Toxic towns: What if the houses are built on contaminated land?

Land contamination comes from many sources: former industrial areas (gasworks, power stations, plants, railway lines) as well as active sources of chemical and industrial use (factories, petrol stations, dry cleaners). Landfills too pose a significant risk, both historic and active. There are more than 21,000 landfill sites across England, with 80 per cent of the UK population living within 2 kilometres of one. 

Contaminated land can contain heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, cadmium and chromium; asbestos; radioactive materials; hazardous chemicals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) – all proven to be harmful to human health, manifesting in respiratory problems, cancers, neurological issues, cardiovascular risks, reproductive and developmental effects … the list goes on.

Yet a recent BBC investigation revealed that out of 13,093 potentially toxic sites in the UK identified as “high risk” by local authorities, only 1,465 have been inspected – fewer than 1 in 10.  

The catch-all site designations of brownfield or greybelt don’t reveal the lengthy, costly and risky remediation often required. Unless on private land, identification and remediation is the responsibility of a local authority, under Part 2A of the 1990 Environmental Protection Act. Clean-up options include removal and replacement, in-situ remediation or, where neither of these are feasible, capping, where layers of clean soil and impermeable barriers are added to prevent further leaching. Future development layout is dictated by contamination levels. For instance, some areas might not be suitable to be developed as residential or schools but are deemed safe as open space or parks. This assessment process is complex and the extent of contamination (deep in soil or dispersed in groundwater) can be difficult to ascertain. 

Super-sites regenerated from contamination include London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Festival Gardens in Liverpool and Eastside in Birmingham. They come with a hefty price tag and time span. The clean-up at former landfill Festival Gardens cost the council £60 million for the remediation of 450,000 cubic metres of soil; at London’s Olympic Park, remediation cost £12.7 million with the excavation of 2.3 million cubic metres of soil with 800,000 cubic metres treated in “soil hospitals”; while at Greenwich Peninsula the cost was £21 million, and the process took 14 months with 30,000 cubic metres of soil washed.

But many of the UK’s contaminated sites are on private land where the landowner shirks liability to clean up the site. The “Rainham Volcano” at Arnolds Fields in east London is an illegal landfill on private land, which the local community is fighting against, spearheaded by campaign group Clear the Air in Havering. At the landfill site in Launders Lane, a constantly smouldering underground fire causes numerous unprotected health and safety risks, including wild fires and air pollution. It is one of the UK’s highest-emitting methane sites. High levels of respiratory and lung disease have been reported in neighbouring areas to the landfill. Why then, in July 2024, did Havering Council decide not to designate the landfill as contaminated land?  

With the help of law firm Mishcon de Reya, Clear the Air in Havering has taken the council to court. The case was heard in March 2025, and the verdict delivered in June 2025 with the court finding in favour for Clean the Air in Havering – but there still a stand-off in terms of responsibility for cleaning up and the decision could be appealed. If the landfill is legally designated as contaminated land, the council and the Environment Agency will have specific legal duties to ensure the site is cleaned up by serving a notice to the owner.

The judgement is important as it clarifies that smoke can be assessed as a contaminant linked to land under the contaminated land regime, and that smoke from fires need to be assessed by the council as a contaminant pathway. “My client looks forward to hearing from the Council how it intends to effect proper monitoring going forward, so that the health impacts of the site can be properly addressed,” Emily Nicholson, partner at Mishcon de Reya writes in a press statement on the case.

Nicholson says: “Just because something is on private land doesn’t mean communities can’t do anything about it. If a nuisance is being caused, people affected may well have rights and they are entitled to enforce those against the landowner.” 

Asked about the crux of the matter, she says: “Local authorities and the Environment Agency are often dramatically underfunded and may feel that they don’t have financial or human resources to deal with complex issues. Often these issues are really difficult to resolve. However, regardless of resources, local authorities and the Environment Agency may have legal duties to intervene and local communities may have to be the ones to force that action.” 

It’s a common story: the private landowner says it doesn’t have the money to remediate the site until it gets planning permission so that investment is possible. A lengthy blackmail situation ensues and, meanwhile, the community can’t open their windows. The National Contaminated Land Officers Group (NCLOG) which brings together over 200 contaminated land officers (CLOs) working across the UK says: “The problem has been exacerbated by the lack of specialist CLOs in many local authorities, following a reduction in support.” 

And critically they reveal: “In the last decade, most local authorities have instead focused on preventing the creation of new Part 2A ‘contaminated land’ sites. To do this, CLOs utilise their professional expertise to evaluate land contamination reports submitted through the planning process.” 

This shows that local authorities are reactive rather than proactive, waiting for contaminated land sites to be brought to their attention – with communities as victims.  

Mishcon de Reya is also helping another community group, Cleaner Bentham, in North Yorkshire, with its case against live factory pollutants from fire-fighting foam made in the local Angus Fire factory. These PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, are a 15,000-strong group of man-made chemicals used in non-stick pans, waterproof clothing, food packaging, toiletries and fire-fighting foams. 

Forever chemicals are ubiquitous and persistent. They are in the bloodstream of over 99 per cent of the human population – even found in remote Antarctica – impossible to break down, and linked to cancers. The 2019 film Dark Waters tells of the true legal battle against chemical manufacturer DuPont in the US. Dupont’s unregulated, forever chemicals, used for Teflon coatings, contaminated a town in West Virginia with significant, widespread and fatal effects to animals and humans.   

Bentham has the highest concentration of forever chemicals in the UK, its groundwater recording over 55,000 times the government’s quality standard for a forever chemical. The Bentham fight has so far grabbed media attention but locals want justice.

