The Part IIA System

There are four other legal documents which are also relevant to the implementation of Part IIA. These are all statutory instruments —that is, Parliamentary orders or sets of regulations. First, there were two routine commencement orders bringing the provisions of the primary legislation into effect. These are described in Annex 5 of DETR Circular 2/2000. Perhaps more interesting are the other two  

11 Pollution Prevention and Control (England and Wales) Regulations 2000, SI 2000/1973. 

Potential problems arising from land contamination have previously been addressed by UK law. For example, Section 161 of the Water Resources Act 1991 refers to situations where any poisonous, noxious or polluting matter or any solid waste matter is likely to enter. . . any controlled waters , which clearly includes the sense of one type of land contamination problem. The concept of contaminated land has also been referred to in UK law—for example, the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1994 gave the Urban Regeneration Agency (which became known as English Partnerships) specific powers to fund the reclamation of derelict, contaminated or un-used land. But Part IIA contains the first definition of contaminated land in UK law. 

Other Approaches to Definition. There have been other working definitions in policy and practice, but specific legal definitions are of course only developed at the point at which a definition is needed to drive some particular statutory process. The definition will then be focussed on the particular needs of that process. The Part IIA contaminated land definition is quite deliberately restricted to the categories of site that Part IIA is intended to deal with—that is, sites that are currently presenting unacceptable risks to human health and the wider environment. The definition describes land where the contamination is not just present, but where it is, or could be, causing a particular problem. 

The definition does not cover all land that contains some degree of contamination, which might be the man on the street s definition of contaminated land it also does not include all land that would fall within many of the technical descriptions of contaminated land, such as that proposed by the NATO Committee on Challenges to Modern Society (CCMS) pilot study on innovative remedial technologies. The general description land affected by contamination has been used by DETR and now others to put a name to the wider categories of land which are dealt with in UK policy or legislation in different ways. 

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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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