Environmental Protection Act 1990 - Part IIA Contaminated Land: statutory guidance edition 2

PART 3: Securing Remediation

C.10 When the enforcing authority is serving a remediation notice, it will need to specify in that notice any remediation action which is needed in order to achieve remediation of the relevant land or water environment to the standard described in Part 4 of this Chapter and which is reasonable for the purposes of section 78E(4) (see Part 5 of this Chapter). Part 6 of this Chapter provides further guidance relevant to the determining the necessary standard of remediation. Part 7 provides guidance on the circumstances in which different types of remediation action may, or may not, be required.

C.11 The enforcing authority should be satisfied that appropriate remediation is being, or will be, carried out without the service of a remediation notice if that remediation would remediate the relevant land or water environment to an equivalent, or better, standard than would be achieved by the remediation action or actions that the authority could, at that time, otherwise specify in a remediation notice.

Phased Remediation

C.12 The overall process of remediation on any land or water environment may require a phased approach, with different remediation actions being carried out in sequence. For example, the local authority may have obtained sufficient information about the relevant land or water environment to enable it to identify the land as falling within the definition of contaminated land, but that information may not be sufficient information for the enforcing authority to be able to specify any particular remedial treatment action as being appropriate. Further assessment actions may be needed in any case of this kind as part of the remediation scheme. In other cases, successive phases of remedial treatment actions may be needed.

C.13 The phasing of remediation is likely to follow a progression from assessment actions, through remedial treatment actions and onto monitoring actions. However, this will not always be the case, and the phasing may omit some stages or revisit others. For example, in some circumstances it may be possible for a remedial treatment action to be carried out without any previous assessment action (because sufficient information is already available). But, conversely, in some instances additional assessment action may be found to be necessary only in the light of information derived during the course of a first phase of a required assessment action or the carrying out of required remedial treatment actions.

C.14 Where it is necessary for the remediation scheme as a whole to be phased, a single remediation notice may not be able to include all of the remediation actions which could eventually be needed. In these circumstances, the enforcing authority should specify in the notice the remediation action or actions which, on the basis of the information available at that time, it considers to be appropriate, taking into account in particular the guidance in Part 7 of this Chapter. In due course, the authority may need to serve further remediation notices which include remediation actions for further phases of the scheme.

C.15 However, before serving any further remediation notice, the enforcing authority must be satisfied that the contaminated land which was originally identified still appears to it to meet the definition in section 78A(2). If, for example, the information obtained as a result of an assessment action reveals that there is not, in fact, a significant possibility of significant harm being caused, nor is there a significant possibility of significant pollution of the water environment being caused, then no further assessment, remedial treatment or monitoring action can be required under section 78E(1).