Unlocking the potential of Brownfield land

The role of Brownfield land is playing an increasingly important part in the Government's housing agenda - as Jane Forshaw, Head of Environmental Policy at English Partnerships, explains

In March this year, we, as the national regeneration agency and Government’s advisor on Brownfield land, were given the green light by Government to forge ahead with implementing our recommended proposals for the first ever National Brownfield Strategy for England. This  includes how best to identify, assess and prepare Brownfield for hard and soft regeneration purposes.

The Strategy is firmly rooted in Government’s commitments to building 60 percent of new homes on Brownfield land over the coming years - as clearly outlined in the Housing Green Paper this July. In other words, this means finding space for 1.8m homes by 2020 on Brownfield land.  As a result, our mandate - shortly to be subsumed into the new Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) - will be to work even closer with Local Authorities and relevant regional bodies, to facilitate delivery of this challenging agenda.

The Homes and Communities Agency, due to begin operating in December 2008, will bring together English Partnerships, the investment functions of the  Housing Corporation, the Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC) and some delivery functions of Communities and Local Government (CLG). A key priority for the Agency will be to focus on growth, renewal, affordability and sustainability at both national and local level. This integrated approach will enable the HCA to create and regenerate places where people want, and can afford, to live, as well as meeting the needs of individual areas.  

The growing importance of local partnership working was stressed in the Housing Green Paper, and is reflected in not only our national Brownfield Programme work, but also the wider business operations of English Partnerships. For instance, we are currently working to formulate Local Brownfield Strategies - in collaboration with 35 pilot Local Authorities by March 2009, as the first phase of work to identify Brownfield land for hard and soft end uses including housing and public open spaces. These participating authorities have been identified on the basis of several criteria including the scale of known Brownfield land, areas of social need identified via deprivation indices, and eligibility for national regeneration programmes. Such accurate spatial intelligence will also play an important part in maintaining synergies with other related areas of our business, including the National Coalfields Programme, the Hospital Sites Programme, and the wider Surplus Public Sector Land remit.

A key objective of Local Brownfield Strategies is to better understand the extent of local Brownfield land, its potential to contribute to the achievement of local development and regeneration aspirations, and the nature of the practical issues that conspire to prevent its early re-use. As such, we envisage that all the partner agencies involved in Local Brownfield Strategies will be better informed when setting future targets for their intervention in Brownfield land. Our aim is to see this pilot implementation plan rolled out across many other Local Authorities.

We have also been given the task of recording the National Land Use Database (NLUD), which asks for an annual return from Local Authorities on five different categories of former land use. Over the last decade, NLUD has been an important part in the process of measuring a Local Authority’s performance by central Government in terms of regeneration, and in future will play a greater role in unlocking Brownfield land that might be available for housing and other redevelopment purposes. 

Of course, experience has shown that it’s not just about building new homes, it’s about creating sustainable communities. Our job, as one of the key strands of the National Brownfield Strategy highlights, is to determine the best use for sites available, and ensure that our land is used for a wide variety of  functions; whether creating business space - such as at Northstowe in Cambridgeshire or via our work with Network Space; community facilities - the O2 on Greenwich Peninsula, and Kings Waterfront in Liverpool for instance; or public open space - including Connaught Barracks in Dover and Middlehaven in Middlesborough.

Through our work with partners such as the Land Restoration Trust (LRT), and CLG and Treasury, we have developed a model whereby green space can be managed and maintained in perpetuity. Thanks to this process, many of the former coalfield sites in our National Coalfields Programme - such as Bentley, Brodsworth, Dinnington, Cronton and Shirebrook collieries - have incorporated large public open spaces such as landscaped country parks, with cycle paths, bridleways and wetlands.

In tandem with wider Government environmental policy objectives, we are addressing issues such as no net loss of biodiversity by 2010 and no construction of homes within Flood Zone Three. In this context, it may be important to consider other uses for Brownfield land. These sites can, for instance, play an important role in supporting biodiversity and, thinking laterally in the drive to reduce carbon emissions, we are considering how such sites could be used to grow biomass as a renewable fuel source or as the location for wind turbines.

We also continue to work with our partner CL:AIRE (Contaminated Land: Applications in Real Environments), a charity dedicated to land remediation and decontamination solutions. Through discussion and international forums, such as the recently established Sustainable Remediation Forum (SURF) - issues around climate change are becoming increasingly important when utilising energy to clean up Brownfield land for re-use. SURF is looking at creating a decision support tool that will allow for the carbon impacts of remediation technology to be considered when choosing remediation systems. Where you have large sites to be decontaminated, it is possible to use more environmentally friendly techniques such as bioremediation, which can take place over a longer period of time and release fewer CO2 emissions than other comparable treatments.

In short, there are interesting times ahead. We are continuing to work with CLG and our partners to encourage coordinated activity on shared learning and challenging stakeholders to deliver good policy and practice. The first ever National Brownfield Strategy for England has laid the foundations for this, and, by unlocking the supply of land, building partnerships, providing access to funding and expertise, and setting standards, will play a key role in the HCA in helping deliver communities that will stand the test of time.



Key strands of the National Brownfield Strategy:

To identify, assess and prepare Brownfield land for re-use, thereby ensuring an adequate supply of land when it is needed;
To safeguard the environment, which includes streamlining regulations, biodiversity options, and flood risk mitigation;
Enhancing communities - covering issues such as removal of blight and ensuring the long term maintenance of restored land;
Accreditation and skills - the lead for this is partner organisation the ASC, who have put forward proposals for a national Brownfield Skills Strategy.