identification of skills requirements for delivery of...

SP1003 Identification of Skills Requirements for Delivery of Contaminated Land Policy

of 48 SP1003 Skills for contaminated land management

Identification of Skills Requirements for Delivery of Contaminated Land Policy

Contractor Organisation: University of Nottingham School of Geography Nottingham NG7 2RD Author: C Paul NATHANAIL ([email protected])

Total Defra Project Costs: £23,865 (agreed fixed price)

Defra Project Code: SP1003



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to acknowledge: Those who were interviewed for this project.

Dr Matthew Ashmore (University of Nottingham) for transcribing the interviews.

Judith Nathanail (Land Quality Management Ltd) for helpful comments on the text.

Dr Claire Hill and David Devaney (Defra) for their helpful review of drafts of this report.



IDENTIFICATION OF SKILLS REQUIREMENTS FOR DELIVERY OF CONTAMINATED LAND POLICY Executive summary Contaminated land is a major externality we have inherited from past industrial practices. The UK contaminated land policy has evolved over the past five decades into a proportional, effective, cost efficient, mature and world leading policy that has much to teach countries only now developing their own policies and practices: prevent new pollution, deal with historic contamination in a systematic manner, prioritising action, ensuring polluters pay and innocent citizens are protected.

Contaminated land management is a complex, multi-disciplinary process with inherent uncertainty due to both natural variation in time and space and the current limits of our knowledge. The effective contaminated land manager cannot hope to be a polymath but ought to seek to minimise ‘pidgin’ and cant while aspiring to be a polyglot: able to understand and make sense of the contributions of a significant number of discipline specialists such as geologists, chemists, lawyers and toxicologists.

The skills a local authority under Part 2A and a developer under the planning regime need are similar. The skills needed to effectively deliver UK contaminated land policy span diverse fields of human endeavour including science, engineering, humanities and mathematics:

Geology, geography, chemistry and toxicology underpin risk estimation. Process, civil, chemical, mechanical, electrical and environmental engineering

underpin process based and conventional remediation technologies. Environmental and social history, industrial archaeology inform desk studies. Data analysis, geo- and classical statistics, geometry inform risk estimation and

remediation design.

At the present time there is little if any under supply of people (capacity) however there is a possibly growing under supply of expertise (capability) within the contaminated land sector. The supply-demand capacity ratio has changed dramatically between 2010 and 2012 and may be a short lived situation. However this allows an opportunity to ensure that the capability of sector practitioners is at the level needed as demand recovers. The past decade has seen regulators and land owners catch up and in many cases overtake many consultants. What was acceptable then is no longer so today.

The need for ‘polyglot’ contaminated land managers remains acute. The nearest mechanism for demonstrating such competence is being on the Specialist in Land Condition Register or for engineers and geologists being on the Register of Engineering Professionals. In addition specialists in detailed quantitative human health risk assessment and comprehensive remediation options appraisal as well as suitably certified and recognised field operatives would deliver significant benefits to UK plc. There is no shortage in training and education provision of various levels and duration – from the one hour infomercial to full blown post graduate degrees, from day long face to face training to online programmes. However the ability to fund such training provision is increasingly limited. Self-help peer-to-peer networks, societies and professional body special groups offer low cost opportunities of awareness raising and limited development of understanding but do not go far enough into the skills development domain.

Although perhaps not widely acknowledged, Defra and the Environment Agency have provided the sector with a large quantity of technical guidance to support the implementation of contaminated land policy. In recent years this has been widely and often freely available on their websites. The guidance often distils disperse knowledge and puts it into a UK policy context. The benefits to UK plc of this body of guidance in terms of consistency and avoidance of duplication of effort is significant and represents a huge return on the investment made to produce it.



Sector led initiatives have complemented the public sector guidance and plugged long standing gaps, notably in the generation of generic assessment criteria for human health risk assessment.

The sector has responded to new developments and less central skills development provision in a variety of ways. From the early days of Nottingham’s vocational Masters in Contaminated Land Management through CIRIA’s, CIEH EMAQ’s and LQM’s online provision and ESI, Atkins and LQM’s face-to-face delivery, there is plenty of evidence that there are those within the sector who realise the importance of offering training, even if there is only limited take up of some of these opportunities.

Defra’s recent practice of focusing its effort on consultation-informed policy formulation and international promotion of UK policy and practice is welcome. Their endorsement of the principle of sector led technical guidance to inform policy implementation will help speed up the development and uptake of guidance at little or no cost to the national purse. Continuing the recent trend in making publically funded research or contract work publically accessible would also be welcome. Whether or not the EU draft Soil Framework Directive becomes law, Defra should encourage the Specialist in Land Condition (SILC) Register and the Register of Ground Engineering Professionals (RoGEP) to develop both in membership and in their ability to act as an indicator of adequate competence in the technical aspects of implementing contaminated land policy.

Recent suggestions of self-regulation presume a robust mechanism of ensuring professional services in land condition. The SiLC Register could quickly evolve into such a mechanism.

Public procurement of contaminated land services should ensure the public sector remains able to benefit from the expertise and speciality of SMEs as well as the capacity of larger organisations.

The work carried out by consultants with public funds should be widely available to encourage and promote good practice and to allow poor practice to be recognised and thereby avoided in future. This will also help address a widespread but not ubiquitous failure in accountability of practitioners, something that has been encountered as a recurring theme during this research project.

Defra’s continued contribution to knowledge exchange and dissemination events should be encouraged and recognised as an opportunity for Defra to receive feedback as well as make sure its policy message is correctly transmitted.

The efforts of the private sector to promote and improve skills should be fostered and encouraged by the public sector where possible.

An online, community or private sector collaboratively updated website (‘wiki’) would be one way of ensuring the large volume of technical guidance reflects the latest science and policy.



TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 7 1.1 Contaminated land management in the United Kingdom .................................................... 7 1.2 Contaminated land policy ........................................................................................... 10 1.3 Profession-Job-Occupation-Skill ................................................................................... 11 1.4 Aim and objectives .................................................................................................... 13 1.5 Contaminated land management: A multi-disciplinary process ......................................... 14 1.6 Contaminated land management: A professional service ................................................. 16 1.7 The Role of the Conceptual Site Model .......................................................................... 18 1.8 Key Skills in contaminated land management ................................................................ 19 2.0 Roles and Expertise in Making and Supporting Decisions Under Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 ......................................................................................................... 20 3.0 Roles and Expertise in Making and Supporting Decisions under the Planning Regime ........... 26 4.0 Assessment of the Skills Necessary to Deliver the Different Roles ..................................... 28 5.0 Assessment of the Current Availability of Skills within the Contaminated Land Sector .......... 30 6.0 Identification and prioritisation of any “skills-gaps” ......................................................... 34 6.1 Historical and Present Capacity in Filling “Skills Gaps” ..................................................... 37 7.0 Assessment of current and proposed initiatives to address industry “skills-gaps” ................. 39 8.0 Overall Implications for the Assessment of Contaminated Land ........................................ 42 8.1 Suggestions for Filling Skills Gaps ................................................................................ 43 References ..................................................................................................................... 45 List of tables Table 1 Terminology ........................................................................................................ 11 Table 2 Skill levels defined ............................................................................................... 12 Table 3 Words and phrases coded in interview transcripts ..................................................... 14 Table 4 Professional body requirements for chartered status (Modified from Hamer, 2008) ........ 17 Table 5 Professional body members of the SiLC Register Professional and Technical Panel ......... 18 Table 6 Conceptual site models in contaminated land management ........................................ 19 Table 7 Key technical and generic skills identified by the ASC in the contaminated land job market (ASC& EP, 2008) ............................................................................................................ 19 Table 8 Roles involved in making and supporting contaminated land decisions under Part 2A ..... 21 Table 9 Discipline-specific expertise involved in making and supporting decisions under Part 2A . 22 Table 10 Expertise involved in making and supporting decisions under Part 2A ........................ 23 Table 11 Roles involved in making and supporting contaminated land decisions under the Planning regime .......................................................................................................................... 26 Table 12 Reasons for unsatisfactory reports submitted under planning regime (based on ASC & EP, 2008b) .......................................................................................................................... 30 Table 13 General contaminated land management skills issues identified by ASC & EP (2008b): A progress check ............................................................................................................... 31 Table 14 Estimated magnitude of the skill base required for Part 2A across the 353 English Local Authorities ..................................................................................................................... 32 Table 15 Example Continuous Professional Development (CPD) Activities (Modified from Hamer, 2008)............................................................................................................................ 39 List of figures Figure 1 Academy of Sustainable Communities forecast of labour shortages as percentage of supply in the brownfield workforce by profession in 2012 (Turner, 2008) ................................ 12 Figure 2 Multi-disciplinarity of contaminated land management ............................................. 15 Appendices Appendix 1 Inventory of skills for contaminated land inspection, assessment and remediation Appendix 2 Wordles of interview transcripts



Abbreviations ASC Academy of Sustainable

Communities (now part of the HCA)

BF Brownfield

BSI British Standards Institute

CABERNET Concerted Action for Brownfield and Economic Regeneration Network

CEN European Committee for Standardization

CIEH Chartered Institute of Environmental Health

CIRIA Construction Industry Research and Information Association

CL:AIRE Contaminated Land: Applications in Real Environments

CLEA Contaminated Land Exposure Assessment

CLG (Department) of Communities and Local Government

CLM Contaminated land management

CLO Contaminated land officer

CNT Commission for New Towns

CPD Continuous Professional Development

CSM Conceptual Site Model

DBSS Draft Brownfield Skills Strategy

Defra Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

DETR Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions

DoE Department of the Environment

ELQF East Land Quality Forum

EP English Partnerships, now part of the HCA

HCA Homes and Communities Agency (merger of EP, ASC and CNT)

HCV Health criterion value

ICE Institution of Civil Engineers

ICI Imperial Chemicals Industries, now part of AkzoNobel

ICRCL Inter-Departmental Committee for the Redevelopment of Contaminated Land

ISO International Organisation for Standardization

LA Local Authority

LQM Land Quality Management Ltd

MNC Multinational Corporation

NPPF National Planning Policy Framework

PDL Previously Developed Land

PSA Public Service Agreement

SiLC Specialist in Land Condition

SNIFFER Scotland and Northern Ireland Forum for Environmental Research

SoBRA Society of Brownfield Risk Assessment

SPOSH Significant Possibility of Significant Harm

SPOSPOCW Significant Possibility of Significant Pollution of Controlled Waters

SSAC Site Specific Assessment Criterion

TDF Technical Development Framework

YAHPAC Yorkshire and Humberside Pollution Advisory Council



IDENTIFICATION OF SKILLS REQUIREMENTS FOR DELIVERY OF CONTAMINATED LAND POLICY

1.0 Introduction This report has been prepared to assist the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the contaminated land management sector identify and develop the skills necessary to deliver contaminated land policy. The report begins with a review of how contaminated land has been managed in the United Kingdom. The employment context of skills is then briefly reviewed. Roles and expertise needed to deliver contaminated land policy under the contaminated land regime (enshrined in Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 as amended) and the planning system (principally implemented through planning policy advice) are then discussed. An assessment of the quantity and quality of skills needed is then presented. Recent and current initiatives to develop technical skills in contaminated land management are considered. The report concludes with a set of suggestions for filling identified skills gaps. A list of the key technical skills identified is presented in an Appendix in a form suitable for use by individuals and their employers to inventory and manage individual and team skills capacity and capability. A major source of evidence for the report has been through semi structured interviews with stakeholders from a range of backgrounds. Wordles of the interview transcripts have been provided in an appendix. A WordleTM is a cloud of words in a text that emphasises those words that appear more frequently in that text.

1.1 Contaminated land management in the United Kingdom The UK has a long industrial history. Land contamination has been caused by ancient mining of lead and other metals in, for example, the Lake District and Cornwall. The UK often claims to have been the birthplace of the industrial revolution. The legacy of this history is not only socio-economic development but also environmental impact of industrial emissions and industrial waste disposal practices created. For example Newcastle’s Byker incinerator was built in 1896 and almost a century later was the focus of significant investigations of the impacts on human health of contaminated ash. Legislation began to recognise the need to protect human health and to a lesser extent the environment. For example the Public Health Act 1936 made provision to mitigate the impacts from old landfills among other hazards.

Redevelopment in the aftermath of the Second World War began to highlight constraints due to the health hazards posed by land contamination. This led to the formation in 1976 of the Inter-Departmental Committee for the Redevelopment of Contaminated Land (ICRCL) announced by a Department of the Environment (DoE) and Welsh Office circular in 1977 (Smith, 2005).

Guidance can go some way to “reduce the technical uncertainty which may be associated with identifying, assessing and, where necessary, dealing with unacceptable health and environmental risks” (DoE, 1997). ICRCL produced some of the earliest of a substantial body of guidance. One of ICRCL’s first technical notes (ICRCL Note 17/78 on Landfill Sites) warned of the difficulties of ensuring safe developments on gassing old landfills. The note was sent to every local authority and was widely publicised in the technical press at the time. Despite ICRCL’s advice, ground gas risks were tragically brought to the fore with the fatal explosion at the Abbeystead Pumping Station (1984) and the explosion at 51 Clarke Avenue, Loscoe (1986). These events triggered conferences and technical guidance from CIRIA. Specific guidance (Circular DOE 17/89) helped planning authorities consider ground gas issues. The opening of the Stockley Business Park near Heathrow (1986), however, showed that former waste disposal sites can be successfully reclaimed.

Land reuse is essential in a densely populated country such as the UK. In their 1979 Progress Report, the ICRCL correctly predicted there would be ‘increased pressure to redevelop old industrial sites for housing, schools or amenity purposes’. The planning

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UK policy and the introduction of the contaminated land regime in s.57 of the Environment Act 1995. This regime was inserted as Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and came into effect in 2000 (England and Scotland) and 2001 (Wales) and most recently updated in England and Wales in 2012.

Voluntary site investigations begun in 1993 by ICI revealed high concentrations of hexachlorobutadiene initially beneath (1999) and later inside (2000) private homes near its Weston Quarries site in Cheshire. ICI’s proactive public communication and resident compensation response to this is still seen as an example of risk communication and risk mitigation (NICOLE, 2004). ICI’s approach to land contamination informed emerging technical guidance from the then Department of the Environment.

The publication in 2000 of the SNIFFER method for deriving site specific assessment criteria was both the late Colin Ferguson’s final, and posthumous, piece of work and an early sign of the sector developing its own solutions to sector challenges. Two years later the CLEA model developed by Colin and his team was published in conjunction with a series of soil guideline value and toxicological reports on key soil contaminants. A year later, an updated version of the SNIFFER method allowed site specific estimates of bioavailability to inform site specific assessment criteria (SNIFFER, 2003).

The early days of implementing the contaminated land regime can be characterised as the local authorities and their advisors adopting a cautious precautionary approach to risk evaluation. Despite LQM considering oral bioaccessibility, 109 properties in east Manchester were determined as contaminated land in 2003 and subsequently remediated (ENDS, 2005; Manchester City Council, 2004). Three years later LQM invoked bioaccessibility and sequential extraction tests to inform a detailed quantitative risk assessment to show that some 900 properties in east London did not need to be determined as contaminated land. The flexibility Part 2A offers Local Authorities was exemplified in 2006 when ground gas was invoked by Vale Royal Borough Council to determine and remediate properties where two deaths from rare forms of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia could not be specifically linked to land contamination (Stewart et al. 2010; Vale Royal Borough Council et al. 2006). Elsewhere high soil cadmium concentrations had led to a series of detailed geochemical investigations that eventually concluded that “No clear evidence of health effects from possible exposure to cadmium in Shipham was found despite the extremely high concentrations of cadmium in the soil” (Elliott et al. 2000).

