The government has drastically cut funds needed to encourage new building on “brownfield” sites, despite claiming that such sites would be key to solving the housing crisis.



Many sites that have previously held buildings or other developments need remediation – a process to remove potentially dangerous toxins from the soil – in order to be considered for new houses, of which the government plans to build hundreds of thousands a year to ease the pressure on the UK’s over-stretched stock.



At least 300,000 hectares (741,000 acres) of contaminated land have been identified, according to a report from an influential committee of MPs. Many of these sites could be used for housing, farmland, industry or other developments, which could both ease the housing crisis and reduce the need to claim more of the UK’s diminishing stock of “green belt” or agricultural land for building.



Doing so would require work to remove remaining toxins from the soil, which is technically feasible but carries a cost. To date, that cost has often been borne by the government and local authorities, but the MPs on the environmental audit committee found that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had drastically cut its funding for remediation, and is planning to phase it out in 2017.

This would discourage developers from planning new building in areas of housing shortage, particularly those in poor areas, the committee heard from experts. In richer areas, hopeful developers frequently pay for decontamination themselves, but in poor districts they rely on the council or central government to do so in order to render the site suitable.

Mary Creagh, the Labour MP who chairs the committee, told the Guardian: “If your main concern is brownfield sites for housebuilding then this is very problematic. It’s a very worrying decision.”

There are also implications for public health in failing to clear up contaminated sites, the committee concluded in its report on Thursday. Pollutants such as arsenic, cadmium and lead, asbestos and tar, are the legacies of the UK’s industrial past and decades of dumping, and can affect the health of people living near such contaminated sites.

“Society relies on healthy soil for the food we eat, for flood prevention, and for storing carbon,” said Creagh. “The government says it wants our soil to be managed sustainably by 2030, but there is no evidence that it is putting in place the policies to make this happen.”

Defra has reduced its funding for such remediation from £17.5m in 2009-10 to just £2m in 2013-14. The department said funding would drop further to £500,000 in 2014 and then phased out from 2017.

Current funding is enough to decontaminate only a few major sites a year, in practice. For instance, a single project in Wakefield required funding of almost £400,000 in 2013-14, the committee found.

Without this funding, councils are less likely to investigate potential contamination – and its attendant public health risks – and local residents could be put to harm. People who buy new homes in areas of contaminated land may not be warned of the risks, and if they emerge later they might find their houses difficult to sell.

Howard Price, principal policy officer at the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH), told the committee’s hearings he had heard of local authority sites where officials had been told not to investigate potential contamination, for fear of the cost consequences.

Dr Karen Johnson of Durham University added: “There is a stigma associated as well. It affects house prices if you live next to a piece of land that is contaminated. Then it is going to affect your health and wellbeing because it affects your mental health because house prices are affected.”

Untreated contamination may harm public health and water quality, the committee was told, with research finding a statistically significant relationship between soil contamination and poor health.

The committee accused Defra of complacency over its withdrawal of funding for remediation, and said that it could undermine the ability of local authorities to meet their statutory duties to safeguard their local environment.

Beyond the specifically contaminated sites, poor soil health leads to increased carbon dioxide emissions and greater problems for agriculture, the committee also noted.

Why soil matters

Soil is a key component in the world’s greenhouse gas systems, though often overlooked. It absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making it one of the world’s biggest stores of carbon dioxide, along with the oceans and the world’s forests. About a fifth of the world’s man-made carbon is held in soils. However, few of the international efforts to combat climate change have highlighted the importance of soil.

Last year, at the landmark climate summit in Paris, governments agreed to increase the storage of carbon in the world’s soils, through methods such as improved agricultural technologies and preserving soil from contamination.

Willie Towers from the James Hutton Institute, an international research centre based in Scotland, gave evidence to the environmental audit committee’s soil health report. He said: “Soil is a hidden part of the environment and I think the public and possibly the political perception of soil is it is out of sight, out of mind. [Soil] is a real key element of the ecosystem and sadly it has been neglected.”

He added: “If significant amounts of soil carbon continue to be lost into the atmosphere then this will make it harder and more expensive to keep temperature increases well under 2C [above pre-industrial levels] as set out in the Paris agreement. Every tonne of carbon maintained in soil gives greater flexibility to the rest of the economy in meeting our carbon budgets.”

A spokeswoman for Defra said: “The health of our soils is vital to the food we eat, the air we breathe and to our precious habitats and our 25-year plan for action on the environment will set out a comprehensive, long-term vision to protect and enhance our natural environment for generations to come. The national planning policy framework sets out clear requirements for new housing developments facing land contamination to be cleared up.”



