I am delighted to have been asked to write the foreword for this year’s Land Remediation Yearbook and to bring you up to date with Government thinking in this vital area.
The land-remediation sector has been growing strongly over the last few years. One recent estimate found that the industry may be worth £1bn per annum, and that it is expected to grow by perhaps four per cent per year for the next few years.

A major driver now and in the future is the Government’s plans to build three million new homes. The re-use of brownfield land lies at the heart of this policy, and the Government recently endorsed English Partnerships’ recommendations on the National Brownfield Strategy.
Better use of brownfield land underpins our ambitions to revitalise major towns and cities, and bring about more sustainable patterns of development. It will help preserve the countryside by reducing urban sprawl, and help ensure that neglected land is brought back into productive use, supporting new homes and jobs. As the work by English Partnerships has shown, it is also possible to develop brownfield land in ways which work with the grain of urban nature – preserving the often rare and valuable biodiversity to be found on brownfield sites, and avoiding redevelopment of areas of high flood risk.

In last year’s Yearbook I talked about our priorities for enabling the clean up of contaminated land. This year, I want to highlight the major steps being taken to improve our environmental permitting and some of the ways in which modernising regulation can be an all-round winner.
2008 will see the implementation of the Environmental Permitting Regulations (EPR). These will replace the Waste Management Licensing Regulations and Pollution Prevention Control Regulations with a single regulatory regime. We see EPR, which came into force on 6 April 2008, as a crucial step in cutting red tape, enabling us to improve the service we offer to our business customers. It is also a crucial first step in building a platform for all future environmental regulation. The good news is that existing licences or permits automatically become environmental (EPR) permits with no need to re-apply.

This single EPR system will reduce the amount of documentation and guidance that operators need to read and comply with. We have completely overhauled our permitting guidance. There will be shorter, more customer-friendly application forms, along with our one-stop-shop for applications through our national permitting service.