The skills needed to deliver contaminated land policy have been developed in the local authorities by initiatives from Defra (and its predecessor departments), the Environment Agency and the CIEH with input from private sector specialists. Private and university sector provision has been instrumental in augmenting local authority skills and developing the private sector’s capability.

A review of the skills needed to deliver brownfield regeneration, which was initiated by the Academy of Sustainable Communities (ASC) and which resulted in a draft brownfield skills strategy (ASC & EP, 2008a), was based on a considerable body of evidence (ASC & EP, 2008a). As discussed later, this review only partially considered contaminated land skills and seems to have greatly overestimated the scale of skills shortages.

Sector led initiatives using technical guidance on human health risk assessment from the Environment Agency to develop generic assessment criteria for which there were no soil guideline values were pioneered in 2007 by LQM and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH), expanded in 2009 by LQM and CIEH and complemented by a slightly later initiative under the auspices of the EIC AGS and CL:AIRE. More recently, the programme of SGV development having ended, Defra commissioned research on a methodology for deriving the Category 4 Screening Levels (C4SLs).

Legal challenges to regulatory decisions have been helpful in refining the sector’s understanding of the Part 2A regime. Key cases (e.g. R. (on the application of National Grid Gas plc (formerly Transco plc)) v. Environment Agency [2007] UKHL 30) have



confirmed determinations of contaminated land and refined our understanding of who is liable for the remediation. The Local Government Ombudsman (White 2008) found maladministration by East Cambridgeshire as a result of not taking into account Government advice and guidance on planning (Box 2).

Box 2 Local authority maladministration (Local Government Ombudsman 2008)

“I issued one report during the year [2007-8] on an investigation into four complaints. All concerned the processing of a planning application for a development on land which was formerly part of a gasworks. I criticised the Council for failing to consider whether a condition should have been imposed on the planning approval to require a soil survey and remediation. I also criticised it for failing to take into account Government advice and guidance on dealing with applications for development on contaminated land. The result of that failure was that contamination of the site was not identified prior to the development commencing and the four complainants now own properties which are based on land classed as contaminated land. In addition to significant sums committed by the Council to remediate the contaminated land properties the Council also agreed to pay each complainant £5,000 and to carry out remediation of their gardens at no cost to them.”

Challenges under common law (The Claimants appearing on the Register of the Corby Group Litigation and Corby District Council [2009] EWHC 1944 (TCC)) have also been important in raising awareness of the need for high standards and for better informed decision making.

The Part 2A regime was amended in 2012 with the publication of revised statutory guidance (Defra 2012) that allowed the changes to the definition of contaminated land introduced by the Water Act 2003 to come into effect. The Statutory Guidance also introduced more detailed guidance on the definition of significant possibility of significant harm (SPOSH) and of significant possibility of significant pollution of controlled waters (SPOPOCW). Four categories of land and water were defined whereby categories 1 and 2 meet the definition of contaminated land in Part 2A.

1.2 Contaminated land policy Contaminated land policy centres around the prevention, identification and removal of elevated risks to human health, the environment and property arising from manmade and, under certain legal regimes, natural chemicals. Different legal regimes require intervention at different levels of risk. A given level of estimated risk could result in different evaluations under different legal regimes. This is a central starting point to any consideration of the implementation of contaminated land policy.

Pollution prevention is the starting point of the UK policy on contaminated land. It has also been the subject of much recent EU legislation which is still in the process of being transposed into national law. However this report focuses on the policy pertaining to the management of risks arising from historic contamination.

Land use management policy in England has long recognised the role of reusing formerly used land in delivering sustainable communities and reducing the consumption of Greenfield sites. England has a long history of reusing derelict and underused land, some of which was affected by contamination to the extent that development was constrained by that contamination.

Box 3 The Brownfield nomenclatural quagmire (ASC & EP, 2008b, p 5)

Many define brownfield land solely as “problem” sites that are derelict and unused, with the connotation being that the land has no form of productive use. However, by others this is seen as too narrow preferring the definition of brownfield land to include any form of development on previously developed land whether or not it is currently in use. Many organisations, documents and individuals make a direct association and connotation between brownfield and contaminated land. It is apparent that “brownfield” is commonly used as shorthand for land affected by contamination. Others argue that this is not the case as greenfield land can also have contamination issues. Others associate brownfield land with the term “regeneration” with an implied assumption that this encompasses the wider significance of sustainable brownfield development. In contrast, there are those that believe that regeneration has a connotation of redressing a deficit but does not encompass all the breadth of a growth agenda.

More recently, under the last Labour government, English land use policy centred on achieving a target of at least 60% of new housing being built on previously developed



land (PDL), which the government referred to as brownfield land (Boxes 3&4) . The incoming coalition government very quickly abandoned the target and, following from parliamentary debates on ‘garden grabbing’, changed the definition of PDL in Planning Policy Statement PPS 3 (CLG, 2010 & 2011a) to exclude “built-up areas such as private residential gardens, parks, recreation grounds and allotments, which, although it may feature paths, pavilions and other buildings, has not been previously developed”. PPS 3 also removed a minimum dwelling density target. These changes were made as early moves towards ‘localism’. The National Planning Policy Framework (CLG 2012) replaced PPS 23. Among the 12 core land-use planning principles that should underpin both plan-making and decision-taking is to “encourage the effective use of land by reusing land that has been previously developed (brownfield land), provided that it is not of high environmental value” (CLG 2012, p. 5). It is important to note that brownfield has different meanings in the USA, Europe and internationally (Millar et al., 2006; Tang & Nathanail, 2012). Indeed the Academy of Sustainable Communities (ASC & EP, 2008b) recognised a plethora of uses of the term (Box 3). The term brownfield is therefore avoided in this document unless it has been used in a direct quote.

Box 4 Brownfield sites (From ODPM Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee 2003)

30. In 1998 DETR had a 1998 PSA target to "seek to ensure that over the next 10 years, 60% of new homes are built on previously developed land," (superceded in 2000 by a target that "by 2008, 60% of new housing should be provided on previously developed land and through conversion of existing building"[74]). In May 2002, DTLR announced that 61% of new houses had been built on brownfield land in 2001.[75] We welcome the progress that has been made with the achievement of 61% of new dwellings on brownfield land in 2001. The Minister said that such a proportion will prove more challenging as levels of housebuilding increase.[76] We welcome the Minister's commitment that he is prepared to make tough decisions to eliminate the unnecessary use of greenfield land for housebuilding.[77]

31. The 60% brownfield land PSA target has become very well known amongst practitioners[78] and is used to focus the efforts of a number of agencies-such as the Regional Development Agencies. Following the 2002 Spending Review, this target is to be relegated to the lower order Service Delivery Agreement. One of the Department's targets is clearly to reduce the number of targets.[79] Indeed they have been very successful at this-moving from 49 PSA targets for ODPM activities[80] in 1998,[81] to 25 in 2000[82] to seven in 2002. This desire to reduce the number of targets has meant that priorities and key services have been omitted from the PSA target list and well-known targets such as 60% of new housing built on brownfield sites have been relegated to subsidiary status.

NB [references are cited in the original document]

1.3 Profession-Job-Occupation-Skill The nomenclature of an individual’s activity and attitude is important when analysing the skills requirements for delivering contaminated land policy (Table 1). Someone’s profession rarely changes yet their job may change every few years while their occupation may vary daily. Their skills should deepen and may well broaden with time and experience. Whether it is by formal training, learning ‘on the job’ or some other means, skill levels can deepen from mere awareness or understanding into the ability to do something, supervise others doing it or indeed developing novel ways of doing something (Table 2). Different levels of skill are needed by an individual in a specific job or occupation.

Table 1 Terminology

Title Examples

Profession Chemist; Engineer; Environmental Health Officer; Geologist; Surveyor

Job Contaminated land officer; contaminated land consultant.

Occupation Desk studies, site investigation, environmental monitoring, report writing.

Skill Computer use, legislation knowledge, specific equipment uses, scientific writing.

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Since 2008, many staff employed in contaminated land consultancy have been made redundant or re-assigned to other environmental sectors, particularly carbon management. A 2009 survey of Environmental Professionals reported that “the scale of job losses has been partially mitigated by short-time working, pay cuts, wage restraint or pay review deferrals” (ENDS, 2009). Whereas the ASC & EP reported that experienced staff were in demand in 2008, the last couple of years have seen a growth in experienced and formerly long standing contaminated land professionals setting up as independent consultants.

The Draft Brownfield Skills Strategy (DBSS) (ASC & EP 2008 a,b) reported the following, somewhat contested, problems in contaminated land management:

(a) Poor quality land contamination reports submitted for regulatory planning approval, which in turn diverts local authority contaminated land officers from their statutory duties under Part 2A;

(b) A variable reputation of registered Specialists in Land Condition, and (c) Some local authority contaminated land officers do not believe they have the

necessary competence to carry out their roles required by the planning and contaminated land regimes.

The veracity and scale of these reported problems were specifically explored by this research project (SP1003) in a series of interviews with a wide spectrum of stakeholders from regulatory, consultancy and client backgrounds. The first will be shown to be true in part; the second has not been substantiated and the third both represents a misunderstanding of the regulatory landscape and reflects organisational challenges rather than individuals’ limitations.

1.4 Aim and objectives The aim of this project was to identify the skills necessary for contaminated land decision making and to provide an assessment of the extent of their current availability at different levels and to make suggestions for addressing any gaps in capacity and/ or capability.

The work comprises 7 objectives:

Obj. 1 A comprehensive description of the different roles and areas of expertise involved in making and supporting contaminated land decisions under Part 2A (Section 2);

Obj. 2 A comprehensive description of the different roles and areas of expertise involved in making and supporting contaminated land decisions under the planning regime (Section 3);

Obj. 3 An assessment of the skills necessary to deliver the different roles (Section 4); Obj. 4 An assessment of the current relative and absolute availability of the necessary

skills within the contaminated land sector (Section 5); Obj. 5 Identification and prioritisation of any “skills-gaps” (Section 6); Obj. 6 An assessment of current and proposed initiatives to address industry “skills-

gaps” (Section 7). Obj. 7 Suggestions for filling any “skills-gaps” (e.g. training, recruitment, continual

professional development etc.) (Section 8);

The centrality of the conceptual model in contaminated land management is both recognised and emphasised by considering its role before exploring the above objectives. In addition a brief overview of contaminated land management in England provides the non-specialist reader with some context within which to read this report.

The report is structured along the lines of the above objectives. The report is based on evidence gathered from literature and online materials together with a series of structured interviews with key individuals from across the sector. The transcripts of these interviews comprise some 85,000 words over 157 pages. They were coded for



specific key words and phrases (Table 3). A sector wide survey to provide quantitative information was not carried out to avoid undue impact on the sector. The research has identified the different roles and areas of expertise involved in making and supporting contaminated land decisions in different contexts, both by the public and private sector, the skills necessary to deliver those roles and, in doing so, identified “skills-gaps” along with the strengths and weaknesses of current initiatives to address those gaps. The report concludes by suggesting further action.

Table 3 Words and phrases coded in interview transcripts

Contamina Hydrogeol Gap Skill Silc plann SGV Shortage Competen

A key message is that contaminated land management is multi-disciplinary and involves the deployment of expertise from various disciplines. The level of that expertise will vary from site to site and the contaminated land manager must be able to identify and deploy the appropriate level of expertise.

Before addressing the skills needed to deliver contaminated land management policy, the nature of contaminated land management is explored in order to help the process of identifying the nature of the skills needed and the extent to which specialist skills are required.

1.5 Contaminated land management: A multi-disciplinary process It is recognised that contaminated land management is a multi-disciplinary process. The ASC & EP (2008, p. 41) recognised that the skill set of the generic project manager in projects involving land contamination “includes the ability to manage and be a part of multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary working to facilitate joined-up thinking, and informed decisions being made at the early stages of large and complex projects.”

The skills domain is fraught with nomenclatural pitfalls and traps which usually do not matter, but, when they do, can have serious repercussions. Leathard (1994) identifies the various prefixes (‘multi’ and ‘inter’) and adjectives (‘disciplinary’ and ‘professional’) which researchers and practitioners use. Leathard is reported as referring to this as a ‘terminological quagmire’ (p6) (Wilson & Pirrie, 2000). Inter-disciplinarity exploits and blends competence in two or more areas whereas multi-disciplinarity requires specialists from two or more areas to bring their expertise to bear on a problem. Cross-disciplinarity on the other hand involves an expert in one discipline crossing a disciplinary boundary with no transfer of methods or principles being involved.

Contaminated land management (CLM) is complex, inherently involves uncertainty and requires a variety of professional disciplines to be effectively engaged. The then Department of the Environment, in its foreword to CLR 12: A Quality Approach to Contaminated Land Consultancy (DoE, 1997) recognised that “managing contaminated land in a safe, effective and economic way requires well informed and constructive interaction between a variety of technical, commercial, regulatory and lay organisations”. The following extract from CLR 12 set a benchmark and offered a warning (Box 5).

There have been attempts to codify, generalise and systematise CLM in an effort to simplify. The ‘Model Procedures for the management of land contamination’ (Environment Agency 2004) includes, predominantly linear, flow charts. The British Standards Institute has recently updated its Code of Practice on the investigation of potentially contaminated land (BS10175:2011). The Environment Agency (2009), Nathanail et al. (2009) and CL:AIRE et al. (2010) have published generic assessment criteria. The then DETR published a local authority guide to implementing Part IIA (DETR et al., 2001) which was amended in 2007 and published by the CIEH (CIEH & Defra, 2007).

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In contrast, Whitlock (1999) pointed out that: “The multi-disciplinary approach is characterised by each discipline within the team working towards discipline-related goals. Team members work within the boundaries of their professional practice: progress is formally discussed at team meetings, effective communication is considered vital and the client’s role is minimal.” There is a need for a shared understanding, a sort of meta discipline, among the various professionals within a context of contaminated land management. The result is to get something more than the sum of its parts, a meta perspective: the contaminated land geologist and the contaminated land chemist. However it goes beyond the realms of science. One interviewee observed that “….there needs to be a better awareness across a whole range of disciplines, of the social, economic and environmental risks associated with brownfields [sic], and how best to get engagement and what to be aware of and then start bringing in, whatever, right at the outset of the project, so it’s about having degree courses for architects and town planners to be aware of these issues right from the first or second year of their degree course. That’s one way, I mean obviously there’s a lot of professional people out in the system and... those professional groups have an opportunity to understand the sort of business and the sort of technical issues around us.”

In summary, contaminated land management is multi-disciplinary: no one individual can be expected to have all the necessary skills at the right level. It is not a cross disciplinary or inter disciplinary issue. Rather it requires relevant professionals to combine their individual disciplinary expertise to define and resolve complex problems. Over the years, many practitioners develop beyond an appreciation or even an understanding to having some expertise beyond their initial discipline. In the past decade specialist education provision has sought to formalise this cross fertilisation. However, the temptation of inter disciplinarity must be resisted if the dangers of shallow and formulaic problem definition and solution are to be avoided.

