The potential dangers of contaminated land do not stand out to prospective purchasers when the door opens on the property of their dreams, spruced up and dressed for sale.
However, neglecting to investigate potential contamination on a property could spell trouble for buyers and the environment. Failing to conduct due diligence might mean hefty clean-up costs, health risks and legal issues for the new owners down the line. The spread of contaminants could harm not just the property but also the homes of neighbours and the local community.
It is the conveyancer’s responsibility to ensure home movers are fully aware of and safeguarded against the financial and environmental hazards associated with contaminated land.
The importance of due diligence
Bypassing environmental assessments to speed property transactions and reduce costs is both a false economy and dangerous. The Law Society notes:
“…you should consider in all conveyancing transactions whether land contamination is an issue.”
The only way to identify contaminated land issues is with an environmental search.
Should the environmental search expose contaminated land, the Environmental Protection Act applies the polluter pays principle, which aims to charge the original contaminator, but that is not always possible. There is strict liability on property owners for remediation costs, regardless of when the contamination occurred – even if the owner takes on the property decades after the contamination happened and the original contaminator cannot be found. Failing to disclose known contamination issues can also expose sellers and conveyancers to legal action for misrepresentation.
There are instances in which the costs for dealing with the contamination have exceeded a property’s market value, and that has plunged new private owners into negative equity and turn a dream forever home into a millstone. The importance of technical and legal due diligence regarding contaminated land cannot be understated. Where an environment search throws up a ‘Further Action’ on a property, it is on the conveyancer to dig deeper, to act further.
Article originally published by Landmark Information Group
The strong winds and torrential rains of Storm Babet made landfall on 18 October 2023. Storm Babet was named after a woman who visited a Dutch weather agency KMNI open day and asked for her name to be used “because [she] was born during a storm.”
Discover the Meteorological Insights
What was the human impact?
• 7 killed
• 2,146 properties flooded
• 100,000 people affected by power cuts
Most affected: East Scotland, Derbyshire, North Wales, County Cork.
Environment Agency (EA) confirmed 100,000 properties were protected with 20 high-volume pumps and five small-volume pumps deployed across several sites. EA’s flood warning service sent out over 300,000 messages by email, telephone and text during Storm Babet.
The impact on businesses
Inchcape JLR dealership in Derby, which opened in 2019 on the city’s former cattle market, closed due to damage
caused by the River Derwent flooding.
It was reported that despite Environment Agency concerns the “dealership would end up under two metres of water – or more – in a ‘one in 100-year’ flood,” Derby City Council had approved the development.
Landmark pulled an Argyll Environmental report on the dealership’s site, and the data is clear: the development site was at moderate to high risk of flooding with moderate groundwater, surface pluvial and other factors putting it at risk of flooding.
There is even considerable history of flooding in this location, which would make insuring the plot challenging– and certainly expensive.
Discover Landmark’s analysis of this site.
Article originally published by Landmark Information Group.
Our recent webinar ‘The Law Society Guidance on the Impact of Climate Change on Solicitors: What does this mean for solicitors?’ is now available to watch on demand.
The webinar, hosted by Landmark, focussed on The Law Society Guidance on the Impact of Climate Change on Solicitors, and was originally shown on the 4th May.
The webinar was specifically designed for solicitors as a tool to help them understand the guidance and its implications.
The session covers two main areas of the guidance.
- Firstly, reducing the climate change impact of the law firm and its clients, which includes assessing annual carbon emissions and setting targets to achieve net zero by 2050.
- Secondly, the guidance examines climate change risks, including the duties of advising and warning clients about such risks.
Our distinguished speakers are Kirsty Green-Mann, Head of Corporate Responsibility at Burges Salmon LLP, Professor Robert Lee at Birmingham University, and Simon Boyle, Environmental Lawyer at Landmark.
AGENDA:
- Summary of the Law Society Guidance and what this means for solicitors’ advice
- What’s the role that a law firm plays in reducing its carbon footprint and disclosing climate-related risks and opportunities?
- An overview of how Burges Salmon has implemented Net Zero
- Panel Discussion: What are the requirements for lawyers to fulfil the guidance and next steps for them
- Q&A
To watch the webinar on demand, please visit this page, and fill in the form.
This survey and guide reveals how a desire for more information about climate and the environment may start changing residential conveyancing processes.
