and land allocations should
be subject to strategic environmental appraisal to ensure that
environmental needs are fully considered. This will ensure that
the full impacts of a proposal are understood and any external
costs (such as environmental damage) are addressed fully.
The report has not given adequate consideration
to the importance of manufacturing and process industry within
the urban context. The white paper should stress that it is not
appropriate to include some industries within a mixed urban setting,
when these will be poor neighbours to residential areas, for reasons
of noise, odour or hazards and associated risks. However, it is
recognised that this situation of mixed use already exists, but
can be mitigated by good urban design.
The design-led approach to urban regeneration,
based on integrated spatial master planning, advocated in the
report, needs to include consideration of the ability of the local
built environment to cater for the social, economic and environmental
aspirations of local communities. It needs to address both environmental
risk and aesthetics, for example, development in areas of flood
risk or on contaminated land, discharges of surface water from
new developments, implementation of pollution prevention measures
and contributions to the improvement of water quality for recreational
purposes. In the absence of such considerations local quality
of life will be compromised.
2.3 THE
FUNCTIONALITY OF
URBAN DESIGN
The report recognises the importance of designing
for functionality, taking account of the relationship between
the urban situation and the wider world. This idea should be extended
in the white paper to include the energy and material flows of
an urban society and should be based on an overall life cycle
assessment approach. New and renovated buildings should be designed
to achieve high environmental performance and building regulations
should include energy and water efficiency requirements.
3. SPECIFIC TOPICS
3.1 Environmental Impact Appraisal in Structure
Plans
The report emphasises the need for the development
plan process to be more strategic in nature, enabling more effective
integration of transport, economic, environmental and housing
strategies. The Agency supports these proposals. There is a need
to strengthen Regional Planning Guidance to require an integrated
spatial framework for planning and transport policies.
The Agency considers that environmental appraisal
is crucial to urban renaissance and that this should be stated
in the white paper. Environmental appraisal provides the proper
vehicle for identifying cumulative environmental effects and should
be an essential part of urban capacity studies and the sequential
approach to land-use planning advocated in the report. It also
provides a sound basis for the "joined up thinking",
linked to informing Local Agenda 21 and benefiting from state
of the environment reporting, which is important in achieving
a socially inclusive urban renaissance.
3.2 State of the local environment reporting
The Agency supports the production of a "State
of the Towns and Cities" report. The Agency also believes
that local state of the environment reports should be produced,
so that actions, policies and performance criteria are based on
a sound understanding of the key local environmental issues and
trends, as well as national, economic and social measures. State
of the environment reporting provides a baseline for examining
environmental change, as well as data for environmental appraisal.
At the national level, the Agency has a statutory
duty to form an opinion on the state of the environment. It has
produced Local Environment Agency Plans (LEAPs) for every part
of England and Wales. These set out local programmes of environmental
improvements linked to the Agency's remit and have been prepared
in consultation with local authorities and other organisations.
In addition many local authorities have produced state of the
environment reports and by the end of 1999 most had produced Local
Agenda 21 plans.
There are a number of examples of joint approaches
to state of the environment reporting involving the Agency. The
Agency and Norfolk County Council jointly produced "The Norfolk
Environmental Overview", and both the Mersey and the Humber
Estuary Management Plans were produced by local partnerships of
many organisations, including local authorities and the Agency.
3.3 Cleaning up the land
The current roles of the Agency in the management
of contaminated land include:
— regulation of release from contaminated
land that pose a risk to controlled waters, including ground waters;
— advice to local authority planning
departments, on development applications where contaminated land
is an issue because of its potential to pollute controlled waters;
and
— regulation of contaminated soil as
a waste.
From April 2000, the Agency expects to be the
joint regulator with local authorities of a new contaminated land
regime (Part IIA of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, as
inserted by section 57 of the Environment Act 1995). This will
place a duty on local authorities to identify land that falls
within a statutory definition of contaminated land. Where land
is "contaminated", then the local authority or, for
"special sites" the Agency, will have a duty to ensure
that appropriate treatment is completed, by agreeing a voluntary
remediation statement or by serving a remediation notice. Special
sites are those that have been determined as contaminated by a
local authority and in addition fall in to certain categories
defined in the regulations. Examples of special sites are those
owned by the Ministry of Defence, those regulated under Part A
of the Integrated Pollution Control regime and those lying over
certain important aquifiers. The number of special sites within
England and Wales is estimated to be several thousand.
