Part IIA system

This chapter is intended to provide an introduction to the Part IIA system and an analytical view of its key dimensions, placing it in the context of wider policy on land contamination issues. (It does not provide a detailed, narrative description of the provisions of the Part IIA system—the system is described in detail in the circular published at the time the system came into force by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR).2)... 

The particular role of the Part IIA system is to ensure that land is suitable for use in the context of its current use and setting. Previous statutory regimes have been in place for similar purposes—most noticeably and recently, the anti-pollution works provisions in the Water Resources Act 19914 and the statutory nuisance system in the Environmental Protection Act 1990.5 But following a policy review in 1993 and 1994,6 the then Government considered that a modern, specific contaminated land power was needed,7 and legislated accordingly in the Environment Act 1995. 

The most immediately apparent area where this concept of risk drives the Part IIA system is in the core definition of contaminated land, set out in Section 78A... 

Even within the Part IIA system there are opportunities for voluntary action to replace formal enforcement action. There is, in particular, a requirement for enforcing authorities to consult those who will have to pay for remediation before serving any remediation notice. This consultation process is intended not only to enable technical issues to be resolved before there is any need to invoke formal appeals procedures, but also to give landowners and others the opportunity to... 

Where the Part IIA system also stands out from other environmental regimes is in its reliance on statutory guidance and, in particular, in its use of guidance with which authorities are required to act in accordance . As a legal tool, statutory guidance has been described as providing a structure for the exercise of statutory discretion. 

The notion of managing environmental risk lies at the heart of Part IIA. The overall risk-based nature of the system implies that it is anticipatory (it does not have to wait for the actual manifestation of harm) and that it is not arbitrary in its approach (for example, by focussing regulatory action solely on particular past land uses or at some particularly point in time, such as when the land is being sold). But the concept of risk, and risk management, permeates throughout Part IIA—in the detailed text, in the overall process, and in the choices that are made in the system. 

As pointed out in Section IIB, it is possible to approach the lattice dynamics problem of a molecular crystal by choosing the cartesian displacement coordinates of the atoms as dynamical variables (Pawley, 1967). In this case, all vibrational degrees of freedom of the system are included, i.e., translational and librational lattice modes (external modes) as well as intramolecular vibrations perturbed by the solid (internal modes). It is then obviously necessary to include all intermolecular and intramolecular interactions in the potential function O. For the intramolecular part a force field derived from a molecular normal coordinate analysis is used. The force constants in such a case are calculated from the measured vibrational frequencies, The intermolecular part of O is usually expressed as a sum of terms, each representing the interaction between a pair of atoms on different molecules, as discussed in Section IIA. 

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