1.6 Contaminated land management: A professional service Not only is contaminated land management a multi-disciplinary practice, it also involves the delivery of professional services. The term professional in this context refers to competence and conduct rather than remuneration. Professions in the United Kingdom are regulated by bodies awarded a Royal Charter by the Privy Council. The Privy Council does not define what a profession is. However, the Australian Council of Professions defines a profession as:

"... a disciplined group of individuals who adhere to ethical standards and who hold themselves out as, and are accepted by the public as possessing special knowledge and skills in a widely recognised body of learning derived from research, education and training at a high level, and who are prepared to apply this knowledge and exercise these skills in the interest of others. It is inherent in the definition of a profession that a code of ethics governs the activities of each profession. Such codes require behaviour and practice beyond the personal moral obligations of an individual. They define and demand high standards of behaviour in respect to the services provided to the public and in dealing with professional colleagues. Further, these codes are enforced by the profession and are acknowledged and accepted by the community” (Professions Australia, 1997).

Royal Charters are today normally reserved for bodies, such as eminent [sic] professional institutions, that work in the public interest and have “evidence of the extent to which the body is pre-eminent in its field and in what respects” (Privy Council Office, 2013). The Privy Council advises that such bodies should comprise members of a unique field of activity who are qualified to at least first degree level in a relevant discipline and comprise most of those eligible for membership, without significant overlap with other bodies. Members of such bodies are recognised by their Chartered status: Chemist; Engineer; Environmental Health Practitioner; Geologist; Scientist; Surveyor, et al.



“A key feature of a profession in the United Kingdom is self-regulation by the members of that profession” (Royal Society of Chemistry 2001). The professional bodies comprising the Professional and Technical Panel overseeing the Specialist in Land Condition Register (Table 4) all have professional codes of practice they require their chartered members to adhere to and disciplinary procedures to deal with alleged breaches. Inherent in many of these codes is the principle of not practising beyond one’s area of expertise. This goes to the heart of professionalism in the sense of possessing a unique body of knowledge or skills and applying them for the common good.

Table 4 Professional body requirements for chartered status (Modified from Hamer, 2008)

Professional Body Qualifications/Experience Minimum Level for SILC Register

Chartered Institute of Environmental Health

5 years of work experience as a qualified EHP 3 years of Graduate and/or Voting Membership of the CIEH EITHER: a) To have passed APD parts one and two; OR b) To have passed APC more than 12 months ago. 60 hours of compliant CPD records from within the last 3 years.

Member

Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management

Honours degree with 4 years relevant experience, which should include 2 years, structured training. Includes professional review

Member

Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment

7 years full time experience in environmental management or assessment and have undertaken sound relevant training to underpin experience or Associate Member with 3 years experience. The latter requires an Associate Membership certificate Course.

Full Member Fellow Member Principal Environmental Auditor

Institution of Civil Engineers Degree/HND with professional development and professional review

Member

Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors

RICS accredited degree or surveying related higher degree, with competency portfolio and assessment interview

MRICS Fellow and a Member of the Environment and/or Planning & Development Faculties

Royal Society of Chemistry Graduate with 3 years experience Member The Geological Society of London

Degree or equivalent in geological or environmental science with 5 years post graduate experience in geology or environmental science.

Chartered Geologist; Chartered Scientist

In the UK, the main body recognising those deemed to have specialist cross-disciplinary skills in issues pertinent to contaminated land management is the Specialist in Land Condition (SiLC). A registered SiLC is a senior practitioner who has a broad awareness, knowledge and understanding of land condition issues, providing impartial and professional advice in their field of expertise. The SiLC register is maintained by the Professional and Technical Panel (PTP) of representatives of various professional societies (Table 4).

The standards required to be met by someone aspiring to chartered status in a given profession revolve around a combination of formally recognised knowledge, usually in the form of a university qualification, coupled with a period of post qualification practical experience, usually under the supervision of experienced members of that profession (Table 4).

Once chartered, professionals are expected to follow the code of ethics or professional practice of their professional body (Table 5).

While the precise wording differs from body to body, there is consensus on the principles of professional behaviour. The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) Code captures the spirit of such behaviour in commendably clear language:



“The duty upon members of the ICE to behave ethically is, in effect, the duty to behave honourably; in modern words, ‘to do the right thing’. At its most basic, it means that members should be truthful and honest in dealings with clients, colleagues, other professionals, and anyone else they come into contact with in the course of their duties. Being a member of the ICE is a badge of probity and good faith, and members should do nothing that in any way could diminish the high standing of the profession. This includes any aspect of a member’s personal conduct which could have a negative impact upon the profession.”

Professional bodies outside the PTP also require such behaviour from their corporate members. For example, the Royal Geographical Society’s code of practice (Royal Geographical Society, 2000) requires that:

“All Chartered Geographer Fellows shall act in a manner worthy of the honour and interests of the profession of geographer and the Society and shall do nothing that may bring the profession of geographer or the Society into disrepute. They shall at all times safeguard the public interest and shall exercise their professional skill and judgement to the best of their ability and shall discharge their professional responsibilities with integrity. In order to ensure compliance with this bylaw, the Council shall from time to time publish Rules of Conduct to which those Fellows holding the status of Chartered Geographers shall conform.”

Table 5 Professional body members of the SiLC Register Professional and Technical Panel

Body Code of Ethics/ Professional Practice

Chartered Institute of Environmental Health Code of Professional Conduct

Chartered Institute of Water & Environment Management Code of Ethics

Geological Society Codes of conduct

Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment Code of Practice

Institution of Civil Engineers ICE Code Of Professional Conduct

Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland Professional Conduct and Discipline, 2007 (Not available online)

Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors Rules Of Conduct For Members version 4

Royal Society of Chemistry Code Of Conduct And Guidance On Professional Practice

1.7 The Role of the Conceptual Site Model The conceptual site model is central to risk based contaminated land management (Environment Agency, 2004; Nathanail, 2009; BSI, 2011). The conceptual model not only has to communicate the spatial and if relevant temporal variation in site conditions and contaminants but also the pertinent uncertainties (Table 6). Failure to develop adequate conceptual models was recognised by interviewees and a planning inspector who said: “I have also not seen a conceptual model for the site. Such a model would put the monitoring results into the context of the pathways and receptors on the site, and would improve the appreciation of the risks involved. All of the above factors add weight to my opinion on the unacceptability of the risk that I have already identified” (Planning Inspectorate, 2009).

The development of adequate conceptual site models remains a concern. As one interviewee put it:

“we do see a number of common errors. Basically we always think that, if you don’t get your conceptual model right, if you don’t get the object of the exercise right, you’re not going to collect the right data and be able to answer the questions you really need to answer... frequently the CSM is wrong, that means the SI design is wrong, inadequate or has too much uncertainty in it in order to answer your questions.”



Table 6 Conceptual site models in contaminated land management

Visualisation Content Function Plan or map Spatial relationship of surface features Shows spatial coincidence and adjacency Cross section Vertical relationship of sub surface

features Supports rapid identification of sub surface pathways and barriers

Topological (network) diagram

Connections between sources, pathways and receptors

Supports rapid qualitative evaluation of pollutant linkages and remediation strategies

Matrix diagram Connects sources and receptors by specific pathways

Highlights which sources and pathways are connected.

Tabular Numerical data and statistics Presents detailed information on site circumstances.

Free form text narrative Presents information that cannot be easily codified or quantified.

1.8 Key Skills in contaminated land management The ASC reported (ASC & EP, 2008) that: “The contaminated land jobs market is dominated by a relatively small number of key skills” (Table 7). While their classification does not reveal the plethora of technical skills subsumed within the ‘Technical Analysis’ heading, it does highlight the importance of generic skills in delivering public policy.

Table 7 Key technical and generic skills identified by the ASC in the contaminated land job market (ASC& EP, 2008)

Technical: Generic:

Technical analysis and reporting Programme or project management

Possession of a good relevant degree Project and business development

Good knowledge of the contaminated land regulatory framework

Communications (interpersonal, negotiation, presentational)

Site technical skills Client management

Interviewees also recognised the importance of generic skills. One observed that “one of the things that LA con[taminated] land people particularly are expected to take on is project management of massive projects that they have not got the skills to do... you’re expected to take something on but no-one’s actually giving you the skills and you have not got the time to acquire those skills and you need to be able to understand you need to get those skills in place otherwise you’re in a mess.” This touches on a broader point that CLOs do not act on their own part, ever. The responsibility actually lies with the authority, which does have project management skills. Since, in practice, most large projects involve procuring external capacity, if not capability, the issue of deploying the right type and level of key skills to specific sites leads to the realm of public procurement practice.

A Treasury commissioned report (Glover, 2008) recognised that current mechanisms of procuring outside support to the public sector were good but their outcome depended on who was involved in applying them. Echoing these findings, one interviewee stated that: “I think the most awful and best examples of practice [are] in the public sector, I think when they do it well, they invariably have access to some expertise in terms of reviewing bids and approaches for example when they’re going to tender so I think they can encourage the best work because they set a very clear scoring criteria based on achieving the results they want to and they can in particular have a clear scoring of quality versus other considerations and that encourages the development of the best technical approach to the work, so I think that mechanism is very useful”.



2.0 Roles and Expertise in Making and Supporting Decisions Under Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 The core decision under Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 is whether or not land meets the definition of contamination land. The lead responsibility for making this decision rests with the Local Authority supported in some cases by the Environment Agency and with voluntary advice from the Health Protection Agency (Table 8).

Under Part 2A, contaminated land management involves identifying, estimating and evaluating risks to human health and the environment and then ensuring situations causing significant harm or [significant] pollution of controlled waters or posing a significant possibility of significant harm (SPOSH) or a significant possibility of significant pollution of controlled waters (SPOSPOCW) are removed. Risk assessment involves consideration of source-pathway-receptor pollutant linkages. Part 2A specifies which sources of contamination and which receptors should be considered. It is not prescriptive about the pathways by which substances reach a receptor. The risk assessment process is broken down into four stages:

a. Hazard identification

b. Hazard characterisation

c. Risk estimation

d. Risk evaluation

Hazard identification involves determining what natural or manmade hazardous substances may be present in, on or under the land being considered. This involves understanding the geological setting of the land and its land use history. The land use history reveals what industrial, waste management and other processes may have released contaminants.

Hazard characterisation involves determining the way the suspected hazards will behave in the environment in terms of their transport properties in various forms and media; their fate and their toxicity.

Risk estimation involves establishing, and in some cases quantifying, the level of risk posed by the hazards to specific receptors.

Risk evaluation involves determining whether the level of risk is sufficiently high to meet the definitions of SPOSH or SPOSPOCW.

The conceptual site model underpins and informs each of the four stages. Risk assessment proceeds in a cyclical mode: when uncertainty in the conceptual site model interferes with the risk evaluation then additional information is needed at one or more of the three preceding stages. Ferguson et al. (1998) provide an accessible account of the principles of contaminated land risk assessment, but without the emphasis on the conceptual model that a present day account would give.

The roles of various parties in contaminated land management are set out in Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and the relevant statutory guidance (Table 8). This section has drawn from the review of UK practice prepared for Defra project SP1004. There are some activities that may require input from a specific discipline especially at the more detailed end of quantitative risk assessment or remediation options appraisal/ design (Table 9). Other activities are sector specific and in practice may be carried out by people from a variety of disciplines. Additional expertise has been broken down by activity in the Part 2A inspection, investigation, assessment and remediation processes (Table 10). In practice the course of action is iterative. Initial information gathering is used to inform a qualitative risk assessment which then informs an intrusive investigation to populate a generic quantitative risk assessment which may then lead to further investigation and a detailed quantitative risk assessment. At each step the significance of the uncertainty in the conceptual model given the specific legal



context the work is being carried out under will determine the need for and scope of any further information gathering.

The Local Authority has the lead role in making regulatory decisions under Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Only the Local Authority can determine that land meets the definition of contaminated land in Part 2A. Having done so, it must either secure the remediation of such land or, in circumstances defined in Part 2A, pass the site on to the Environment Agency to secure such remediation.

The Environment Agency ensures the remediation of a narrow range of contaminated land, called Special Sites, as defined in Part 2A and described in the Regulations. The Environment Agency may also provide generic technical advice to Local Authorities and the rest of the sector in the form of documents and tools (e.g. the Contaminated Land Exposure Assessment model (CLEA) and the Remedial Targets Methodology spreadsheets) and produces periodic summaries of the state of contaminated land management nationally. Polluters and owners or occupiers of land affected by contamination may decide, and many have done so, to undertake voluntary remediation to avoid regulatory action being enforced against them. Alternatively they may decide, and some have so decided, to challenge regulatory decisions in court.

Each of the roles in Table 10 is described below.

Part 2A requires a Local Authority to inspect its area from time to time. The role of inspecting land from time to time involves gathering, assimilating and interpreting information about past and present land use and environmental circumstances in order to develop a conceptual model depicting the spatial connections between sources, pathways and receptors and highlighting key uncertainties. Historically this has been carried out using desk based information such as that highlighted in CLR 3 (DoE 1994a) and from site visits (DoE 1994b) although more recent, particularly online, public, private and third sector information sources are also available.

Table 8 Roles involved in making and supporting contaminated land decisions under Part 2A

Responsibility Role Carried out by

In house staff

External Sub contractors

Local Authority Regulator

Inspect land from time to time;

determine if land is contaminated land;

determine who is liable to pay for remediation; allocate responsibility;

prepare remediation notice/ statement; ensure remediation is carried out; and

undertake remediation of orphan sites.

Usually

Always

Usually

Usually

Always

Rarely

Never

Rarely

Rarely

Never

Environment Agency To support Local Authorities; and

With respect to Special Sites1: ensure remediation , determine who is liable to pay for remediation; allocate responsibility; prepare remediation notice/ statement; undertake remediation of orphan sites

Often

Often

Rarely

Rarely

Appropriate person2 To carry out remediation specified in a remediation notice or remediation statement

Rarely Usually

Contaminated Land Grant reviewer

Evaluate the robustness of the preliminary or detailed risk assessment or remediation proposal.

Often Sometimes

Remediation contractor

Carry out the required remediation Rarely Usually

Professional advisor Provide specialist technical input to the regulator or appropriate person or grant review function.

Rarely Often

1 Special sites are sites for whose remediation the Environment Agency is the regulator

2 any person determined (in accordance with section 78F of Part 2A) to bear responsibility for anything which is to be done by way of remediation in any particular case.



Sites which remain candidate contaminated land are then subject to intrusive investigations involving accessing specific sub surface horizons; obtaining samples for specific analyses, taking in situ measurements or making in situ records (Nathanail et al. 2007). While most authorities will sub contract the entire intrusive site investigation and risk assessment process to environmental consultants some are now carrying out some of the data gathering work in house and only calling on specialist external advice on sampling strategy development and risk assessment.

Determining if land is contaminated land involves establishing whether the site meets one or more of the components of the definition of contaminated land. Since the definition is in narrative, attempts to use quantitative evaluation tools are open to challenge. The key is to either establish significant harm or significant pollution of controlled waters are taking place or to demonstrate that there is a significant possibility of significant harm (SPOSH) or significant pollution is significantly likely. In other words if nothing is done, significant harm/ pollution will continue or is likely to happen. The test is a positive one: the local authority must demonstrate the definition has been met before it can determine land as contaminated. If it cannot so demonstrate then it should not determine the land. The statutory guidance recognises the challenge in decision making: If land is to be placed in Category 2, this must be on the basis of expert advice (Defra 2012).

Table 9 Discipline-specific expertise involved in making and supporting decisions under Part 2A

Discipline Expertise

Environmental Health

Overall direction and management of the statutory process including, in particular, key decisions on risk evaluation.

Establishing the need for, and implement, urgent action.

Protecting public health.

Taking enforcement action.

