A Brown a Pleasant Land: Household Growth and Brownfield Sites
Parliamentary and wider debate about where the households of the future might be located will be ill-informed unless it uses a logical, systematic and embracing classification of brownfield sites.
This was a main conclusion of a report published by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST).
POST emphasises that:
- By no means all brownfield sites are in urban areas
- Not all brownfield sites are contaminated
Defining brownfield sites as any land that has been previously developed, the report suggests that maximising its economic use offers a good opportunity to reduce the loss of greenfield land and can also make a wider contribution to improving life in towns and cities.
The report identified a number of significant barriers that were stopping the full potential from being achieved-not least being the lack of an agreed conception of what consitutes brownfield sites. POST says these may include vacant plots, empty homes, and redundant buildings, as well as the land more traditionally associated with the term derelict brownfield sites or contaminated land, and land with difficult ground conditions (eg. 'made ground', underground tanks and basements, or land with unconsolidated soils).
The report suggests that among the benefits of using brownfield sites are opportunities to enhance urban living through the creation of more contained, small-scale mixed use development land, or urban villages, illustrated by the Millennium Village on the site of the former Greenwich gas works. Here, contaminated land is being cleaned up and a new urban neighbourhood is being created that combines good urban design, environmentally friendly buildings and transport systems, and a diverse mix of housing, commercial, leisure and community facilities on the development land.
Despite these obvious 'opportunity pulls', as the report describes such benefits, there are many 'development frictions' that create obstacles to realising the full potential of such sites. The main ones include a raft of regulatory, administrative, scientific, and financial uncertainties, in particular:
- Continuing delays in the introduction of a legal system for dealing with the most serious land contamination;
- Debates over the traditional 'dig and dump' approach to site rehabilitation versus more 'sustainable' novel techniques such as using bacteria to clean up contamination;
- Unwillingness of many local authorities to release previous employment land for housing; and
These frictions could be overcome, says POST, through a combination of technical, financial and planning-related measures.
The options which the report examines include:
- Ensuring that the National Land Use Database being compiled by the Government is as comprehensive as possible, through using the definition of brownfield sites developed by POST and, in collecting and disseminating information on the condition of development land;
- Introducing systems for priority identification of development land on brownfield sites;
- Strengthening guidance on dealing with polluted and contaminated brownfield land;
- Introducing economic incentives for brownfield sites and land development, eg. financial levies on greenfield development, balanced by tax credits on brownfield development; tax penalties for owners of vacant land or property and harmonisation of VAT between refurbishment and new-build;
- Encouraging the wide range of professionals involved in the process of redeveloping brownfield sites to increase their level of knowledge of the issues, and possibly creating a minimum level of qualification in each area;
- Incorporating lay people's views fully into official assessments of the risks faced from land contamination and other hazards.
Overall, many of these elements could be brought together into a coherent and coordinated policy to increase the number of new homes built on brownfield land.
This could seek to integrate issues relating to meeting people's housing aspirations, regeneration, minimising deprivation and exclusion, improving current housing conditions and building sustainable mixed-use communities, as well as redeveloping brownfield land.
Source: United Kingdom Parliament - Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, 23.07.1998
