I am so sorry—I thank the noble Baroness.
These amendments create an obligation for local authorities to locate contaminated land in their areas and for the Government to review the management of contaminated land. This is the first parliamentary outing of what has been called Zane’s law. It is named for Zane Gbangbola, for whom the Truth About Zane campaign was also founded, which is still working. There is wide support for the campaign—from Sir Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham to the FBU, the CWU and the Conservative-controlled Spelthorne Borough Council—to get on the record the truth about the seven year-old’s death in Chertsey in 2014, when floods swept hideously toxic hydrogen cyanide into the family home from a nearby historical landfill site. That is not what the inquest verdict concluded in 2016, but the campaign continues to fight that inequality of arms and the illogic of that verdict.
Last year, Zane’s parents, Kye and Nicole, and their supporters took up an even broader issue: the question of why it was that they and the rest of the community had no knowledge of the danger of the historic landfill site near their home. I am old enough to remember Aberfan in 1966; it was a well-known site, but it was unstable. As most noble Lords probably know, 116 children and 28 adults were killed when the landslip came on to a school. What happened to Zane—and his father Kye, who was left paralysed by the hydrogen cyanide—could awfully easily happen to another family or a whole community.
The issue goes back to 1974, when the Control of Pollution Act first took control over waste disposal. However, before that came into effect, many dumps were quietly closed and, since then, have been pretty well forgotten, as campaigner Paul Mobbs explains in a disturbing video, which I do not have here with me. EU regulations on waste and pollution required the tightening of those controls under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Section 143 brought in an obligation on local authorities to investigate their areas and draw up
“public registers of land which may be contaminated”.
Section 61 gave local waste authorities powers to inspect closed landfills and clean them up if necessary. However, lots of new housing developments, in particular, are on old landfill sites. Under pressure, the Government held three consultations on contaminated landfill registers from 1991 to 1993, eventually deciding that the aforementioned Section 143 would not be enacted and all plans for public registers of contaminated sites would be dropped. The explanation given was cost and the desire not to place new regulatory burdens on the private sector.
Limited powers were brought in in 1995, although they did not come into force until 2000, which meant that when developers found contamination problems, public authorities often had to pay. But it got worse. In 2012, as part of the Cameron Government’s “bonfire of red tape”, to reduce the statutory burdens, the right of enforcement authorities to use the law was further reduced—the emphasis being on “voluntary” clean-up, with no real power to check it had been done. This is clearly a problem for existing buildings, but also for buildings being constructed right now. It is evident that there is a great risk at potential locations of new homes right around the country, from Carlisle to Cambridge, and Dudley to Newbury.
There is also the issue of the climate emergency and the new extremes of weather, particularly floods, but also heatwaves, that cause events such as that which tragically claimed young Zane’s life. To identify the size and scale of the problem, in every local authority in the land, there has to be a starting point to fixing it and preventing future risk to life. I beg to move.
7.30 pm