Geology Determine geological history of a site and vicinity.

Develop the ground model of earth materials, masses, processes and boundaries.

Draw geological cross sections showing the flow of groundwater, non-aqueous phase liquids and hazardous ground gases.

Soil science Soil description and characterisation (pedology).

Soil behaviour (edaphology).

Environmental Chemistry

Determine physical-chemical properties of contaminants for given soil conditions.

Convert literature values to relevant temperature.

Carry out stoichiometric calculations.

Characterise environmental radioactivity.

Biology Establish microbial population (including genetic profiling).

Determine how natural microbial populations can be enhanced or encouraged.

Establish need for bioaugmentation.

Toxicology & Epidemiology

Derive health criteria values to inform setting generic assessment criteria.

To extract and evaluate dose-response data to select NOAEL, LOAEL or BMDL10 values.

Inform the development of LQM CIEH Dose-Response Roadmaps.

Engineering Design, permit, implement and decommission process based and conventional remediation technologies.

Procurement Develop or accept terms and conditions under which work will be carried out.

Set out the services, goods and outputs to be delivered.

Establishing compliance with quality criteria thresholds.

Surveying Establishing position and elevation of ground level, monitoring & sampling locations.

Converting information to a common spatial reference base.

Establishing changes in elevation with time.



Table 10 Expertise involved in making and supporting decisions under Part 2A

Part 2A role Activity Commentary Inspection (non-intrusive)

Terrain evaluation Discern relevant features on historic and current maps, aerial photos, satellite imagery

Environmental characterisation Determine geological circumstances suggesting natural sources, pathways or barriers and receptors.

Establish current land use The current land use is any land use permitted without recourse to planning permission. It informs the identifications of the critical receptor and the relevant exposure pathways

Develop a conceptual site model CSM comprising plan, cross section(s), topological diagram and accompanied by details in text/ tabular form.

Risk Assessment Hazard identification 1 Identify the suspected contaminants from the historical land uses, geology maps, documentary and walkover evidence.

Hazard characterisation 1 Determine the fate, transport and toxicity properties of the contaminants in light of the site circumstances

Selecting Generic Assessment Criteria

Establish the assumptions informing any generic assessment criteria are relevant to the site circumstances.

Deriving Site specific Assessment Criteria

Derive assessment criteria that closely reflect the site circumstances

Data analysis and modelling Determining relevance of statistical methods

Only non-targeted, unbiased sampling strategies of parameters with essentially no spatial correlation are amenable to non-spatial statistical evaluation. Where spatial correlation is demonstrated or suspected, non-spatial statistics is invalid and geostatistical techniques should be used.

Refinement of conceptual model The spatial, quantified relationships between sources, pathways and receptors

Risk estimation 1 This is the final scientific stage of risk assessment.

Risk evaluation 1 This is the non-scientific, value laden component of risk assessment.

Inspection (Intrusive site investigation)

Design a site investigation: sampling, analytical and monitoring strategies

The aim of the site investigation is to reduce relevant uncertainty in the conceptual model.

Undertake or supervise sampling Surface and shallow soil samples require no specialist equipment. Deeper samples or samples of ground gas and groundwater require more specialist expertise and equipment.

Carry out on site analyses Specify laboratory analyses Supervise installation of ground gas or water monitoring wells

Carry out periodic sampling of water or gas

Carry out periodic gas monitoring Apportioning liability Tracing company ownership

Tracing genealogy of public sector bodies

Determining the appropriate person Remediation Remediation options appraisal Options appraisal requires a working knowledge

of the thirty or so types of remediation technologies and, increasingly, combinations of technologies.

Remediation design and permitting Design requires intimate familiarity with the specific technology(ies) being implemented.

Remediation construction Remediation operation Remediation decommissioning

1 The four stages of risk assessment (DETR et al. 2000)



The task of determining who is liable to pay for remediation involves applying a hierarchy of responsibility. In the first instance the (Class A) person who caused or knowingly permitted the land to become contaminated is liable. In their absence then liability falls on the (Class B) current owner or occupier of the land. Orphan sites or linkages, that is sites or contaminant linkages for which neither a Class A nor Class B person can be found, are remediated at public expense. In many cases the Local Authority has been the Class A person or, in order to avoid hardship on home owners, has paid for the remediation. Challenges to liability have been tested in court. Where land ownership has changed then the LA may have to trace the ownership of the land or of the land owning organisation in order to establish where liability rests. Where, however, liability has been transferred by a contractual provision it is up to the person not the LA to pursue. Where there is more than one Class A person then the local authority must allocate liability.

The appropriate person is responsible for carrying out the remediation specified in a remediation notice or volunteered by them in a remediation statement. If voluntary remediation is not likely then the LA must prepare a notice stating what remediation it requires to be carried out. Where the LA is itself carrying out the remediation then it must prepare a statement detailing what it is intending to do. Voluntary remediation also requires a statement from the person paying for the remediation. The LA must ensure that the necessary remediation is carried out and that all significant pollutant linkages are demonstrated to have been broken.

The Environment Agency is responsible for supporting Local Authorities on certain matters and ensuring the remediation of Special Sites. The support has been in the provision of a wide range of technical guidance, some training and more formal site specific inputs on issues like water pollution, permitting and radioactivity. Some non-statutory support has reduced in recent years as the Environment Agency’s priorities have shifted and the sector has embraced a greater role on guidance development and training, a trend that is expected to continue. This is an expectation felt by the interviewees: one interviewee noted that “we’re not going to have much more government support with SGVs and so on…”

This section has outlined the responsibilities of Local Authorities and the Environment Agency under Part 2A. It has become quite clear over the past decade that it is impractical for every LA to maintain a team of staff with sufficient expertise in a wide variety of disciplines that may be needed only intermittently. However, many tasks can be done in house thereby minimising costs and maximising the benefit to the council by retaining the expertise gained (Table 8). Some have long-adopted other service delivery models including out-sourcing and so-called shared services where these are thought more efficient or economic. Interviewees reported some LAs have purchased rapid measurement equipment such as hand portable XRF devices to allow screening analyses of shallow soils or metal/metalloid contaminants. In other cases, LA staff work with consultants to design site investigations with LA staff carrying out shallow sampling and consultants carrying out quantitative risk assessments.

LAs often employ consultants to evaluate the robustness of the preliminary or detailed risk assessments or remediation proposal. The Environment Agency also employs consultants to assist in this way or to help evaluate requests for funding under the Agency’s (formerly Defra’s) contaminated land capital grants scheme. While consultants may provide specialist technical input to the regulator or appropriate person or grant review function, it is important to remember that the ultimate decision on whether or not to determine land contaminated rests with the Local Authority. However as one interviewee recounted (see below) consultants may not have the right depth of expertise.

“I think that very often, the typical model is that a LA takes on a consultant to do an investigation as to whether or not the site meets the definition of contaminated land. Getting the spec[ification] agreed at the beginning isn’t usually too hard; when it



comes to the results though, the consultant’s opinion about the significance of the results and whether they meet, usually, SPOSH, is quite variable, partly because people have only come slowly to the realization that it’s not just a question of exceeding a SGV or looking at statistics and applying that blindly and coming up with an answer. It’s about how much beyond there do we need to be before we say – yes actually this is SPOSH.”

Remediation contractors carry out the required remediation irrespective of who is paying for it in all but the simplest cases. Some forms of non-specialist remediation may be done in house by council staff. Process based remediation technologies exploit physical, chemical or biological changes to break the source-pathway-receptor linkage (Nathanail et al., 2007; CL:AIRE, 2010). Such remediation would almost always be subcontracted to a specialist private contractor. Simple engineering processes such as simple capping of the contaminated land or small scale excavation do not require specialist equipment or expertise and have on occasion been carried out by LA staff. In recent years several of the larger civil engineering contractors have bought and brought in-house specialist consultancy expertise allowing better integration of engineering and process based technology service provision.



3.0 Roles and Expertise in Making and Supporting Decisions under the Planning Regime Developers and local authorities have the lead roles in making decisions under the planning regime (Table 11). Where a site is affected by contamination issues, responsibility for securing a safe development rests with the developer and/or landowner (CLG 2012).

Land contamination is a material consideration under the planning regime. That means that it should be taken into account when deciding whether or not to grant planning permission. The primary responsibility for resolving land contamination issues rests with the developer. The planning authority has an oversight and regulatory function: planners ensure the adequacy of risk assessments, condition remaining issues and confirm any conditions have been discharged.

In general, LA contaminated land staff interviewed for this research reported good and improving liaison with planning colleagues. Only rarely are LA contaminated land staff located with planning colleagues. Since much of the workload of contaminated land officers is in dealing with planning applications this is not an intuitive situation. Rather this seems to be a remnant of the historic and ongoing role of environmental health in public health protection (which is a factor in other planning applications too) rather than a strategic decision that environmental health is the best place to locate contaminated land capability within an authority.

Table 11 Roles involved in making and supporting contaminated land decisions under the Planning regime

Function Role Key Guidance Planning officer To consider planning applications and make

recommendations to elected members on whether to grant permission and if so what if any conditions to apply.

NPPF (CLG 2012)

Contaminated land officer

To support planning colleagues on land contamination issues: To evaluate land contamination reports (investigation, assessment, remediation) submitted with planning applications or in fulfilment of planning conditions; to suggest appropriate conditions; to evaluate

Part 2A Environmental Protection Act 1990 and associated statutory guidance (Defra 2012)

Developer/ owner Securing safe development NPPF (CLG 2012) Remediation contractor Carry out the required remediation Environmental permitting

regulations; Industry code of practice;

Professional advisor Provide specialist technical input to the regulator or appropriate person or grant review function.

Adherence to Codes of Conduct of relevant professional body and SILC Register.

Environmental insurer To provide insurance solutions for transferring residual levels of risk.

CIRIA R592 (Finnamore et al., 2000)

In 2010 Mr Justice Williams quashed a planning permission given by Leeds City Council in the absence of any information on land contamination at a site where land contamination was one of the main material considerations. In his judgment, an extract from which is given in Box 6, he reports that the issue revolved around the failure of the applicant for planning permission to demonstrate that the site would be suitable for the proposed use. Leeds City Council staff had written to colleagues that: “The applicant has not provided any information relating to land contamination issues in support of the above application. The applicant has not demonstrated that the site would be suitable for the proposed use. As the end use is residential and therefore sensitive, we require the submission of at least a Phase I (desk study) report to support the application. Depending on the findings of the Phase I report, it may be appropriate for the applicant to also submit a Phase II (site investigation) report and remediation statement.” (TECHNOPRINT PLC and MARK SNEE vs LEEDS CITY COUNCIL and ARCHBOLD CARSHOP LTD (2010) (Para. 47))



Box 6 TECHNOPRINT PLC and MARK SNEE vs LEEDS CITY COUNCIL and ARCHBOLD CARSHOP LTD (2010) (Para. 52)

“In my judgment, it was unreasonable for planning permission to be granted when so many issues relating to potential land contamination were unresolved. I appreciate that solutions can usually be found to overcome problems associated with land contamination. It does seem to me, however, that a reasonable local planning authority would have demanded much more information from the Interested Party before deciding to grant permission rather than grant permission subject to conditions when the extent of any potential problem was simply unknown. To repeat, land contamination was not identified as some peripheral issue in this case; it was identified as one of the main issues for consideration”.

Although the case was not brought up by interviewees, Leeds City Council was, in the context of the number of contaminated land staff they had: “There are a few authorities that you’ll know about that have whole teams, Birmingham, Leeds, but most of the time it’s a part time job for one person already.”

In a case which received a higher profile (Contaminated Land Bulletin, 2007; Brownfield Briefing, 2008) by being the subject of a 2005 “Tonight with Trevor MacDonald” television documentary, East Cambridgeshire District Council accepted the Local Government Ombudsman finding of maladministration. In this case planning permission for the residential redevelopment of a redundant school site on a former gasworks site had failed to ensure the site was remediated before redevelopment commenced. The site was determined contaminated land under Part 2A and remediated with funding support from Defra.

Although such cases are rare, and without delving into the technical aspects of each case, they do show that due process extending to the need for effective intra-council cooperation is important. Thus while developers have to demonstrate land is suitable for its intended use and contaminated land officers are well placed to review submitted information, it is incumbent on planning departments to tap into the in-house contaminated land capability.



4.0 Assessment of the Skills Necessary to Deliver the Different Roles Nathanail (2005), anthropomorphising land that meets the CABERNET definition of brownfield, considered brownfields as unemployed or underemployed land. If this analogy is extended, then contaminated land may be thought of as land that is unwell or unfit for purpose. A low level of skill may be sufficient for remediating (‘curing’) some sites, or even parts of sites, while a high level of specialist expertise may be needed for others. The contaminated land manager must have the expertise to know what level of input is needed from each discipline (cf Figure 1) and the moral courage and professional integrity to deploy it.

The DoE observed that “confidence in the process [of managing contaminated land] can be impaired by project management deficiencies, for example if the terms of reference, methodology and expected outputs of contaminated land projects have been poorly defined, managed or reported” (DoE, 1997).

Hamer (2008) produced a Report Capability Framework Scheme (RCFS) for determining the skill level required to write and review contaminated land reports. The RCFS helps determine both the type and level of skills needed to carry out and also to review contaminated land management work at the project specific level. This has the potential to help project managers, regulators and clients evaluate up front the adequacy or otherwise of the expertise being deployed on a particular project. Such reassurance is sought by some, particularly [multinational corporation (MNC)], clients. One consultant reported that “We also have to demonstrate to [MNC] clients ... that we’re working to best practice criteria, so sometimes we have to submit what our training courses look like to those sorts of companies.”

The Environment Agency has implemented a Technical Development Framework (TDF) for its staff. The SILC Professional and Technical Panel (PTP) and the CIEH have consulted on their own technical development frameworks aimed at the practitioner and regulator respectively.

The EA TDF has been officially endorsed by the Geological Society, allowing the EA to demonstrate its commitment to the professionalism of its staff and to award the title ‘Practising Geologist’ to those of its officers who meet a prescribed level of capability. The TDF focuses on “high level descriptions of key behaviours, skills and knowledge” (‘capabilities’) needed by Environment Agency staff to help it in “protecting and improving the environment” (Thomas et al. 2008). Capabilities are stratified into five levels: 1=awareness or novice, 2=basic or being supervised, 3=confident or unsupervised, 4=distinguished or local expert and 5=national expert.

The SiLC PTP draft skills framework was published for consultation in late 2009 and will be finalised under the auspices of the newly formed SILC Register Ltd. “... the origins for the SiLC framework were from the brownfield skills strategy framework which was the academy for sustainable communities’ research with EP into the gaps in the UK marketplace for dealing with BF-type issues.” It is a virtually unpopulated framework that needs detail in the form of discipline and activity specific information to be a workable tool. The skills matrix included in Appendix 1 of this report is suggested as a good basis for an individual seeking to comply with the requirements of the SiLC framework.

The CIEH framework has to adopt a different approach in recognition of the fact that it is aimed at individuals working for some 370 employers and can have no implicit link to grading and pay. Nevertheless one consultant welcomed it: “I think that would be welcomed by the CLOs here because it fills a recognised gap. I haven’t done a survey, but I’d guess quite a few of the CLOs maybe aren’t even chartered.”

