It has been a difficult year for most areas of the UK economy, but in particular the development industry has been heavily hit by the “Credit Crunch”. The gradual slowdown in development, driven initially by a lack of available credit, was followed by a stand-off from potential buyers eager to wait for purchase prices to drop further. Given ambitious government targets to build three million new homes by 2020, at least 60 per cent of which must be on brownfield land, there has never been a more important, and pressing time, to implement the very first National Brownfield Strategy for England (NBFS), to ensure that brownfield redevelopment is carried out in a more coordinated and sustainable way.

The recommendations for such a strategy were accepted by government at the English Partnerships Brownfield Conference in March 2008. This was the culmination of an extensive stakeholder consultation and research exercise led at the time by English Partnerships, as national brownfield advisor for England, to gauge the needs of industry and others to successfully redevelop brownfield land. Now that the newly established housing and regeneration body, the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) – which brings together English Partnerships, the Housing Corporation, the Academy for Sustainable Communities and various delivery functions of the Department of Communities and Local Government - has brownfield at the heart of its agenda, it is in prime position to lead with the implementation of the four Strands of the Strategy (see box). However, organisations and individuals are also responsible for ensuring that they play a pivotal role in the brownfield agenda.

The former English Partnerships, and now the HCA, has already been working hard to identify and assess derelict and vacant brownfield land (Strand 1). This involves coordinated work with selected local authorities with the highest concentration of brownfield land in deprived areas to deliver Local Brownfield Strategies.

These are seen first and foremost as a way to increase the knowledge base of the quantity of brownfield land within an area to enhance the National Land Use Database of Previously Developed Land (NLUD-PDL). Through the assessment of identified sites, Local Brownfield Strategies will provide flexibility, certainty and robustness in the brownfield land supply to make informed decisions to feed into emerging local initiatives on employment, housing, open space and commercial land use needs and demands of the sub regions. However, the identification and development of onger term planning strategies to help provide consistency and certainty to the industry on the reuse of brownfield sites is only part of the answer to ensuring that, where appropriate, such sites are, above all else, redeveloped in the manner most appropriate to local needs – whether building new housing or other.

There is still ongoing debate in government about legislative issues relating to the so-called abnormal site conditions that affect brownfield sites, such as contamination and waste. On this front, we as the HCA, continue to work with government departments and agencies and other partner organisations, such as the Soil and Groundwater Technology Association (SAGTA), to help rectify these issues and provide some clarity. We were closely involved with production
of the “Guidance on the Legal Definition of Contaminated Land” clarifying note issued in July 2008 by DEFRA. We also work extensively with our partner CLAIRE (Contaminated Land: Applications in Real Environments), a charity dedicated to land remediation and decontamination solutions. Through this work the “Definition of Waste: Industry Code of Practice”, discussed elsewhere within this issue, was released in September 2008, which goes someway to providing a framework for determining when excavated materials are either not a waste in the first place and / or may cease to be a waste.

This shows what joined-up thinking and stakeholders working together can achieve – but there is more still to be done. Additional work developing the CLUSTER approach and reviewing movement of materials between sites (for example, top soil or other potentially valuable materials) and to fixed soil treatment centres, are happening already, and all of these will play an important role in increasing the sustainability potential of sites.

Through discussion and international forums, such as the recently established Sustainable Remediation Forum (SuRF), it is apparent that such issues around sustainability are becoming increasingly significant when remediating brownfield, or any other, land. Facilitated by CL:AIRE and involving the HCA, the Environment Agency and SAGTA, SuRF is developing a decision support framework that will allow for the sustainability of remediation technologies to be assessed.

A key part of the Government response to the NBFS was the creation of a new National Brownfield Forum to be formed of key stakeholders, including Government Departments and Agencies, including the HCA, Environment Agency and Health Protection Agency, SAGTA and other industry representatives. This new Forum meets for the first time in early 2009 and will play a fundamental role in not only identifying the issues surrounding the development of brownfield land, but also work to remove them. No doubt the future will be interesting for all, but this time of market uncertainty is an opportunity for us to learn new ways of overcoming the challenges so that when the market picks up, we can act to enable a more sustainable redevelopment of brownfield land to occur. We will continue to work with our partners to encourage coordinated activity on shared learning and challenging stakeholders to deliver good policy and practice. The first ever National Brownfield Strategy for England has laid the foundations for this, and, by unlocking the supply of land, providing access to funding and expertise, and setting standards, will play a key role within the HCA in helping deliver communities that will stand the test of time.