North West Bylines has told the story of how the former BICC plant at Helsby, North Cheshire, has been re-developed with a large Tesco store, hundreds of houses and a sports club. Contamination with Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) was anticipated, found in several locations across the site and plans were put in place to deal with it. And yet, a recent measurement for the BBC Last Witness podcast, found high concentrations of PCBs in a stream feeding the Hornsmill Brook that runs through the site. Has something been missed? Are the government-mandated procedures for dealing with brownfield development on contaminated land fit for purpose?
Vicar, Paul Cawthorne, from Shropshire, who is a tireless campaigner against PCB pollution in the UK, certainly believes Cheshire West and Chester Council have questions to answer. He says “[the Helsby development] illustrates how the contaminated land regime has been undermined by its statutory guidance and how councils have inadvertently been mis-steered by government. I feel sorry for this council that they don’t seem to have fully evaluated the environmental ‘significant possibility of significant harm’ at Helsby any more than they have done at Alvanley” [the long-abandoned landfill site known as Commonside which is a few miles distant].
Cawthorne talks of the “fear of finding out”, which afflicts many of the local authorities he has encountered around the UK. Dealing with PCB contamination is difficult and expensive and often it is hard to identify who is ultimately responsible for a clean-up. Councils have a statutory role in identifying contamination under the 1990 Environmental Protection Act. It’s a short step from there to being obliged to do something about it.
The Helsby case is different though, because the possibility of contamination was recognised from the start. The council is the planning authority and has the power to put conditions on development to ensure that contamination is dealt with. Those powers have been used extensively, but in a piecemeal fashion.
Contamination does not necessarily stop development
PCB contamination has been found on multiple occasions in the last twenty years of development at Helsby, so why has building been allowed to proceed?
A paragraph from a 2002 Atkins document, available in planning application APP/2002/2009, is key to understanding this apparent contradiction. It states “In its current condition the subject site will be a strong candidate for identification as ‘contaminated land’ under the provisions of Part IIA of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Successful re-development of the site can address the possible significant pollutant linkages and produce a site remediated to a suitable standard for the proposed end-uses. The developed site would not be a candidate for identification as ‘contaminated land’.”
[ “Environmental Assessment Pt1/2 – forming part of planning submission for Mere’s Edge Development”]
Doing nothing results in contamination persisting long into the future, while appropriate development improves the land and brings it back into use.
Provided of course that what is done is effective.
How contamination is dealt with
In the government-mandated approach, the conceptual model of contamination looks at three things. These are the source of contamination, the receptor of contamination and the pathway between them. If all three are present, then there is a risk. Throughout the Helsby development, the approach has been to remove the pathways by which the contamination can reach the receptors. This is perhaps inevitable as it is impractical/too costly to remove all potential sources where they are widely but infrequently distributed across a large site. Likewise it is impossible to remove the potential receptors – there would be no point to the development if there were no future residents.
Since 2002, around 20 planning applications have been made for the various parts of the old BICC site. As risk assessments consistently identified at least a moderate risk, in each case planning permission was granted but the developer was required to put in measures to reduce it to acceptable levels. These measures included the use of impermeable membranes and water supply pipes, the replacement of topsoil and the use of hard cover – e.g. Tarmac. This was done to protect construction workers, future residents and water courses.
As described in our earlier article, the risk to Hornsmill Brook was assessed as being low, with the rate of migration of any residual PCBs to the water expected to be very slow.
Is the 1990 Environmental Protection act fit for purpose?
Legislation (notably the Environmental Protection Act of 1990 or EPA) specifies how potentially contaminated land should be handled. The EPA procedures were followed, reports and surveys were commissioned and are publicly available on the local council’s planning portal. BICC had prepared the site by creating a containment consisting of a clay barrier and impermeable membrane. They also constructed a treatment plant to capture and remove residual PCB contamination. And yet, contamination is still present in a ditch feeding Hornsmill Brook almost 25 years after the plant closed.
Are the EPA provisions adequate to properly manage a situation where there is a chronic, long term but low level of contamination? Sadly, there are several other examples of PCB contamination in the UK – not least the nearby Commonside tip at Alvanley – which show that they are not.
The EPA defines roles and responsibilities for the Environment Agency and the local authority.
The Environment Agency does not have the resources to independently monitor the condition of developments such as Helsby. They have input to the planning process, and review reports and assessments made by the consultants working for the site developer.
Local authorities can use planning powers to ensure developers carry out risk assessments and put in place measures to reduce risk, but they do not have the resources to monitor the effectiveness of these actions.
Lessons from brownfield development at Helsby BICC plant
The developer of the site has been the Brookhouse Group, based in Sale. They have submitted most of the significant planning applications and commissioned many of the risk assessments and surveys. The original local authority responsible for planning was Vale Royal Borough Council, who were superseded in 2009 by Cheshire West and Chester. In 2002, Vale Royal published a Development Brief to provide planning guidance for the site. Comparing this document to what has actually been built at Helsby, shows a much higher proportion of residential properties than originally planned (most of the site was intended for employment). Are early decisions made based on the original development brief still valid? Are the measures taken, capable of lasting for decades into the future?
But as pointed out by Helsby Councillor, Chris Copeman, perhaps the most significant issue is the lack of long-term monitoring of the whole site to assess whether the mandated environmental mitigation was working. In every stage of development, planning permission was granted on condition there was an analysis of risk and a plan to minimise it. But there is no provision for a continuous assessment of whether these measures worked across the whole site.
While there is currently no evidence of impact on the health of local people, this must not lead to complacency. And we do know that Hornsmill Brook is at risk. The BBC podcast finding of high PCB levels in a feeder ditch, suggests that the mechanisms by which PCBs reach the water way have not been fully understood and dealt with despite 20 years or more of development. PCB contamination of the water course is a risk to residents (children and dogs may play in the water) and allows these dangerous chemicals to leach out to the sea where they can enter the food chain. More widespread sampling and analysis is clearly needed.
We must develop brownfield sites safely and economically
These difficult sites must be tackled. Simply leaving them – as shown by the experience at Commonside – will store up problems for the future. But there’s clearly a need for better monitoring. At Helsby, we don’t know enough about the state of the site.
Campaigner, Paul Cawthorne, says “I simply don’t understand from the primary legislation of Environmental Protection Act Part 2A why a decision on contaminated land status can be finessed into non-existence by planning to cover a site with a supermarket and family housing, especially when ditches on and around the site are known to be contaminated with PCBs. What’s gone wrong here isn’t so much one council making a mess as a national regime allowing a mess to be made.”
A memo from the Law Commission to the Interim Environmental Protection Assessor for Wales, released to Cawthorne under the Freedom of Information Act, identifies three issues that stand in the way of improvement. First, is there a need for a change to legislation, second, should there be changes to statutory guidance to local authorities and thirdly, do they need more resources to manage the problem.
The Helsby experience suggests the answer is “yes” to all three.
