UK Land Searches Don't Tell The Full Story

With the UK governments increasing demands on Local Authorities to use every available piece of land available for housing you would think that every effort would be made to inform prospective purchasers exactly what they are letting themselves in for. Unfortunately that isn’t the case. The proposed Home Buyers Packs appear to be heading for the bottom of a Whitehall filing cabinet leaving many people relying on their solicitors to ask the right questions before they make one of the biggest decisions of their lives. The normal approach is to send a land search round a number of offices in the Local Authority to make sure nothing major is going on. In terms of Brownfield development that process can be extremely misleading.

Standard questions covering Contaminated Land ask for any statutory action which has been taken by the Local Authority using their powers under Part IIa Environmental Protection Act. In reality since that scheme came into place in 2001 Local Authority Officers have been swamped by applications under development control as the rush to build on any free space continues unabated. This may have resulted in millions of pounds of remediation work being carried out but it also means a standard land search may not tell the whole story. Work done to comply with a relevant Planning Condition or voluntarily does not have to be declared leaving an incomplete picture of what may have happened underneath your dream home.

As with anything else remediation works must be undertaken to the appropriate standard the current land search procedure gives you no way of checking that. A lack of UK Guidelines for many substances also means that Local Authorities are left with the problem of deciding exactly what is safe. Another potential issue is created not by developments on Brownfield sites but what the adjoining land is being used for. Unless solicitors ask the right questions new build properties next to existing landfill sites will get a misleadingly clean bill of health.

Currently the Government don’t seem inclined to close this particular loop hole relying instead on solicitors to make sure they ask the right questions. The Law Society (www.lawsociety.org.uk) have produced a warning card which is intended to inform its members about the possible problems that can result. As it says in its first line "this is not intended to be a professional requirement".

So what can prospective purchasers do to safeguard their investment? The first thing is not to accept a land search as their only means of information on possible contaminated land issues. Contact with the local authority asking them about previous uses on the site and the surrounding area is something else that may reveal some interesting information. Then it is down to reminding solicitors about the Law Society guidance and the need in many cases to use additional questions to get the full picture.

You cannot help but think a requirement to provide this information prior to sale would let everyone know where they stand. Cynically though that would certainly slow down the rate of Brownfield development and in the present climate that is the last thing the Government and hard pushed Local Authorities want.