You asked about software and about remediation notices. On notices, the EA
were to develop one for their use on Special Sites. I do not know how
available that is, or whether it has moved on from a fairly limited first
draft.
A few points to remember on choosing software.
1) there are some quite specific public register requirements for Part IIA
are quite specific. Land goes on this once it has the remediation notice.
So whatever the system used, it will need a link to producing the public
register.
2) a system that stores other - "wider"- information and has some form of
assessment mechanism is going to need some rules on access and information
release, managing confidentiality etc.
3) There are different "levels" of information storage and functionality in
the possible system, hence the differences in systems (to some extent)
a) simple map based data, either large or small scale to both develop and
reflect the overall strategy and to start to capture individual areas of land
b) a next stage up from this, which has other data overlayed - receptors,
possible contamination sources, zones of influence etc. This helps in
absolute prioritisation, eg by receptor or contaminant type (these priorities
should be set in the strategy), and in a next stage of prioritisation or
first stage of assessment which is to identify possible pollutant linkages.
c) a variation on the above, which either contains (big data files) or
references other information about the site, eg easy access to site
investigation reports.
d) a variation on b, or c, which allows more detailed prioritisation. This
can be simple, eg categorising types of receptors or sources, or both, or
complex, eg scoring or otherwise analysing the information on
contaminant/pathway/receptor to get some qualititative measure of risk.
Obviously this is only needed if an authority has to decide which sites to
look at because it has too many in any given batch.
A note on prioritisation: The degree to which prioritisation is needed
obviously depends on how many sites an authority has, whether it can use a
simple prioritisation system to batch them (CLR6 for example works if there
are a small number of sites with a reasonable spread of receptors - but CLR6
does advise that additional systems might be needed by different
organisations to do some further refining) and whether the data is there to
support the analysis. There are some fairly notorious cases of systems with
heavy use of input data still not actually splitting the sites up. There
are other cases of organisations developing systems with a rational
"scoring", only to keep readjusting the weighting to come up with the order
which looks obvious intuitively.
e) An even more complex piece of software that decides if a site is
contaminated land. I've not seen one of these..
f) A system which produces the notification that the site is contaminated
land based on data entered from the determination.
g)A system which produces the remediation notice (also based on data entered
from the assessment of remediation requirements and the result of the
apportionment.
h) a system which sticks sites which have had the remediation notice on the
public register.
i) generation of the information needed for the EA Contaminated Land report
(good idea for all but the most basic systems I would have thought).
j) at any one of the above stages, a system which links to other work by
local authorities (planning etc) in terms of providing output or
k) a system which links to other information as data input (eg data on local
authority owned land, or on housing stock etc.
If anyone has any comments on this please let me know.
JMLowe
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