The SILC and EA frameworks recognise a hierarchy of technical competence. They are focused on the individual member of staff whose skills are to be developed rather than



on the needs of a specific project. Clearly the development of the technical and other skills of an individual need attention. However, the level of skill needed to tackle a specific site, or aspects of a site, may not match those of the available individual(s). The RCFS (Hamer, 2008) is a project or site focused scheme that provides useful information and principles for contaminated land managers. The CIEH draft competency framework on the other hand does not take a tiered approach. It can be tailored to a range of different employer requirements and focuses on the competence of the authority.

The activities listed in Table 10 involve a number of specific sub-activities:

project manage ensure compliance with relevant

British, European and International standards

carry out literature reviews interpret historical maps interpret geological maps carry out walkover survey carry out ecological survey identify common plants conduct structured interviews of

former employees develop conceptual site model draw hydrogeological cross

sections model spatial correlation establish the aim and objectives

of a site investigation design a site investigation specify an analytical strategy develop health and safety plan develop sampling strategy supervise and direct the site

investigation describe materials take, pack and dispatch samples schedule laboratory tests produce logs of trial pits &

boreholes

ensure waste management select appropriate chemical

properties select or derive health criterion

values (HCVs) select or derive generic and site

specific assessment criteria establish applicability of classical

and geostatistical analysis tools write reports review reports use spreadsheet use human health risk

assessment model (e.g. CLEA) use groundwater risk assessment

model (e.g. Consim; EA Remedial Targets Methodology)

predict volumes needing remediation

calculate SSAC remediation design, construct and

operate make legally compliant decisions carry out stoichiometric

calculations carry out remediation appraisal ensure remediation verification

The above list illustrates the breadth of actions undertaken to inform regulatory decisions about contaminated land. A systematic inventory of these has been produced in a form that may be used to track individual skills through their career (Appendix 1). The matrix allows both the broadening of an individual’s skill base and the deepening through the levels (cf Table 2) to be tracked. The list of skills in Appendix 1 and illustrated above cannot be expected to reside within an individual. Given their academic background and professional role, individuals may use the Appendix to plan their future education, training and experiential learning. Employers may use the information to plan staff development and formulate project teams along the lines envisaged by Hamer (2008). Clients can be reassured that their project is benefitting from the appropriate level of expertise.



5.0 Assessment of the Current Availability of Skills within the Contaminated Land Sector The Leitch Review of Skills (Leitch, 2006), commissioned by HM Treasury, found that “the UK’s skills base remains weak by international standards, holding back productivity, growth and social justice.” Lord Leitch claimed “‘Economically valuable skills’ is our mantra.” He called for a demand led system: “the only way in which to increase employer and individual investment in skills and ensure that increased investment delivers economically valuable skills.” While his review did not specifically address contaminated land, brownfields, construction or even engineering and science professions, he did recognise that “Better skills will be needed at higher levels to drive leadership, management and innovation – these are key drivers of productivity growth.”

At that time a national target of 60% of new housing to be built on previously developed land was in place in England and the economic crisis triggered by events such as the collapse of Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC)) and Fanni Maye (Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA)) had yet to take place. Some 180,000 new houses were being built each year, 75% of which in 2005 were on PDL (English Partnerships 2006). Based on these figures and a then government target of 2 million new homes by 2016, a projected shortfall in the brownfield workforce of over 75%, amounting to some 680,000 practitioners, by 2012 was predicted by the Academy of Sustainable Communities (ASC 2008). Those figures seemed incredible at the time and have now largely been consigned to history. No interviewee suggested that either now or at the time those figures were reasonable. The mood among interviewees seems to be one of quality rather than quantity; capability rather than capacity:

“as a group as a whole, I think there are enough people around who know what they’re doing”.

“But I would say that the problems I’ve seen are throughout the CLR11 process. There’s some big ones, clearly risk estimation and evaluation are big ones, but we still have some of the earlier problems to do with the conceptual modelling, the design of the investigations and the way data’s [sic] actually gathered, that compound the uncertainties and hence the quality of the decision you make at the end of the process”

The global financial crisis, the creation of the Homes and Communities Agency (by merging the ASC, EP and Commission for New Towns) and the change of government in 2010 overtook the ASC: the Brownfield Skills Strategy, due to be finalised in 2009, has yet to be, and there is no reason to suspect it will ever be, published.

Table 12 Reasons for unsatisfactory reports submitted under planning regime (based on ASC & EP, 2008b)

In what respects are reports commonly unsatisfactory? Number of responses

(out of 95)

History of contaminative uses and environmental setting aspect of reports unsatisfactory

39 (41%)

Site model/discussion of pollutant linkages and preliminary RA aspect of reports unsatisfactory

71 (75%)

Site investigation/characterisation aspect of reports unsatisfactory 77 (81%)

RA/estimation/evaluation aspect of reports unsatisfactory 77 (81%)

Remediation strategy/option appraisal/recommendations aspect of reports unsatisfactory

59 (62%)

Interviews with LA staff indicated that the distribution of potentially contaminated land was uneven across the country. Defra stated that “probably over 95% of contaminated land work has taken place through redevelopment under the planning system” (Defra, 2010). The specific type and depth of skills needed to fulfil the various roles involved in implementing UK contaminated land policy will also vary from site to site. However in



this section the quantity and quality of skills needed will be assessed. In 2007 the ASC found that a substantial proportion of technical reports were unsatisfactory with respect to ‘best practice guidance’: of the 95 responses, 13 said 76 - 100% of reports were unsatisfactory; 25 said 51 - 75%; 31 said 26 - 50%; and only 26 said 0 - 25% were unsatisfactory. The ASC went on to ask what was unsatisfactory in the reports. Worryingly those aspects which required synthesis and interpretation were the main cause of dissatisfaction (Table 12). This project’s interviewees also reported commonly encountering unsatisfactory reports. The ASC considered the land contamination roles pertaining to the “reuse of contaminated brownfield land”. They identified general skills issues some of which have been addressed in full or in part and some remain unaddressed (ASC 2008).

Table 13 General contaminated land management skills issues identified by ASC & EP (2008b): A progress check

General skills issues identified Progress since 2008 Potential Future consequences

Staff retention was identified as a problem, particularly in the public sector where budget pressures reduce competitive ability with equivalent positions in the private sector for key technical staff.

Public spending cuts are making staff shedding rather than retention a problem.

Continued loss of both capacity and capability within the regulator

Junior positions in the contaminated land and oil sectors were compared and a significant pay difference was noted in favour of the oil industry. There is considered to be potential for a labour shortage in the near future if new graduates are not brought into the sector regularly and retained.

Graduate and entry level in the CLM sector has dropped in recent years leaving a potential shortfall in the medium term as experienced professionals retire or when workloads increase.

Decreased capacity may be offset by decreased workload but if current housing aspirations are to be met then a marked increase in redevelopment on brownfields potentially affected by contamination will be essential.

With some notable exceptions, it was felt that professional bodies could provide better technical support for the contaminated land industry. Chartered status was not considered as important within organisations any more.

Some provision is being made by professional bodies (eg Geological Society training guides for Contaminated Land Specialists) and SILC. The Registered of Ground Engineering Professionals (RoGEP) specifically recognises contaminated land management. Specialist groups within the professional bodies organise CPD events relevant to contaminated land practitioners. Outwith the professional bodies, ELQF, SCLF and SoBRA to name but three have established programmes of meetings.

The CIEH has continued to invest heavily in training and peer-support. Some signs that individuals are investing in professional qualifications to assist their own career prospects.

The Specialist in Land Condition (SiLC) registration scheme was seen as a possible route to raising standards (quality), although its eight years minimum experience requirement for qualifying is commonly considered to be too onerous. A tiered version of SiLC was often presented as a way forward.

SiLC Register Ltd, set up in early 2011, is formulating a mechanism for those working towards SiLC status however the post chartership concept remains in place.

A competent person scheme will most likely be needed to support implementation of any future Soil Framework Directive. Currently, SiLC alone has the relevant cross-disciplinary scope to fulfil that need.

The general consensus was that the Environment Agency’s newly released Technical Development Framework (TDF) was a positive approach and that something similar would be useful for the private sector, further that such a framework suitable for both public and private sector should be agreed.

Since then CIEH and SILC have published consultation draft development frameworks for regulators and practitioners respectively. Interviewees endorsed the ASC comments about the EA TDF.

Progress on training frameworks remains slow as it is seen as a low priority by many organisations.



The ASC (ASC & EP, 2008b) reported that the 95 local authorities responding to their survey employed an average of 0.8 full time equivalent (FTE) posts working on ‘contaminated land regulation’ [sic]. Most had either no (24 of 95) or half (24 of 95) a FTE post; 29 had one FTE and 18 had 2 FTE posts while none reported 3 or more FTE posts.

To scope the magnitude of the skill base required with a Local Authority to implement Part 2A, the estimates in Table 14 have been made. It has been assumed that the initial prioritisation of sites has been carried out. There are 353 Local Authorities in England. Allowing for weekends, bank holidays and annual leave, 220 working days per year per employee have been assumed.

The number of days of LA staff time needed for each of seven types of event has been considered: desk study (5 days), site visit (2 days), intrusive investigation (5 days), generic quantitative risk assessment (5 days), detailed quantitative risk assessment (5 days), determination of contaminated land (10 days), securing remediation (10 days). These figures are central tendency figures that recognise that LAs will carry out most of the work in house for small and simple sites but will bring external capability and capacity for the rarer larger and more complex sites. Despite estimates of tens and hundreds of thousands of potential contaminated sites, only around 1000 sites have been determined as contaminated land in England in the first decade of Part 2A being in force – an average of some 3 sites per local authority per decade. Of course this simply highlights the problem with averages: one local authority alone determined over 100 sites in one year. Nevertheless for aggregate order of magnitude purposes central tendency figures have been used. It has been assumed that each local authority will consider 5 sites on its priority list per year and carry out a desk study and site visit of these sites. Of these only 1 will require a GQRA, which may well be carried out by LA staff in-house, and 1 will require a DQRA, which may well be carried out by external advisors. Taking the past decade’s figures, each LA will determine and secure the remediation of a site once every three years. For simplicity’s sake the role of the Environment Agency in dealing with special sites and the effort in dealing with the small number of highly contested sites have been ignored in these estimates. These figures are shown in Table 14. Table 14 shows that a total of some 18,885 days (ca. 86 years) of staff time are required across all English LAs.

Table 14 Estimated magnitude of the skill base required for Part 2A across the 353 English Local Authorities

Event Events per LA per year

Events per year across

England

LA Staff days per

event

LA Staff days per year across

England Desk studies 5 1765 5 8825

Site visits 5 1765 2 3530

Intrusive investigations 1 353 5 1765

GQRA 1 353 5 1765

DQRA 0.5 176.5 5 882.5

Determination 0.3 105.9 10 1059

Remediation 0.3 105.9 10 1059

TOTAL 18885.5

These are very crude figures but reasonable bearing in mind that there have been some 1000 determinations in the first ten years of Part 2A. Many sites will be prioritised for site inspections and progressively fewer will be the subject of intrusive investigations, generic and detailed quantitative risk assessments (GQRA and DQRA respectively), determination and remediation. These estimates suggest that Part 2A may account for a quarter of a typical contaminated land officer’s time leaving the remainder for other related duties such as dealing with land contamination aspects of planning applications



and technical development. It is recognised that some LAs will have far more than the number of sites envisaged below and therefore require a much larger staff resource while others will have a much smaller legacy of potentially contaminated land.

The figures in Table 14 seem reasonable in light of the relatively small number of determinations since 2001. This coupled with the significant decrease in private sector activity in land contamination over 2008-2010 suggests that the capacity to implement contaminated land policy exists. However as the work of Hamer (2008) suggests, that is not the same as saying the capability exists.

In redevelopment, LA staff still encounter poorly argued reports. One interviewee commented: “I suppose [it’s] less than it used to be, but you do still get reports [that are either scientifically flawed, or not compatible with the policy], I got one just yesterday, it had no justification for any of the soil screening values used,… just numbers written down with… nothing.” A consultant interviewee lamented: “There are not many people out there that I think ‘I’m convinced you understand the whole process of human health risk assessment’, and I’m not saying just CLEA because I think it’s much more than that.”

One area that has not received much attention nor was raised by interviewees is the archiving of records about land contamination and the measures taken to mitigate the risks it poses. Pre purchase property check products can only report retrievable information on land condition. Information on for example the verification of a ground gas membrane, construction of a capping layer, end point achieved by bioremediation or composition of imported backfill is less easily accessible to a purchaser or lender on a previously owned property.



6.0 Identification and prioritisation of any “skills-gaps” Many interviewees reported that while there was not an acute gap in the quantity of people involved in the contaminated land sector, there was still an issue of capability, particularly in projects which required a more detailed understanding of specific issues. The recent economic crisis has sharply reduced the quantity but paradoxically increased the quality of skilled personnel required. In a stagnant or even falling property market previously indulged or tolerated inefficiencies cannot be accommodated. When ‘time was money’ overly conservative assessments and simple if expensive remediation would reap rewards by getting the job done quicker and the profit realised sooner. In the regulatory realm, while Defra's contaminated land grant budget was not over stretched, authorities could come back for successive rounds of investigatory work and authorities stood a good chance of their remediation request being approved for relatively low levels of estimated risk. In what was then a young regulatory regime these were sensibly cautious approaches to have adopted and much experience has been gained by the sector during the past decade.

At the present time the ramifications of public spending cuts are only now beginning to be seen. Training budgets have been scrapped in some, and are under ever more severe pressure in many, local authorities. Some specialist contaminated land officer posts are being redesignated as general posts or being lost altogether. This is in part reflecting the withdrawal in 2008 of specific Local Authority Best Value Indicators (BV 216a: Identifying contaminated land; BV 216b Information on contaminated land) and in part the decrease in workload due to the decline in planning applications over the past two years. However it is likely storing problems for the future. By failing to appreciate the multi-disciplinary nature of contaminated land management and de-skilling their officer corps, local authorities are either going to have to rely on the private sector or are sowing the seeds of further decisions akin to those that resulted in the East Cambridgeshire District Council (ombudsman ruling of maladministration) and Technoprint vs Leeds City Council (judicial quashing of planning permission) cases.

Many companies offering contaminated land consultancy services have either ceased trading, pulled out of the sector or reallocated staff into new areas such as carbon trading or renewable energy. Many redundant staff are setting up sole trader organisations. Job adverts in contaminated land are much rarer in the trade press. One interviewee observed “It’s a funny time isn’t it really, the change in availability of people – up until 2 years ago, it was quite hard to recruit good people in the right areas, then all of a sudden, people were finding themselves out of jobs, the market was becoming well provided for in terms of CVs and so on.” However they did identify one area where these was a shortage: “...but nevertheless, I think we have very few people with an engineering background, which surprises me slightly as civil engineers used to predominate in the contaminated land field, I don’t see many with a civil eng[ineering] background who you could say ‘yes this person could design a remediation scheme’, alongside the chemist to do the chemistry and so on. So civil and process engineering perhaps one area.” The scale of these changes is difficult to quantify but resulted in an unsuccessful attempt to have ‘contaminated land engineers’ taken off Tier 2 of the United Kingdom shortage occupation list of November 2011 (UK Borders Agency 2011).

This trend is accompanied by, but not linked to, consultants being bought up by contractors: Parsons Brinkerhoff by Balfour Beatty and Entec by Amec. Such acquisitions represent a possible return to the innovative contractor model of George Wimpey (Wimpey Laboratories) and John Mowlem (Soil Mechanics) where intellectual capital would be converted, if not magnified, into financial capital through the lens of the contracting operation. Significant consultancy mergers in recent years have included Sinclair Knight Merz (SKM) acquiring Enviros and URS winning a bidding war with CH2MHill to buy Scott Wilson. World leading environmental skills were a factor in at least the former merger (SKM Enviros, 2010).