A critical concept in environmental justice is “cumulative impact” – when a community suffers the effects of multiple stressors, the totality of exposures (contemporary and throughout a person’s lifetime) should be taken into account. 

Centric Lab’s Camargo says: “The specific challenges to the health of people in Southall, such as overcrowding, stress and poverty, should have been evaluated before introducing a major new source of air pollution”. He adds that these areas should not be “sacrifice zones” for economic development. 

You can fine someone for dropping litter on the pavement but it’s harder if they release it to the air. This lack of agency for a community to report environmental pollution exacerbates health conditions, and places further stress on Southall’s marginalised community, who already experience insecurity and structural deprivation. 

Community susceptibility is fundamentally overlooked within the planning process’s standard health impact assessments (HIA) and environmental impact assessments. These determine blanket “safe levels” that don’t address the issue of specific community susceptibility; for instance, certain communities might have a multigenerational, lower physiological threshold to pollution and its negative health impacts.  

“We felt that the HIA was a process being performed, delivered, and regulated behind closed doors without any input from the very people it will impact,” says Centric Lab, which worked with Southall and 10 other communities to create Community Health Impact Assessments (CHIAs). These help community groups explore the factors that drive health outcomes to create better policy for what the local community needs, beyond housing, for health. 

A group in Lewisham has used its CHIA to demonstrate to its local planning authority that health inequities for local racialised communities were not considered in the local plan, and policy amendments are now being made.  

“The solution towards what it is like to live around regeneration and be healthy isn’t that we get a park at the end and there’s a new organic food store,” says Centric Lab’s Artus. “Sometimes it could be about being heard and being represented, having a small layer of genuine power and knowing you’re part of the equation. Any agency over your environment is a major condition towards your wellbeing.” 

Grant funding for local authorities to investigate and treat contaminated land was scaled back from 2010, and was completely withdrawn in England by 2017. Many councils are, therefore, unable or unwilling to support proactive implementation of Part 2A. 

NCLOG says: “In many areas, only the worst or most obvious contaminated land sites are now being addressed. The issues [in the BBC investigation] are symptomatic of years of underfunding and deprioritisation of contaminated land work. A key first step would be to develop our understanding of the scale of contaminated land issues in the UK.”  

This is the same plea made by Zane’s Law, a campaign named after seven-year old Zane Gbangbola, who died of poisonous fumes from a nearby landfill after the River Thames flooded his family’s home in 2014. Landfill sites in flood-risk zones or eroded coastal areas present a huge risk to chemical spread. Zane’s Law calls for councils to keep a public register of all potentially contaminated sites. Critics say this would blight many homes in development but Gbangbola’s family speak of a government duty to protect people from harm.  

A case in point is Coppenhall Place, a 263-home development built in 2018 by Countryside Partnerships on the former Bombardier site in Crewe, Cheshire. After completion of the new homes it was discovered that the land had not been remediated properly so, in 2023, the local authority, Cheshire East Council, revoked planning permission. For two years, residents have lived in a state of insecurity and anxiety, unable to leave their homes for fear of something happening to their uninsured properties. In March of this year, the council finally re-awarded planning permission so that remediation can get underway.  

There is no doubt that regeneration is needed, but when high costs of remediation outweigh development value and long, unpredictable timescales deepen risk, many brownfield sites remain undevelopable. The government’s Brownfield Land Release Fund was boosted by £68 million in October 2024 to help local authorities with remediation efforts. But split across 54 councils, this headline-grabbing rise doesn’t stretch far, and the government needs to dig deeper to encourage private-public partnerships on privately owned sites.

Environment Analyst’s Brownfield Awards highlight projects such as The Avenue by Homes England in Chesterfield. Previously considered one of Europe’s most contaminated sites, it took 19 years for the site to be remediated at a cost of £180 million (the figure also includes infrastructure and site preparation). This site, among others, is celebrated for its logistical and technical feats. Other projects highlight critical new technologies for remediation, including bioremediation and phytoremediation. 

The fact that NCLOG is questioning local authority and Environment Agency abilities to address contamination lends credence to concerns by communities neighbouring a brownfield site. Just because developers have planning permission it doesn’t mean they will remediate a site in the best way possible. The community cost must also be factored in, and some studies suggest it may not always be better to intervene and remediate rather than leave a site as it is.

Because remediation must be done properly: in the community interest, using a CHIA thoroughly from start to finish and employing the best technology. 

A US podcast Breaking Ground follows “toxic tours” given by locals in North Carolina so that people who don’t live there can visit to see, smell and hear what it means to be neighbours with industries that threaten health and wellbeing every day. Taking policymakers and developers on similar tours in the UK might be a start, preventing decades of further disputes and blockbuster TV dramas to call people to arms. 

NCLOG admits: “Without a central government-driven reprioritisation of land contamination assessment, it is highly unlikely that the legacy issues raised by BBC Wales Investigates [“Britain’s Toxic Secret”] and Netflix [Toxic Town] will be addressed.” 

As for the property industry, Artus challenges professionals to consider their impact beyond environmental, social and economic metrics. “If you only use something like the indices of deprivation to determine whether there’s going to be positive human and social outcomes, but fail to recognise that you have an extractive economic model, you are only going to further entrench inequities,” he says, “which is why we see billions of pounds of regeneration, yet the Gini coefficient [a measure of inequality] continues to rise as more children fall below the poverty line.  

“Real estate is a powerful but blunt instrument that exposes and widens the cracks in systems. When it doesn’t look at those cracks, it can become the active agent in social inequity.”  

Harriet Saddington is a writer and architect with a background degree in architectural history who works with architecture practices and developers with a focus on social impact