The transition to Net Zero is a long term goal, but it’s clear home movers are factoring climate change into their decisions now. Our parent company Landmark’s survey shows there’s already a desire for more data, earlier in the process. It’s a revealing snapshot.
Download the guide to find out:
- Residential conveyancers views on who is responsible for advising on climate change
- The percentage of home movers prepared to invest in energy efficiency measures
- How agents and conveyancers are handling the need for a Net Zero strategy
- What percentage of firms are reporting on future climate change risks to their clients
Residential estate agents and conveyancers are trusted to source the right information at the right time. This survey shows that many firms want more guidance from authoritative organisations on the provision of climate change information to home movers.
Landmark Information Group provides climate data to colleagues working in every part of the property industry’s value chain. Our work includes surveys and reports like this one, surfacing insights on subjects such as Climate Change, Digital Transformation, and the Home Mover Experience.
Download the guide, understand colleagues’ views on reporting around climate change and information exchange with vendors and purchasers.
Complete the form, we’ll send our guide – View on Climate Change Information in Residential Conveyancing – straight to your in-box.
Introducing the Landmark Climate Change Report: Helping property professionals, property investors and businesses to understand how climate change could impact a property.
It is highly important to start reporting on climate change and the numbers can prove it:
- 2022 was officially the warmest year on record for the UK (Source: BBC)
- Large-scale action in all sectors of the economy will be required, including tackling emissions generated by the building stock, which accounts for 31% of our national emissions. (Souce: Gov.uk)
- 25 percent of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to the built environment. (Source: parliament.uk)
The Landmark Climate Change Report is a desktop report, designed to enable property professionals to understand how climate change could impact a given residential or commercial property. Unlike other reports in the market, it benefits from understanding the concerns of both:
- Physical risks [flooding, subsidence, heat stress, coastal erosion]
- Transition risks [energy performance]
The report is property specific, based on a UPRN, and doesn’t stop with providing just data; delivered in an intuitive format Landmark Climate Change Report gives property professionals the ability to inform clients with advice and recommendations relating to climate change.
Who is this report for?
The Landmark Climate Change Report is for real estate lawyers and residential conveyancers¿ who want to provide best practice due diligence and inform their clients on future climate change risks
The report gives the ability to inform on short, medium and long-term physical and transitional climate-related risks for a specific property with advice and recommendations if appropriate, delivered in an intuitive format unlike current reports in the market which provide unsupported data and little explanation in every environmental report, regardless of requirements.
Further reading
Landmark asked leading experts in their property-related fields to contribute to a white paper, which sets out the physical and transitional risks that the industry faces – and proposes workable solutions to the challenge of reporting on and responding to the risks.
Read the executive summary of the Landmark Climate Change white paper here
Additionally, you can also check out a series of Landmark blog posts here:
- A duty to warn of climate-related risks
- How property lawyers can act now on climate change
- Reflections at the end of COP 27
- Climate change: there is no time left for prevarication or procrastination
- Climate change: you can’t fix what you don’t measure
This is a snippet of a blog post written by Simon Boyle, a solicitor from Landmark Information Group, reflecting on thoughts post-COP 27. To read the full post, click here.
The 27th Conference of the Parties held at Sharm el-Sheikh has drawn to a close. As with the previous COPs it has had mixed results. There was a positive development in the agreement to set up the loss and damage fund to help the poorest countries- but overall it did not deliver that which was urgently needed- a binding target on the big emitters whose economies are still mainly powered by fossil fuels. At the start of the conference Alok Sharma (President of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference and British Politician) warned that this was the last opportunity that world leaders had to ensure that the global temperature would not exceed 1.5 degrees c.
But with the failure to agree on binding targets, especially from the three biggest emitters China, US and India, it is looking almost certain that the critical 1.5°C goal set by the Paris COP in 2015 is not going to be achieved.
This should be ringing alarm bells across the world. We are already experiencing the effects of climate change from the 1.1°C rise that we have had so far. And of course, things will get a lot worse once we get to the 1.5°C of warming. But it is at least far better than a 2°C rise within the next 20 years.
That extra half degree additional increase may sound relatively modest but the global effects on both ecosystems and humans would be profound. For example, at 1.5°C of warming 8 % of plants will lose their habitable area but this doubles to 16% at a 2°C rise. A 1.5°C rise is predicted to destroy 70% of the world’s coral reefs but a 2°C rise will wipe them out entirely.
You can read Simon’s full post on the Landmark blog page here. To read more blogs from Landmark, click here.