The present situation seems to be that there is at best enough capacity and more likely still an oversupply in the sector. However the issue has switched from one of capacity to capability. Since we can no longer afford the luxury of over conservative risk assessments and the consequent remediation, we need to be more detailed in our risk estimation and less willing to deal with uncertainty by remediation rather than the further site characterisation envisaged by Greenleaves II (DETR 2000). Specific areas of deep and highly valued skills and the need for teams of skilled individuals were identified by interviewees:

“It’s seldom you get a complete interpretation failure, i.e. if you both have the same datasets and you’re both happy there was enough data there, it’s very rare to come to different conclusions... I would put a lot of emphasis on SI [site investigation] design because that links in the need to get your objectives right, and the need to get your CSM developed in order to produce the right design…it dwarfs the errors that might be made in the field with respect to the way data’s gathered and…these days the analytical side of thing because [that’s] tightened up quite a lot with MCERTS etc.”

“Hydrogeology, I think, we do see some good hydrogeologists out there, and we don’t always get hold of them very quickly, but when we do, they’re worth their weight in gold.”

“environmental chemists, I think there are a lot of pure chemists around, but fewer environmental chemists,”

“human health risk assessment is an area where a lot of people have developed their own skilled people by virtue of constantly working at it themselves, one of those sort of courageous self taught areas, though of course there’s the danger that if you self teach in isolation, then you end up producing rubbish... so you have more than one person involved in that process and they interact with other areas of learning and training providers etc., so I think that’s an area where it’s more and more common to be doing DQRA, you have to be able to do that...”

“from our [regulator] perspective of course it’s all about risk assessment”

“toxicology, and risk assessment, the risk assessment models and understanding what they can and can’t do, including CLEA and, I’m not a big fan of CLEA... [don’t] like any model that I can’t get into the heart of it to look at what’s going on”

“we’re still playing from a subset [of remediation technology options], you’ll tend to find a consultant would use remediation techniques that they’re comfortable with using. I very rarely see options appraisals.”

“it’s understanding the risk rather than the toxicology behind some of the numbers that they’re coming up with. Very often they tend to pick and choose numbers that they like. ... but it’s just a feeling that I just tend to see, is that consultants, that they’ve found something on site and they’ve got a number for that something and they want to try and show that it’s ok, so they’ll pick and choose and they’ll play with the models until they come up with an answer they want”

However it was also recognised that some core disciplines (Figure 2) do not need to be routinely deployed on contaminated land projects. “I think... that we don’t need thousands of toxicologists, we don’t need a toxicologist in every LA, or indeed in every consultancy, what we need is… well it doesn’t matter what the site is, the chemicals have the same sort of behavioural characteristics, (forgetting about the fate and transport, and just thinking about the toxicological…).” Toxicology was also identified as an area where consistency and harmonisation was possible and achievable: “so why should we be reassessing arsenic on every site from a toxicological standpoint if we have a really good assessment of arsenic, and a published outcome and criteria that we all understand how to use... all well and good, if we choose to define something that isn’t a [HCV] but reflects an unacceptable intake - fine, but don’t do it on every site.”



Referring to process based remediation such as in situ chemical oxidation or surfactant flushing, a consultant observed that “it’s damn good science and damn good engineering and the two bring that sort of process thing together.”

One interviewee reported that “I don’t feel the prioritization we’ve got is giving us the sites we need to make the progress on”. This reflected the localised approach to site prioritisation adopted by LAs in the immediate aftermath of Part 2A coming into effect and the inadequacy of the CLR 6 prioritisation guidance (DoE, 1995b): “If there was a standardized [approach] or a template for carrying out prioritization, it would have saved all the LAs a major headache of deciding how to go about prioritization, and how much resource it was going to take and obviously there was a lot of different options there to pursue.”

The role of guidance was commented on by several interviewees. “…the conclusion I reach is that a lot of practitioners assume they know what’s in CLR11 and assume that what’s in CLR11 is what they’ve been doing for many years. They assume CLR11 reflects existing practices that they undertake, and I don’t think that, some of the problems we get is because things have moved on, people don’t…understand the full CLR11 process because they assume they know it.” “... because [CLR11]’s a rather large document they haven’t got the time…to grasp the concepts effectively of RA [risk assessment] and risk management that have been promulgated for many years by e.g. the Greenleaves documents (DoE, 1995; DETR et al., 2000)…”

Commenting on the importance, or otherwise, of the size of an organisation, one interviewee said “I think the primary resource is the professional member of staff with good intentions and ability, so if they’ve got the aptitude and the ability to develop to achieve certain standards and take the industry forward then there’s plenty of opportunity for them to do that even if they’re in a 2-man, 3-man outfit.” The way contaminated land services are procured may have to adapt in response to the growth in self-employment and micro-enterprises. The Glover Report (2008) into public sector engagement with small and medium sized enterprises (SME) found that “although there is much good practice in both local and central government, with some real progress being made since the 2003 report, it quickly became clear from the evidence gathered that small firms still face substantial hurdles to compete on an equal footing with larger enterprises in the public sector procurement market place. This means that they lose out and that the government also misses the opportunities for innovation and better value for money that small firms can provide”.

Although not specifically addressing contaminated land, the Glover report noted that “SMEs may also be better able to supply higher quality specialist products or services than their larger competitors, either because larger suppliers are discouraged by the limited demand, or because by concentrating on niche markets SMEs can retain skills, originality and commitment in that field that are greater than those found in larger competitors.”

Glover also identified the mechanisms of public procurement as posing barriers to SMEs. The variation in pre qualification questionnaire (PQQ) formats was highlighted as leading to inefficiency by requiring respondents “to present the same routine details each time.” Despite a core PQQ being developed by the OGC, “businesses voiced exasperation at the number and variety of PQQs being used by procuring organisations that continued to create and use their own.” However is not so much the extent to which the process is inefficient but more worryingly the extent to which it may erode the delivery of better value because “PQQs tend not to allow SMEs to illustrate their specialist abilities, niche qualities or show how innovative they can be. This rigid structure can hinder and constrict innovative thinking and holds back progressive design. Many SMEs felt that PQQs should allow them to boost their bid by illustrating their unique selling point, innovative ability or the added value that they bring.” The US EPA not only encourages SME engagement, it sets targets and reports annually on the extent to which small, small disadvantaged, women-owned and disabled veteran owned businesses are sub



contracted with. The mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Small Business Programs is to support the protection of human health and the environment by advocating and advancing the business, regulatory, and environmental compliance concerns of small and socio-economically disadvantaged businesses, and minority academic institutions. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is an independent agency of the federal government created in 1953 to aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small businesses. The SBA helps Americans start, build and grow businesses. Its 2010 EPA scorecard the Small Business Administration (2011) reported that the EPA “met 3 of its 5 prime contracting goals: Small Business, Small Disadvantaged Business and Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business. However, it did not meet its prime contracting goals for Women Owned Small Business and HUBZone [Historically Underutilized Business Zone]. Fiscal year 2010 prime contracting achievement saw increases over FY2009 in Women Owned Small Business. EPA FY2010 achievement declined for Small Business, Small Disadvantaged Business, Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business and HUBZone.”

As contributions from delegates to the 2011 EPA Brownfield Conference reported, while this is neither universally welcome nor indeed seen as a panacea for engaging with all SMEs, it does bring small and specialised or local organisations to the project table.

“There’s equally a lot of public bodies generally I suppose that are failing to achieve that because they don’t make sure they’ve got the right experience and trained people in reviewing bids and so on. So, they can be the best and the worst, but I think the framework does enable good work to be recognised.”

6.1 Historical and Present Capacity in Filling “Skills Gaps” Past approaches to filling skills gaps have both achieved much and provide lessons for evaluating present and developing future capacity in filling the skills gaps identified above.

The need for guidance in contaminated land was recognised by the ICRCL in the 1970s. The ICRCL reports still contain much valuable, and often neglected, insight into land contamination issues. Significant conferences were held in Eastbourne (1989) and on methane issues at Nottingham. The 12 volume series written by Sue Herbert, Mary Harris and Mike Smith and published by CIRIA (Herbert et al. 1995) provided the main technical guidance for the sector for almost a decade. Around the same time the Department of the Environment series of what grew to be 15 Contaminated Land Reports (CLR) began to be published.

In 1997 the late Colin Ferguson’s Centre for Research into the Built Environment at the Nottingham Trent University (now the Land Quality Management Group at the University of Nottingham) identified a need for training and ran a two day course on contaminated land management. This led to the EPSRC Integrated Graduate Development Scheme funding the development of a sector driven masters course in contaminated land management initially offered as an MSc and now an MRes at the University of Nottingham. Other Universities, including Greenwich and Reading, followed with masters courses specifically in contaminated land management but only Portsmouth’s remains.

In the early days of Part 2A there was an expectation among Local Authorities that Defra or the Environment Agency would provide, or at least fund, training for regulators. In Scotland that need was met by a series of training events delivered by LQM under the auspices of the then NSCA, now EPUK, and subsidised by the then Scottish Executive. The provision of training on the then new regime was welcome and well attended. Over the middle of the past decade a programme of training organised by the CIEH gave regulators basic and in some subjects more advanced training in subjects such as geology, bioavailability, statistics and remediation. More recently the need for sector specific training in conventional disciplines such as chemistry, toxicology and statistics has been met by private sector providers (notably Atkins, ESI and LQM) and notably by the well subscribed CIEH EMAQ+ programme. Government funded initiatives such as



FirstFaraday (later the Environmental and now Environmental Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network) set up a remediation technology programme of short courses that was adopted by CL:AIRE and used by the Environment Agency within the context of its technical development framework. CIRIA and, to a lesser extent, SNIFFER have continued their long standing practice of offering training around their technical reports and more broadly on other contaminated land topics.

Inadvertently perhaps the focus on guidance in the form of publications has created a culture of over dependence on authoritative documents and an under appreciation of other sources of technical information. CLR 11 (Environment Agency 2004) “provides details of over 80 individual or sets of key publications that contain more detailed technical guidance on particular aspects of the risk management process. All the documents have been issued by authoritative bodies, such as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and its predecessor departments, the Environment Agency, the British Standards Institution and others”. CLR 11 has not been updated in 7 years – during which time a plethora of other guidance has been issued by these authoritative bodies, some of the guidance cited has been withdrawn and much additional guidance from other organisations has become available. A consultant interviewee felt that:

“There’s a lot of problems in relation to scale, there’s a tendency for a rule book approach in the [larger] firms, and they may have intent to support their juniors by giving them rules to follow, but actually they end up just being totally dominated by process with no regard to thinking about the problem...”

A preoccupation with cost or standardisation has resulted in poor quality work: “in the petroleum retail sector there’s a really endemic problem of quality because of the standardised scope of investigation and monitoring, and it may be a sensible risk management strategy from the oil company to go for an approach where they might think 90% of the problems are found and they’ll deal with things that fall outside that in a separate way, but the reality is that that poor quality standardised investigation product doesn’t promote an ability for the practitioners to develop their understanding of the problem and they rule out the chance to spend any time thinking about it because it’s reduced to such a formulaic approach.”

Recent market led approaches have filled gaps left by the above authoritative bodies but perhaps at the loss of comprehensive acceptance and perhaps in some cases of the quality control and rigour for which technical guidance from the Environment Agency had become known. A culture of only considering guidance from 'official' sources and using them as expert systems rather than decision support systems has emerged which has resulted in a degree of practitioner over reliance on guidance and less on understanding and solving site specific problems. This in turn has placed ever greater emphasis for such guidance to be up to date, robust and comprehensive while remaining succinct and accessible to the non-specialist.

The sector needs to become more aware of other sources of guidance and knowledge. If the multi-disciplinary model proposed earlier (Figure 2) is adopted then the need for contaminated land specific guidance will diminish thereby freeing up resources to focus on delivering skills for the contaminated land specialist who has to coordinate and deploy the individual disciplines.

Leitch (2006) wanted employers to be legally required to provide training for their employees. One interviewee felt that “the biggest way that change could be achieved is by enforcing some standard minimum requirements.”



7.0 Assessment of current and proposed initiatives to address industry “skills-gaps” The demand led approach envisaged by the Leitch Report has been effective for over a decade. Most initiatives have been driven by the private sector (notably Atkins, ESI and LQM), Universities (e.g. Nottingham, Sheffield, Portsmouth) or professional bodies (notably the CIEH).

Currently available initiatives largely stem from the sector realising it needs training and it has to provide it for itself. Many professional bodies and the SiLC Register require members to commit to continual professional development (CPD). Continuous professional development can take many forms (Table 15).

Commercial conferences and exhibitions continue to be good fora for information exchange but have a tendency to be ‘infomercial’. Sustainability Live and its various predecessors have been the main exhibition for the contaminated land sector in recent years. Newzeye’s conferences are providing the need met in the past by IBC, Certa and others. However the grey literature generated by such conferences has limited penetration in the sector. Commendably, EPUK tends to make the presentations at its annual workshop freely available online. Hybrid events such as Geotechnica’s seminar and exhibition and occasional field based workshops such as one organised by Zetica at their test site at Enstone Airfield in Oxfordshire to showcase their geophysical capabilities are a welcome addition. Recent innovations such as the NGO conferences and workshops are popular and well attended as they tend to be organised locally and have no or low fees. Defra has been an important supporter of these events by speaking at them and thereby securing large attendances. This helps promote shared understanding and consistency in approach across the country.

Various online fora for information dissemination and exchange have developed in recent years. The archives of the contaminated-land-strategies forum on JiscMAIL date back to 2000 and show peer-to-peer assistance among the more than 1300 subscribers in many cases. Social networking sites serve a different, less dynamic and more inter-personal forum for communication. LinkedIn has some 45 groups on topics of interest to contaminated land management practitioners. The contaminated land management LinkedIn group has over 700 members.

Table 15 Example Continuous Professional Development (CPD) Activities (Modified from Hamer, 2008)

Attending Seminar, conference or workshop Presenting Seminar, conference or workshop Attendance at SiLC training/assessor days Presenting at SiLC training or assessor days External Training courses undertaken or delivered In-house training Distance Learning programmes Presentations Lecturing on an aspect of contaminated land on a relevant MRes or MSc course Team work / technical leadership Voluntary work in support of a suitable area Involvement in working groups/focus groups/forums/panels (including IEMA) Development of skills or knowledge through work-based activities. Reading relevant journals / magazines Networking Providing training / tutoring / lecturing Writing articles for trade magazines Writing peer review papers Authoring guidance Membership of technical peer review panels External examinerships Mentoring junior colleagues Part time post graduate education Part time research degree Technical Meetings/briefings/presentations



Online learning involves either standalone material or interactive material. Standalone online training, such as that developed for monitored natural attenuation (www.howtomna.com), can only deliver limited levels of skills due to the absence of any (or limited, quasi-automated) feedback that is essential in any skills development program. Interactive skills development online essentially seeks to mimic face to face delivery without tutor and tutee being in the same room. This has been found to be effective for certain types of skills development. For example, skills in using computer programs such as CLEA, KeyCSM or the Remedial Targets Methodology lend themselves to an online delivery mechanism and are being successfully delivered by some providers. Depending on the facilitator and online learning environment, group work and individual tuition can also be effectively delivered online. However skills such as soil sampling, using a cable scanner or carrying out a walkover do not readily lend themselves to an online learning environment.

