 This is an over 30 year long story about my involvement with contaminated sites and helping communities get action to clean them up. It's innately connected to my hometown, Banbury, an average small town on the border between the Midlands and the South East. Yet in the 1980s this place taught me about the issues of waste disposal and land contamination. Not because it was exceptional, but because these issues affect almost every community across Britain. Despite warnings about the issues of contaminated land since the 1960s, governments have failed to act to create a comprehensive system to track down, assess and where necessary decontaminate these sites. Climate change is important, but it has pushed other pressing ecological issues off the agenda. Like climate change, land contamination is a direct result of historic industrialisation. It is done. Now we have to manage those impacts. Unfortunately climate change will make those impacts far worse. At the centre of Banbury along the river is Spicebord Park. Spicebord Park is reclaimed land. Bought by the local corporation in the 1880s it was filled with spoil and the ash from waste and coal burning dumped on the low lying land to raise it up. This carried on for almost a century until 1974. That date is significant. In 1974 the control of pollution act was enacted, which commenced the first true regulation of waste disposal in Britain. Many sites like this were closed before the law took effect. Most were then quietly forgotten about. Delving to the undergrowth though, especially where the rabbits have excavated the soil beneath, and you will find incinerated Victorian and Edwardian waste. And the soil itself is very black. The particular problem here of the levels of metals, especially lead, is not the sort of stuff that should be dug up and moved elsewhere, but that's exactly what happened in the early 1990s. The contractor building the new link road to the M40 excavated the spoil from the park and used it to reclaim farmland a short distance away. Then things turned nasty and litigious, once it was discovered what that spoil contained. What finally precipitated action to create a legal framework was the need to enact European laws on waste and pollution. This was done for the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Section 143 of the Environmental Protection Act introduced new laws on contaminated land. It gave the government powers to say what contamination was and how it should be recorded. It also created an obligation on local authorities to investigate their areas and draw up public registers of land which may be contaminated. Section 61 of the Act also gave powers to local waste authorities to inspect closed landfill sites and institute cleanup operations if they were deemed necessary. For example, if such a public register had existed then everyone should have known what was in Spiceball Park. The world would have been a much better place for such a register. In the event though the development industry and land owning interests strangled it. Pressure from the industry forced not one but three consultations on contaminated land registers between May 1991 and November 1994. There was also opposition from local authorities in former industrial areas. The second consultation in May 1992 listed fewer types of land use but didn't fare any better. Then on the 24th of March 1993 the government capitulated to the pressure from development interests. Michael Howard, Secretary of State for the Environment announced that Section 143 would not be enacted and that all plans for public registers would be put on hold. In his written answer to the House of Commons he stated that the review would consider The powers and duties of public authorities which relate to the identification, assessment and appropriate treatment or control of land that could cause pollution of the environment or harm to human health. Having regard to the need to minimise costs which exist in a new regulatory burden placed on the private sector. After a year and a half of wrangling a new consultation was issued in November 1994. New powers were then drafted in the Environment Act 1995 which created a convoluted system to protect land owning interests. As the last delaying measure, though enacted in July 1995, the new powers were not commenced in law until the 1st of April 2000, almost five years later. The result of the new framework was to weaken the power of regulators further meaning developers have often won appeal cases heaping the cleanup costs on local authorities. By the early 2000s I had given up trying to work on contaminated land. In part that was the result of my work on the incinerator ash campaign at Bico in Tyneside where the council recycled toxic incinerator ash on parks and allotments, poisoned local people with cancer-causing compounds and walked away over any serious penalties for that negligence. The official obstacles were too great to make progress. Government closed ranks within the remnant industry and local authorities just didn't want to know about local sites in case it created financial abilities for them. Despite this, I knew I would return to this issue one day. It was so obvious that there would be a disaster and that one day I would be fated to walk into some people who had been subject to the multiple failures of this flawed system and had suffered harm as a result. Just when it appeared the Compromise and the Environment Act had settled down, the camera and government's deregulatory zeal weakened the system further. Not satisfied with just disbanding the advisory bodies through investigators' use issues such as the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, they also took an axe to the regulations. In 