PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Chemicals: Health Hazards (19 January 2021)

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what (a) financial and (b) other support the Government is providing to areas with disproportionate environmental contaminants as a legacy of historical industrialisation and urbanisation.

Asked by:
Navendu Mishra (Labour)

The 2015 Spending Review awarded the Environment Agency approximately £0.5m per year of Contaminated Land Capital Funding to support investigations of potential Special Sites on behalf of local authorities and remediation of orphan Special Sites and we are considering where capital investment would best support remediation in the future.

HMRC also provides Land Remediation Relief which provides a deduction of 100% from corporation tax, plus a deduction of 50%, for qualifying expenditure incurred by companies cleaning up contaminated land acquired from a third party.

The majority of land affected by contamination in England (approx 90%) is investigated and cleaned up by the private sector through the planning regime.

Defra, the Environment Agency, and the Coal Authority are also working in partnership to tackle pollution of the water environment in areas with a legacy of historical metal mining through the Water and Abandoned Metal Mines programme.

Answered by:
Rebecca Pow (Conservative)
27 January 2021