Guidance documents have an important but limited role to play in meeting future skills needs. Past experience, for example with Soil Guideline Values, has shown that a significant proportion of the sector does not read sector specific guidance. Making guidance documents available as electronic paper (be it as HTML pages or PDF files) has improved access and use of guidance but not the reading and assimilation of the guidance. For this, specific training is needed, which can include guided and structured reading or exercises which develop familiarity with the requirements of key guidance. The withdrawal of much of the planning policy guidance by the release of the National Planning Policy Framework while controversial was in part justified by the Government as a means of reducing the volume of material from over 1000 pages to under 100. However the NPPF has retained land contamination as a material consideration and raised the standards expected to be demonstrated by developers building on land affected by contamination. The updated 67 page Part 2A Statutory Guidance (Defra 2012) replaced a 190 page document including a 77 page appendix which comprised the statutory guidance (Defra 2006). The sector also complained about the overlapping and repetitious guidance pertaining to ground gas that appeared in 2007-2008 but was effectively consolidated in “The Local Authority Guide to Ground Gas” (Wilson et al. 2008).

CPD courses have long offered certificates of attendance and there is no reason why some form of summative assessment cannot be included. Such courses have been the mainstay of knowledge transfer in the sector for some of the detailed skills and have been offered by skilled specialists from the private and public sector. However their short duration means there is a limit to how much can realistically be achieved in the time available.

In house mentoring and peer review works well as long as the mentor/ reviewers are themselves sufficiently skilled both in the subject matter and in the process of knowledge transfer. The SiLC Register takes a robust approach to appointing scrutineers to assess candidate SiLCs and could become one source of suitable mentors. Other professional bodies including the Geological Society also have a system of mentors.

Specialist contaminated land postgraduate courses are offered by a few Universities (notably Nottingham, Portsmouth and Strathclyde) and most recognise the vocational nature of the subject. They represent substantial investments in terms of time and fees. Some programmes have had financial support from research councils but this funding is being stopped. However they do provide the opportunity for developing the detailed skills and understanding interviewees reported the sector needs.

The most significant barrier to any of the current schemes making a major impact on the capability gap this work has identified is the cost of providing training to develop deep skills in detailed quantitative risk assessment, options appraisal and risk evaluation. For better skills to be delivered practitioners need clients who will pay for those skills and regulators who will not accept work done at lower skills levels. Past experience has shown that these three stakeholder groups have to be tackled in parallel for a change to be effected. The regulators need to be trained in what to look for – and here the CIEH



Professional Practice Notes offer a cost effective mechanism. The clients, in this case either the local authorities outsourcing Part 2A work or developers seeking planning permission on land affected by contamination, need training on how to assess the competence of the consultants they are about to engage. Finally the practitioners, in this case either the LA staff who will be carrying out work in house or the practitioners serving LA and developer clients, need to be given the skills and the means of demonstrating they have those skills.

One unforeseen consequence of the current financial climate is a growing desire for individuals to invest in their own skills and qualifications rather than the traditional reliance on employers to fund training and education. Recent initiatives have revolved around increasing use of web based delivery and low cost self-help groups such as:

The East Land Quality Forum exemplifies the peer-to-peer model. Volunteers organise the programme and sponsors cover the venue costs. No profit is involved and no delegate fees were charged for the forum’s first three meetings in 2010/ 11. Such knowledge transfer is ad hoc and relies on the goodwill of speakers and convenors.

The Yorkshire Contaminated Land Forum has run a programme of 4 events per year since its formation in 2007. The Forum is run by a steering group from both the private and public sectors. No charges are made for Forum activities.

The North West Brownfield Regeneration Forum (NWBRForum) offers free seminars to support regeneration in the North West, promote best practice, encourage dialogue and develop partnerships

The Scottish Contaminated Land Forum links effective and sustainable rehabilitation of contaminated land to economic growth and improved quality of life. Although membership is currently free, a small charge is levied for attending its annual conference.

EMAQ+ has now introduced an on-line assessed certificated qualification

Advances in multi-media streaming technologies have permeated the sector to such an extent that they have made online training a viable option. CL:AIRE and CIRIA have followed in the footsteps of sector pioneers Keynetix in offering web based seminars (so called 'webinars'). The Environmental Sustainability KTN ran a very useful monthly conference call/ presentation on a Triad related theme (Triad is an approach to decision-making for site characterization and remediation). The University of Nottingham's long standing masters programme in contaminated land management is now delivered entirely via web based interactive lectures and webinars.

The challenge of maintaining online delegate concentration and ensuring accurate receipt of the knowledge transmitted should not be underestimated. The personality and visual dynamism of the 'in the flesh' presenter must be replaced. In the case of Keynetix this is achieved by tandem presenters who converse in the way that radio commentators of sporting events do. Delegates eavesdrop on the dialogue as the constant change in voice and occasional banter maintains attention. Formative assessment is essential if learning outcomes are to be cemented and confirmed. This can take the form of on-the-fly surveys or questionnaires or follow-up essays or coursework. Such online delivery can achieve an awareness or understanding of issues but the development of off line/ away from the keyboard skills is more difficult to achieve. A new pedagogy is emerging which still relies on the intrinsic expertise of the 'teacher' but uses new methods of coaching, mentoring and confirming.



8.0 Overall Implications for the Assessment of Contaminated Land The Draft Brownfield Skills Strategy (DBSS) (ASC & EP 2008a) identified shortages of professionals in brownfield redevelopment but these seem to have been either an artefact of the time or indeed great over estimates of the then situation. The draft strategy reported problems in contaminated land management that were only partly recognised by the stakeholders interviewed in this project. In this project, interviewee after interviewee reported the issue was strength in depth, capability and high levels skills rather than a shortfall in the number of available individuals. ”If you look at the history and training background of the average con[taminated] land practitioner I think there’s serious limitations in what they appreciate and have an understanding of and therefore they’re driven to using rule-based tools that oversimplify but are maybe suitably protective if they’re well designed approaches.” The same consultant went on “There [is] only perhaps a very small percentage of practitioners in the UK that might be regarded as being able to make the right balanced judgements about these issues.”

Poor quality land contamination reports submitted for regulatory planning approval remain a concern to both consultant and LA interviewees. The extent to which such reports divert local authority contaminated land officers from their statutory duties under Part 2A varies. However, the pressure to support development does result in curtailed timescales within which to consider land contamination issues that, as the Technoprint vs Leeds City Council case (Box 6) exemplifies, can store up problems for the future.

Local authorities work under strict public procurement rules that do not always deliver value for money when specialist skills such as contaminated land management are required. One consultant said that “I would argue that somewhere of the order of 50% of the reports that get written are not fit for purpose because there’s an insufficient appreciation of what might cause SPOSH or pollution of controlled waters to occur.”

The reportedly variable reputation of registered Specialists in Land Condition was backed by several interviewees. However when pressed for specific examples of poor performance there was virtually no tangible evidence. Indeed one interviewee “would very much encourage SILC and we do encourage builders to employ engineers who qualified with SILC; we do regard it quite highly and encourage that... it’s an indicator that they can do it right”. Schemes similar to, but with more disciplinary powers than, SiLC exist in several other domains such as the Massachusetts Licensed Site Professional (USA) and various state auditor schemes in Australia. The setting up, in January 2011, of SiLC Register Ltd, a company limited by guarantee is a welcome sign. However the present scheme would benefit greatly from formal feedback mechanism of either exemplary or poor SiLC performance.

The revised Part 2A statutory guidance (Defra 2012) recognises the role of specialist expertise in risk assessment. Some local authority contaminated land officers do not believe they have the necessary competence to carry out their roles required by the planning and contaminated land regimes. This is neither surprising nor a problem given the multi-disciplinary nature of contaminated land management. However, it can become a problem if senior management in an organisation, including a LA, fail to appreciate this and expect their contaminated land staff to be able to operate in all aspects of contaminated land management all the time.

There is a growing realisation from clients and regulators of the need for formalised competency certification for contractors and hitherto unregulated activities such as soil sampling or ground gas monitoring. While laboratory quality assurance and control has been refined over the years and UKAS now accredits water sampling and asbestos sampling, these field activities have lagged behind. These skills are more difficult to develop using online delivery and require field based activities such as those offered by, for example, Equippe Training for avoiding the dangers of underground services.

In the remediation sector, operatives may have risen through the artisan or technician route rather than the professional or academic routes. Expertise in running remediation



processes optimally is difficult to demonstrate but is becoming more appreciated as cost and sustainability become more of an issue and regulators more aware of how specific technologies can have collateral consequences such as off site migration or long term rebound. Explicit development and recognition of competence in operating remediation processes remains an undeveloped area in the sector.

Overall the UK has been successfully implementing its contaminated land policy for over three decades. The policy of pollution prevention has now been adopted across Europe and beyond. The development industry has been able to fund the vast majority of the remediation of post industrial and other land affected by contamination. Only a small proportion of land has had to be determined. Further investment by the sector in detailed skills and in maintaining a pool of general practitioners bodes well for the future. The reuse of land will be critical in the next few years if we are to emerge from the present economic situation with momentum to deliver truly sustainable urban land management.

The UK public sector has developed much technical guidance over the past four decades, a lot of which is easily and often freely available online. However updating that guidance is a rare event. The review of BS10175 (BSI, 2011), the Environment Agency’s updates to the CLEA documentation (Environment Agency 2009a,b,c) and the updated LQM/CIEH Generic Assessment Criteria (Nathanail et al. 2009) are notable exceptions however only the publically funded Agency guidance is available at no cost. Long standing peer support and exchange initiatives such as the contaminated-land-strategies JiscMAIL, North West Brownfield Forum and YCLF have been more recently joined by SoBRA and ELQF. An online, community or private sector updated website which allows its users collaboratively to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser would be one way of ensuring such guidance reflects the latest science and policy.

A need for deeper skills in developers/ clients, advisors and regulators has been identified. The regulators need to be trained in what to look for in the reports submitted to them under Planning or commissioned by them under Part 2A – and here the CIEH Professional Practice Notes offer a cost effective contribution. The clients, in this case either the local authorities outsourcing Part 2A work or developers seeking planning permission on land affected by contamination, need training on how to assess the competence of the consultants they are about to engage and on procurement that delivers value for money. Finally the practitioners, in this case either the LA staff who will be carrying out work in house or the practitioners serving LA and developer clients, need to be given the skills and the means of demonstrating they have those skills.

8.1 Suggestions for Filling Skills Gaps “It is of course, best not to allow gaps to emerge in the first place and local authorities need to be persuaded that, notwithstanding budget pressures, expensively-acquired CL skills should be retained.”

One interviewee observed “one suggestion has been to move to self-regulation... I don’t think I’d be keen on self-accreditation.” However, robust self-regulation works in other domains and may offer efficiency savings to the contaminated land management sector.

SiLC was seen as having the potential to facilitate skills development. However, its low numbers and high entry criteria are seen as barriers. SiLC should be encouraged to mature into a robust mechanism of ensuring professional services in land condition.

“I’m keen on SILC I’d like to see it expanded to cover more than just the land condition report... [I] never ask for them, I’ve never seen one.”

“I’m just keen that there’s some institution or someone who will take up the mantle for contaminated land professionals.”

Public procurement of contaminated land services should ensure the public sector remains able to benefit from the expertise and speciality of SMEs as well as the capacity of larger organisations.



The work carried out by consultants with public funds should be widely available to encourage and promote good practice and to allow poor practice to be recognised and thereby avoided in future. This will also help address a widespread but not ubiquitous failure in accountability of practitioners, something that has been encountered as a recurring theme during this research project.

Defra’s continued contribution to knowledge exchange and dissemination events should be encouraged and recognised as an opportunity for Defra to receive feedback as well as make sure its policy message is correctly transmitted.

The efforts of the private sector to promote and improve skills should be fostered and encouraged by the public sector where possible.

An online, community or private sector updated collaborative website (‘wiki’) would be one way of ensuring the large volume of technical guidance reflects the latest science and policy.



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Appendix 1

Inventory of skills for contaminated land inspection, assessment and remediation

Inventory of skills for contaminated land inspection, assessment and remediation (Modified from Nathanail & Nathanail 1996)

Contaminated land management is a complex process requiring the input of multiple disciplines. In this appendix a comprehensive list of skills needed to inspect, assess and remediate land affected by contamination has been presented in a form suitable for an individual to use to log their skills and thereby manage their future skills development plan. The Appendix may also be of use to employers seeking to encourage and where mutually beneficial support staff to further develop their skills.

The Appendix draws heavily on work presented in 1996 at a Geological Society Engineering Group conference (Nathanail & Nathanail, 1996) which in turn drew on earlier guidance from the Geological Society for those geologists working in the construction sector and seeking to become Chartered Geologists.

The Skills are broken down into the following sections:

Legal Context

Developing the conceptual site model

Phase 1 – Qualitative Risk Assessment

Collation, Synthesis and Qualitative Risk Assessment

Planning the Investigation

Parameters required for risk assessment

Evaluation of possible investigation techniques

Health and safety

Description and Classification Of Made Ground, Fill, Waste, Soil And Rock

Ground investigation

Laboratory testing

Data analysis

Risk assessment

Detailed Quantitative Risk Assessment

Remediation technologies and options appraisal

Civil engineering approaches

Broadly in situ

Broadly ex situ

Remediation to protect development from hazardous gases

Implementation of remediation projects

Phase III remediation reports

Management, administration and reporting

Professional matters

Each section is subdivided into broad subject areas. Some guidance on the applicability of these subjects is given followed by a specific paragraph describing the level of training, experience and achievement required. In some instances this is followed by a list of specific technical items, but these are examples and experience of only a few of these items will be necessary to fulfil the requirements.

The definitions used for the standards demonstrably attained are as follows:-

Ap Appreciation - a general understanding of the activity

K Knowledge - knowing how it should be done (and capable of demonstrating this)

E Experience - actually performed by the Trainee usually under supervision

Ab Ability - able to perform the activity without supervision and able to direct others successfully.

In addition, where a particular item is regarded as being a necessary component of a contaminated land manager’s experience this is indicated by * if essential. Experience in

these subjects is expected to be obtained. In exceptional circumstances a good working knowledge may suffice but the omission of a number of these would bring into question the adequacy and breadth of the training obtained. These symbols have been used sparingly and the requirements of each section have been drafted in general terms as it is intended that a wide variety of training and experience should be able to satisfy the broad objectives of each section. Additional notes on any other relevant experience and training received may be included at the end of any section. In any given situation, it is incumbent on a professional to evaluate their ability to do the job in hand.

An example is given below of the completion of the record of attaining training targets:- Skill Date of Assessment Comment

Ap K E Ab

Core Logging 5.7.91

AJB

5.9.91

AJB

5.7.92 AJB

5.7.93

AJB

AJB

5.7.93 Supervising a team of 3 geologists

Some professional bodies require maintenance of continuous professional development records and a few provide log books for documenting the evidence. Individuals are well advised to keep such a log of experience and to update it regularly, with supporting evidence. The log should be a record of the type of work carried out, illustrating the experience gained and responsibilities held. It should therefore be sufficiently detailed to allow correlation with the experience recorded in this skills inventory, but should not contain confidential information, nor need it include detailed confidential administrative information, site specific locations, etc. which are not relevant to the required experience. It should also include a record of all formal and informal training relevant to contaminated land management received, and also professional meetings and lectures which have been attended.