The report states "Where the Environment
Agency is going to be responsible for regulating reclamation schemes
within difficult regeneration areas—through a combination
of contaminated land, waste and water regulation—it has
to recognise that it has responsibilities to promote regeneration
as part of the public interest. It is a direct stakeholder in
the regeneration process. The onus should therefore always be
on finding workable solutions and not placing undue obligations
upon those seeking to bring about regeneration." The Agency
wishes to assist in bringing more contaminated land into sustainable
use through the widespread use of more effective clean-up methods.
It therefore welcomes the emphasis given to cleaning up the land
in the report. It agrees that "the bottom line is to ensure
more clean-up and redevelopment of contaminated or potentially
contaminated sites by attracting more private finance and investment
in to such development". The Agency fully recognises its
important role as a stakeholder in land regeneration and the need
to find efficient (or workable) approaches to regulation, within
the legislative framework, so that investment costs are not unnecessarily
high. However the principal duty of the Agency is to protect the
environment. It has to ensure that regulation of contaminated
land remediation is effective, so that there is public trust that
land has been cleaned-up properly. It has to control the risk
of new contamination from the unregulated dispersal of pollutants
from land treatment processes. Effective regulation has an important
role to play in establishing more positive perceptions of land
that has been cleaned-up, which in turn will encourage a more
rapid development of contaminated land.
The Agency considers that the new Part IIA contaminated
land regime provides a good legislative framework for identifying
past land contamination that poses unacceptable risks, for identifying
how such risks should be managed and establishing who should pay
for necessary treatment. However there is an urgent need for a
new regime for the regulation of land treatment processes. This
is not covered by Part IIA.
At the present time, the Agency is responsible
for the regulation of land treatment processes under the waste
management licensing regime, which was not intended for this purpose,
and to a lesser extent the Water Resources Act. The Agency has
sought to apply the waste management licensing regime to land
treatment in a proportionate manner. Full use has been made of
appropriate exemptions and of mobile plant licences, the latter
in place of more onerous site waste management licenses. However,
the scope for further adaptation of the existing arrangements,
which are often cumbersome and costly, is limited. A root and
branch approach is now needed. The Agency is working with the
Department of the Environment Transport and the Regions to explore
options for a dedicated regime for land treatment processes, possibly
under the Pollution Prevention and Control Regulations. This initiative
needs to be supported in the white paper.
The report recommends the establishment of "an
Environmental Agency `one-stop shop' service for regulatory and
licensing requirements, moving quickly to a position where a single
regeneration licence is available, covering all the regulatory
requirements for cleaning up a site". The Agency has already
set up multi-functional teams in its Area offices to support the
integrated delivery of regulation. However, at this time, the
need to regulate land treatment under the separate waste and water
regimes provides no scope for a single regeneration licence. To
achieve this, a radical approach is needed based on integrated
regulations.
The Agency intends to provide owners and developers
of land with clear requirements for necessary soil treatment and
other actions needed to discharge remediation statements or notices.
It will require owners and developers of land to provide evidence
to demonstrate that these actions have been completed. Once the
Agency is satisfied that the requirements of a statement or notice
have been met, it will provide written confirmation of this. Only
to this extent will it "Give land owners . . . assurances
that the regulators are unlikely to take future action over contaminated
sites once remediation schemes have been carried out to an agreed
standard." The independence of the regulator has to be maintained.
It cannot give absolute assurances that no further action will
be needed. The Agency agrees with the report that the commercial
insurance industry is the means by which owners of land should
provide against possible failures or inadequacies of remediation
works, whether these are done voluntarily or to meet regulatory
requirements.
In the past year, the Agency has invested in
additional staff and tools to deliver the proposed new contaminated
land regime. The rate at which available resources will allow
the Agency to progress the regulation of special sites, for which
it is the regulator, is estimated at no more that one per local
authority per year, averaged across England and Wales. Until the
new regime is in place, it is not possible to determine if this
rate is less than is required to meet urban development needs.
The Agency is also concerned that its limited resources may not
be sufficient to provide all the technical support which local
authorities might expect, to support their larger role in delivering
the new contaminated land regime. An important task for the Agency
will be to report on the progress of the regime and to highlight
to Government where any shortfall in regulatory resources is acting
as a barrier to development.
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