2012, the government published a new statutory guidance. This put emphasis on ensuring the burdens faced by individuals, companies and society as a whole were proportionate and manageable. Enforcing authorities were only to use the law where no appropriate alternative existed. Likewise, local authorities are specifically forbidden from using their powers of entry to take samples or enforcement action if the owner or developer offered to voluntarily provide funding or information. Creating an issue as to how results might be validated. This is a problem as the guidance makes it clear the authority must seek to minimise unnecessary burdens on the taxpayer, businesses and individuals and encourage voluntary action to deal with land contamination issues as far as it considers reasonable and practicable. In many cases that will require not taking any enforcement action at all. For example, one notable post-war business in this area was Banbury Buildings. They produced prefabricated agricultural and industrial buildings clad in cement bonded asbestos. Every day a lorry or two would go to Watford and return with a load of asbestos sheets. The prefabrication process inevitably resulted in sheets being cut or broken producing waste. Where did the waste go? The high hills around Banbury are formed by a hard layer of ironstone. This has been mined for iron production from at least Roman times until the 1960s. It is still mined for aggregate. Large areas have been removed but many small quarries are dotted around the area. Banbury Buildings use these small holes in the ground and local disused railway cuttings as convenient spots to get rid of their asbestos waste. As Banbury nearby villages get bigger they push out across the ironstone slab at which point finding filled ground becomes more likely including sites filled with Banbury Buildings asbestos. In the application for one recent development the developer indicated that there was no documentary evidence from a period in time when records were not required to be kept that tipping had taken place on their site. In the circumstances the council were not in a position to demand a detailed site investigation. The developers believed to have found one of these asbestos sites when work started. That's another issue here, confidentiality. As developers proffer commercially confidential information to local councils in many cases councils may be unable to release those details to the public. In reality though the thousands of small contaminated sites across the country are a minor problem. If we look ahead to a future where climate change makes our complex society more uncertain in terms of maintenance and regulation there is a greater problem that isn't even regarded as such today. The economics of waste disposal mean that sites are large. Likewise as pollution control processes have cleaned up industrial emissions which would have once been emitted to the air or water the concentrated toxins from those scrubbing processes have to go somewhere and often they end up in landfill sites. Most landfill sites in Britain today take inert waste. A smaller number take a mixture of biodegradable and or hazardous waste. Biodegradable and hazardous waste sites operate the dry tomb principle. The site is lined with clay and often a plastic liner. When filled cells are covered with clay and a plastic liner. Gas is coming off the top of captured and burnt to reduce pollution and the leachate produced by the waste is drained from the bottom of the site and treated to reduce its polluting impact. As the inside of the cell becomes drier gas and leachate production falls and eventually will pretty much stop. That doesn't solve the problem though. To keep the waste stable the impermeable liner has to be maintained forever. If the cap fails and water gets in leachate and gas production will begin again. As the water level rises it will then slowly leak the pollution it contains. This means the site must be preserved in its highly engineered state for centuries or millennia to come and in many cases kept clear of trees or scrub whose roots might damage the lined sails below. There is just such a site north of Bambry, Alcatoun landfill site. It sits inside a former ironstone quarry but at 175 meters or 575 feet above sea level it also sits well above the streams which feed the river Chirwell and then the Thames. If the site becomes unstable and the cap sinks or trees grow on top water might penetrate and then leak from the site into the local environment. As climate change increases heavy rainfall that's not only a challenge for sites like Alcatoun but especially the many landfills built in gravel workings on flood plains. Here changing water levels and erosion might breach the site's liner system mobilising the pollution they contain. This isn't even the worst climate change related aspect of landfill practice today. Some of the cheapest land to buy is Saltmarsh because of its low agricultural value. For decades Britain has been land raising on salt marshes that is heaping up waste into low hills rather than filling in holes. We sea level rise as these sites are at or just above sea level that may soon be below sea level where not only will water get in but waves and storms can erode the waste sails and their impermeable liners spinning their contents. In 2017 researchers at the University of London published a study for the Environment Agency. It estimated 1264 landfill sites in England were at risk of flooding or erosion if sea defences were not maintained. In a 2019 follow-up study they focused on two sites in the Thames estuary. This highlighted the severity of marine pollution should these sites begin to erode. The Committee on Climate Change is a government's chief