Skill Date of Assessment Comment Ap K E Ab Comments THE LEGAL CONTEXT (England)

Part 2A

Human Health

Controlled Waters

Ecosystems

Property and livestock

Town and Country Planning

Common Law

Environmental Damage Regulations

Other

THE LEGAL CONTEXT (Wales)

Part 2A

Human Health

Controlled Waters

Ecosystems



Common Law


Other

THE LEGAL CONTEXT (Scotland)

Part IIA

Human Health

Controlled Waters

Ecosystems



Common Law


Other

THE LEGAL CONTEXT (Northern Ireland)

Part 3


Common Law


Other

THE LEGAL CONTEXT (Other jurisdiction)

Human Health

Ground and surface water

Ecosystems


Land use Planning

EU legislation

Other

Skill Date of Assessment

Ap K E Ab Comments

DEVELOP THE CONCEPTUAL SITE MODEL

Forming a clear 3D interpretation of the ground using a series of two dimensional drawings or multi- dimensional computer- assisted models. Lateral variations must be discussed or demonstrated as well as the geological and industrial processes that have formed and modified the ground and contaminants.

The significance of variations in the geology or ground properties must be communicated to non- specialists.

Plan of sources, pathways/ barriers, receptors

Cross section(s)

Topological diagram (Table/matrix/network) clearly showing pollutant linkages

Uncertainty – parametric

Uncertainty – spatial (vertical and horizontal)

Uncertainty – temporal

Drafting narrative of key features

Evaluation and justification of possible/significant pollutant linkages

QUALITATIVE RISK ASSESSMENT

Be familiar with the types of information available from most of the potential sources listed:-

- Topographic (OS) maps (large and small scale, all previous editions).

- Town plans (OS and others)

- Trade Directories

- Published and unpublished geological maps and reports.

- Environmental Agencies records

- Planning Authority records

- Published papers

- Aerial photographs

- Previous reports on the site or nearby sites

- borehole records e.g. geotechnical, well or water monitoring

- Mining record plans

- National databases

- Archives (National, local, company specific)

Have experience of procedures for obtaining information (e.g. instigating a literature search; online ordering, visiting county libraries and archives, using search companies).

Assessment of the reliability and relevance of information from a variety of sources.

Conduct a walkover survey to identify indicators and likely sources of contamination.

- On the Site

- In the vicinity of the Site

Evaluate information obtained in terms of sources, pathways and receptors.


Ap K E Ab Comments

COLLATION, SYNTHESIS AND QUALITATIVE RISK ASSESSMENT

Record which information sources have been tried, whether fruitful or not, the nature of the information collected and its likely value at this and future stages of the investigation.

Prepare a preliminary interpretation showing interpreted conditions and areas of uncertainty.

Summarise information into tables and charts and short items of text to render the information readily accessible at a later stage.

Carry out a preliminary risk assessment to evaluate whether further work is required.

Establish the need for and Aim & Objectives of further work

PLANNING THE INVESTIGATION

Defining Site investigation objectives

Planning an investigation to evaluate potentially relevant source-pathway-receptor linkages. Including consideration of:-

- previous site uses

- location of potential receptors

- indicators of contamination

- geomorphology

- nature of strata boundaries

- sequence, thickness, variability of strata anticipated

- groundwater levels and their variability

Planning investigations for a variety of end uses and determining the important factors in each e.g.

- domestic housing development

- allotments

- open spaces

- commercial/retail development

- industrial development

- pre- purchase audit

- beginning/end of lease audit

- non-standard land uses

Design of monitoring well installations,

- groundwater monitoring; well spacing, depth of well and length of well screen

- gas monitoring; well spacing, depth of well and length of well screen

- evaluation of whether combined gas and groundwater monitoring is appropriate


Ap K E Ab Comments

PARAMETERS REQUIRED FOR QUANTITATIVE RISK ASSESSMENT

Derive parameters used in risk assessment from site investigation work; document and justify the quality and quantity required.

Have experience of how parameters may vary within strata, their relationship to strata origin and how such relationships may be investigated, e.g.

- chemical properties

- background values

- natural degradation

- toxicology of contaminants

- contaminant mobility

- Particle size distribution (PSD)

- Soil organic matter (SOM)

- pH

- Fraction of organic carbon (FOC)

- Loss on ignition (LOI)

- Other

How parameters may vary with different previous site uses.

EVALUATION OF POSSIBLE INVESTIGATION TECHNIQUES

Methods of investigation including depth range, size and manoeuvrability of equipment, time required, relative costs, capabilities and limitations. Direct experience of some of supervising, logging and sampling from the following methods will be required.

- trial pitting/trenching

- cable percussion drilling

- rotary drilling

- sonic drilling

- Direct push (e.g. window sampling, probe holes)

- geophysical methods

Groundwater monitoring including identifying Light and Dense Non aqueous liquids (LNAPLs & DNAPLs)

Ground gas monitoring;

- concentrations,

- pressures,

- flow rates

- barometric pressure

- in- situ permeability tests

- head space test

- pH/conductivity/DO/temperature meter

Sample packing and handling requirements for various contaminants

Dispatching samples for off site analysis

HEALTH AND SAFETY

Have experience in producing Health and Safety risk assessments.

Operate under Construction Design & Management (CDM) Regulations

Be Supervisor under CDM regulations

Skill Date of Assessment Comment

Ap K E Ab

DESCRIPTION AND CLASSIFICATION OF MADE GROUND, FILL, WASTE, SOIL AND ROCK

Demonstrate experience in the use of standard descriptive terminology for soils and rocks, their properties and fabric. Experience is required in drawing detailed and consistent pit, face and borehole logs to recognised standards.

Be able to describe materials for which standardised methods do not apply (e.g. heterogeneous Waste)

Appreciate the difference between description and classification and use them correctly, be familiar with some of the systems; the essential features on which the systems are based and the differences between them. e.g. systems for:

Weathering

Chalk

Upper Lias

Mercia Mudstone

Be able to write intelligible summaries of ground conditions, identifying the main characteristics whilst also expressing the variability and uncertainty.

GROUND INVESTIGATION

Demonstrate experience of control and supervision of a variety of routine ground investigation methods:-

- trial pitting

- probe holing

- cable percussion boring

- rotary drilling

- sampling in soil and rock

- monitoring well installation

Planning, carrying out and interpretation of investigations of groundwater chemistry, levels and flow.

- monitoring well installation

- pumping tests

- rising/falling head tests

- slug tests

- packer tests know about not do

- collection of representative groundwater samples

- measurement of groundwater levels and LNAPL

- levelling survey of monitoring wells

Demonstrate a knowledge of all and experience in the use of some of the following less common methods.

- Dutch cone penetration testing

- piston sampling

- in situ density tests


Ap K E Ab Comments

Demonstrate experience in methods of monitoring ground gas conditions:-

- probe holes

- installation of gas monitoring wells

-use of meteorological information to determine need for sampling

- measurement of concentrations

- measurement of gas pressures

- measurement of gas flow rates

- collection of gas samples for offsite analysis

- use of GasClam

Understand how to use the outputs of geophysical techniques to inform the conceptual model. Techniques used may be some of the following;

- seismic reflection

- seismic refraction

- electrical resistivity and conductivity

- magnetometer

- gravimeter

- ground radar

- borehole sonde geophysics

- crosshole seismic

Other:-


Ap K E Ab LABORATORY TESTING

Sample disturbance, the chemical and physical changes that occur in samples with time and how these affect the test results.

Effects of sample size and fabric on test results.

Scheduling tests for contaminants in soil, water & gas:

Soil (Chemistry)

- Heavy metals

- Cyanides

- Asbestos

- Semi Volatile Organic Compounds (SVOC)

- Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC)

- Chlorinated solvents

- Petroleum Hydrocarbons

- Polychlorinated Biphenols (PCB)

- Dioxins/ Furans

- Pesticides/ herbicides

- Explosives

- Leachability

Water (Chemistry)

- Biological & Chemical Oxygen Demand (BOD & COD)

- Total Dissolved Solids (TDS)

- pH

- Eh

- Turbidity

Soil (geomechanical)

- Plasticity

- Particle size

- Compaction

- Moisture content

- Organic content

- Combustibility

Gas

- Composition

- Isotope analysis

Specialist testing equipment and have detailed knowledge of a few methods. e.g.

- Atomic Absorption

- Induction Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICPMS)

- Bioaccessibility tests

- Plant uptake


Ap K E Ab Investigating geotechnical circumstances; the strength, deformability, durability and permeability of a range of soils and rocks.

DATA ANALYSIS

Graphical and tabular summaries of data

Statistical Summary of data sets

Validity and use of non spatial statistical tests

Validity and use of geostatistical techniques

Contour plotting, including validity of different contouring techniques

Depth plots including relating depth of contamination to geological strata

Use of GIS

Other:


Ap K E Ab

GENERIC QUANTITATIVE RISK ASSESSMENT

Understand principles laid out in legislation and associated guidance including e.g.

- source- pathway- receptor framework

- suitable for use

- significant harm

- significant possibility of significant harm

- [significant] pollution of controlled waters

- [significant possibility of significant] pollution of controlled waters

Four stages of risk assessment:

- Hazard identification

- Hazard assessment

- Risk estimation

chronic risks to human health

acute risks to human health

risks to controlled waters (ground)

risks to controlled waters (surface)

risks to protected habitats

risks to structures

risks to adjacent property

other receptor

- Risk evaluation

chronic risks to human health

acute risks to human health

risks to controlled waters (ground)

risks to controlled waters (surface)

risks to protected habitats

risks to structures

risks to adjacent property

other receptor

Toxicology

- Selecting Health Criteria Values

- Deriving Health Criteria Values

- Deriving Mean Daily Intake values

Quantitatively assessing the risks to human health.

Using exposure assessment models such as:

- CLEA

- RISC

- GASSIM

- RBCA

- C-SOIL


Ap K E Ab - Other (specify)

Modelling the fate of mobile contaminants.

Using groundwater models such as:

RBCA

Consim

EA Remedial Targets Methodology

DETAILED QUANTITATIVE RISK ASSESSMENT

Human Health Risk Assessment


- Hazard characterisation

- Risk estimation

- Risk evaluation

- Risk communication

Ecological Risk Assessment



- Risk estimation

- Risk evaluation


Groundwater risk assessment



- Risk estimation

- Risk evaluation


Surface water risk assessment



- Risk estimation

- Risk evaluation


Assessment of risks to property



- Risk estimation

- Risk evaluation


Ground gas risk assessment



- Risk estimation

- Risk evaluation


Ap K E Ab - Risk communication

Unexploded Ordnance risk assessment



- Risk estimation

- Risk evaluation


Asbestos in soil and made ground

- - Hazard identification


- Risk estimation

- Risk evaluation



Ap K E Ab REMEDIATION TECHNOLOGIES AND OPTIONS APPRAISAL

Knowledge of remediation technologies and in what circumstances they may be appropriate

Have experience in determining the appropriate remediation strategies for given end uses.

Options appraisal process.

Sustainable remediation appraisal process.

CIVIL ENGINEERING APPROACHES

Excavation, Off-site disposal of contaminated soil and Infilling void

– waste classification

Containment Cover systems

Containment Vertical barriers

Containment - hydraulic barriers

Application of CL:AIRE Definition of Waste: Development Industry Code of Practice

BROADLY IN SITU

Soil vapour extraction/venting and bioventing

Air sparging and biosparging

In situ flushing

in situ bioremediation

Pump and treat

Permeable reactive barriers

Redox amendments for enhanced bioremediation

In situ oxidation techniques

Electro-remediation

Phytoremediation

Energy forestry

Monitored natural attenuation

In situ thermal desorption

Ground heating

- Electric resistive heating

- Thermal conduction heating

- Steam heating

Hydraulic Fracturing techniques

Pneumatic fracturing


Ap K E Ab BROADLY EX SITU

Ex situ bioremediation (biopiles, windrows, landfarming, slurry phase)

Soil washing and related ex situ treatments

Solidification/stabilisation

Thermal treatments (thermal desorption, incineration)

Vitrification

Ex situ groundwater and vapour treatment

REMEDIATION TO PROTECT DEVELOPMENT FROM HAZARDOUS GASES

Dilution and dispersion of gases in-ground

Gas barriers in-ground

Dilution and dispersion of gases for buildings

Gas barriers for buildings

Long-term post-construction monitoring for gases

IMPLEMENTATION OF REMEDIATION PROJECTS

Confirm remediation strategy

Prepare Implementation Plan

Design remediation treatment

Obtain Environmental Permits

Demonstrate experience of supervision of remediation projects as a consultant or a contractor. This should include:

compiling method statements /commenting on contractors method statements

attending site to supervise/ witness the remediation

liaising with Planning Supervisor to ensure compliance with Health and Safety legislation.

Design and carry out statistically valid confirmatory sampling.

Liaising with the Environmental agencies and other bodies

REMEDIATION REPORTS

Compiling comprehensive documentation relating to remediation.

Preparing Verification Reports

Establish lines of evidence to verify remediation from the CSM

Obtaining final approval of the remediation from the Environmental agencies.

Other:


Ap K E Ab MANAGEMENT, ADMINISTRATION AND REPORTING

Know the component parts of one's organisation, chains of authority and administration systems.

Know how documentation of various types is processed, maintained, issued, stored and retained in office and on site.

Have experience in the use of the component parts of a Tender or Contract Document and how they are related and the authority they convey to the various parties to the Contract.

Have experience of administering a Contract (as Consultant, Client or Contractor) or working under Conditions of Contract.

Have experience of administering or working under Technical Specifications for investigation or remediation, including the use of Bills of Quantity.

Understand the duties and responsibilities of the Client, the Consultant, the Contractor, the Regulators and the public, how conflicts between them are resolved.

Understand what work constitutes a Variation under the Contract, how Variations arise, are authorised and paid for. Understand how these Variations affect the Contract period.

Have experience in dealing with or formulating claims and how Contract provisions and documentation apply. Obtain experience in the collection of data for the evaluation of claims.

Demonstrate experience in compiling well-structured reports with well-presented data, well-argued risk assessments and in good English and in giving oral presentations to clients or colleagues.

Demonstrate experience in programming and running a Project to time and budget.

Demonstrate experience in the use of computer technology to process data and for design, e.g. spreadsheets, databases, geographic information systems etc.

Have experience of critically reviewing one's own technical performance and the quality of work on one’s projects. Demonstrate a commitment to maintain technical and professional standards.

Other:

PROFESSIONAL MATTERS


Ap K E Ab Take an active interest in the affairs of a relevant Professional Body, Learned Society or Trade Group by attendance at meetings.

Know, understand and abide by the relevant Professional Body Code of Conduct.

Have a sound understanding of one's professional responsibility to one's company, client and society.

Have an awareness of relevant state of the art of research in the profession e.g. by reading technical journals and attending conferences.

Have an understanding of relevant Health and Safety practices and standards.

Attend a recognised relevant safety course.

Have an understanding of how one's work affects society in general and the environment.

Demonstrate a commitment to continuing education by attendance at seminars, conferences and evening meetings.

Take an active interest in current affairs, in particular, how they affect one's industry, both nationally and internationally.

Others:-

SP1003 Appendix 2 Wordles of interview transcripts Appendix 2

Wordles of interview transcripts

SP1003 Appendix 2 Wordles of interview transcripts

Figure A2-1 Wordle of an interview with a Public Sector Service Manager

Figure A2-2 Wordle of an interview with a Regulator


Figure A2-5 Wordle of an interview with a Professional Body Representative



Figure A2-7 Wordle of an interview with a Professional Body Representative




Figure A2-12 Wordle of an interview with a Consultant



Figure A2-14 Wordle of an interview with a Consultant