advisor on climate matters. In their 2018 study of the risks of sea level rise they considered the impact on coastal landfills. Their estimate was at just 55 sites were at risk. The University of London's 2017 study found that number just along the south coast and in contrast to the Committee on Climate Change's figure a more recent study from 2020 put the estimate at 1,700 sites in England and Wales. Those with close ties to the government are failing to see how contaminated land and climate change impacts interact, arguably because of the economic groupthink which dominates government today. In reality this failure process has already started. A number of coastal landfills are already being eroded. Research in the Thames valley has found that many former landfill sites are already leaching significant quantities of pollution into the river as flooding increases. At the end of September 2021 a new global study of landfill risk was published. Though just a snapshot of this global problem it highlighted the major impact sea level rise would have on landfills in Germany and the low countries as well as the USA. We may think we have a problem with plastics and waste in the ocean today. What happens in the future when each incoming flood tide washes more eroded waste across coastal floodplains. In November 2014 I had a gig in Guildford. During the meeting I talked to Kai Gambola and Nicole Lawler. In the Thames valley floods nine months before their son Zane had died in his bed of heart failure. Kai was paralysed and now uses a wheelchair. Their symptoms were consistent with cyanide poisoning. The case was exactly the kind of tragic event I knew would arise back in the 1990s after Michael Howard cancelled section 143. The landfill behind their house from which the water flowing through their property was issuing was not considered to be a landfill. It was cut off from the main site by the construction of the M3 and was not registered under the control of Pollution Act. When more stringent controls and registered sites were enacted in 1994 it passed and noticed as it was considered to be an historic site. And despite the environment agency internally flagging the landfill gas risk as part of a nearby lock house development. Irrespective of the possible risks the local authority was not going to press for a thorough investigation due to the disempowering nature of first Michael Howard's 1993 then David Cameron's 2012 contaminated land policies. When the Farber Gate entered the house their cyanide alarms activated. We now know from recent disclosures by Public Health England that Fertiver testing did find cyanide at levels sufficient to kill Zane and paralysed his father. They did not find carbon monoxide. Despite this Downing Street deliberately spun this event as a carbon monoxide poisoning to cover up the facts known at the time. This official version would be the determination of the much delayed inquest where none of this information held by public agencies was presented. In this case though we have a death attributable to cyanide poisoning in an area of Surrey where nearby landfills are known to have received cyanide contaminated wastes. Zane's death could be the first where we can clearly point to climate trends amplifying the contamination of the environment by waste dumping. But from the Prime Minister's office on down there is evidence of intent to bury not only the cause of Zane's death but more generally any acknowledgement of the severity of the ecological crisis. Solving this begins by valuing the future of our children not abstract land values. We are all put at risk by the government's willing ignorance in the face of the evidence and clear intent to prioritise abstract economic values over their basic duty to protect the public's well-being. This is fundamentally a human rights issue not just a pollution one. In failing to act to protect public health and instead choosing consistently to favour the financial interests of politically connected developers and large landowners the government are failing to guarantee the public's right to life. This is because the right to life is not financially qualified it cannot be traded against the abstract financial assets of their donors. At the recent UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva a proposal to create a human right to a clean environment was tabled for discussion. This would certainly mandate strong action on contaminated land. Two nation states were hostile to that idea the USA and Britain. Despite their opposition this new right to a clean environment was passed on the 8th of October. We wait expectantly to see how this might affect future environmental laws. At no point in this over 30 year saga of land contamination and the influence of the land lobby has the government once discharged its principal obligation to protect the public's well-being. Instead it has consistently sided with the property rights lobby a lobby that is currently providing a quarter to a fifth of the conservative party's financial contributions. This structural block in our political process which serves a narrow economic sectional interest rather than general public well-being is stalling action on the difficult issues we need to confront as part of climate adaptation. Yes that means dealing with our past legacy of land contamination. However what many politicians fail to consider is the increasing rainfall, flooding and sea level rise have the potential to turn the present generations state-of-the-art waste sites into future toxic millstones as we struggle to maintain them against the changing climate. That process has already started. The death of Zane Bambola is but one example of the beginnings of this process of unraveling.