The Environment Bill that is now before Parliament is a substantial piece of legislation.

Though its main purpose is to set up environment agencies for England, Wales and Scotland, it covers several other quite distinct environmental issues.

In particular, the vitally important cl 54 addresses the long-standing problems of identifying and cleaning up contaminated land, and of who should pay for the work involved.

Clean up standards in the past have undoubtedly been unduly lax; as they are raised, the costs involved rise exponentially.

The amounts at stake will often make all the difference between a profitable and an unprofitable development, and can threaten the future viability of some or all of the parties involved.

Greater clarity as to who may be held legally liable is essential, and it is good that the government has attempted to grasp this nettle.

Though there are many difficulties with what is at present proposed, all those who are concerned with contaminated land disregard it at their peril.Historically, the various controls over different types of pollution have developed independently, as have the bodies enforcing them - the waste regulation authorities, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Pollution (HMIP), and the National Rivers Authority (NRA) in England and Wales, and correspo nding bodies in Scotland.

Rationalisation of the bodies administering these controls has been a long-standing objective, not only to avoid inefficient duplication, but also to promote consistency in standards across the various media (air, water and land), as well as over the whole of the country.The Environment Bill is a major step in this process; it will set up an environment agency for England and Wales to take over the functions of the NRA, HMIP and the waste regulation authorities, and an equivalent Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) that will also take from the local authorities responsibility for enforcing the air pollution controls of pt I of the Environmental Protection Act 1990.

Eventually these two agencies may possibly merge to form a single national agency operating throughout Britain (as does the Health and Safety Executive), or even the UK, but that is still a long way off.Over half of the new Bill is devoted to this administrative reorganisation, and to making the powers and duties of the agencies more consistent across the different media than is currently the case.

The Department of the Environment has, however, taken the opportunity to legislate on several other issues.

Thus, much of the rest of the Bill is concerned with amending the law on national parks, and providing new protection for hedgerows.Other provisions worth noting include the strengthening of controls over pollution from abandoned mines; statutory underpinning of a national waste strategy, with powers to impose 'producer responsibility obligations' to encourage the re-use, recovery or recycling of any products or substances; powers facilitating protection of the marine environment; the harmonisation of powers of entry on to private premises for monitoring and enforcement of the various statutory pollution controls; and, contentiously, the removal of the current obligation on the NRA and sewerage undertakers to perform a tri-partite sampling procedure if evidence by them as to pollution offences under the water legislation is to be admissible in court.The greatest concern for most people, and certainly for most solicitors, however, will be the single very long cl 54 that now, after the third reading in the House of Lords, inserts 17 new sections into the EPA 1990, creating wholly new powers and duties in relation to contaminated land, and providing in particular for its remediation, and for who should be held liable for the costs of doing this.

These new sections are to take the place of the notorious s.143 that was to set up registers of 'contaminative uses', and s.61, which was meant to deal with problems arising from closed landfill sites, though it covered a lot more.

Both of these are to be repealed without ever having been brought into force.The Bill was introduced into the House of Lords last December, and is scheduled to complete its stages through Parliament before the summer recess.

The new agencies would be brought into being immediately thereafter, with most of the other provisions coming into effect on 1 April 1996.

Although several vitally important aspects of the provisions concerned with contaminated land are to be dealt with by government guidance, that has yet to be issued, even in draft.

Nevertheless, the Bill has immediate relevance to anyone buying or selling interests in land, or taking land as security for a loan, and all those advising them should be aware now of its impact.The new contaminated land regime is based very largely on that for dealing with statutory nuisances.

Local authorities will have to c arry out inspections to identify land in their areas that is 'significantly contaminated', and to inform the agency of any that they find.

Special procedures are to apply to closed landfill sites, the definition of which continues to be highly elusive, and to 'special sites', being those which are causing, or are likely to cause, serious pollution - for these the agency will be directly responsible.Where significantly contaminated land has been identified, a 'remediation notice' will be served on 'the appropriate person', specifying what steps he or she must take to assess its condition, and/or what he or she is to do to clean it up and by when.

Guidance will be issued on clean up standards.

The government has made clear - the Bill itself does not do so explicitly - that remediation is only to be to a 'suitable for use' standard, so that if, for example, a site is to be used as a car park, the standard will be less demanding than if it is for housing.

In all cases ground water protection would have to be assured.The critical issue - it could well be a multi-million pound question - is who is 'the appropriate person' to be served with the remediation notice.

The drafting on this point leaves many unanswered questions, but the intention seems to be that, where possible, service should be on the original polluter, being everyone who has ever contributed any of the contamination, however trivial, each of whom may be liable for the full costs.

If no such person 'can be found', service should be on the current owner or occupier of the land.The Bill does not, however, speak of the 'original polluter', but of anyone who 'caused or knowingly permitted' any polluting substance to be 'in, on or under' the land concerned.

There are many questions as to exactly who comes into this category, but it potentially embraces a huge variety of people.

It may include those who have consigned waste to a particular site for disposal - not only those who conspired with, say, a farmer to dispose of waste illegally, but also those who quite properly supervised the disposal of their waste and, in accordance with the duty of care, followed it to its final resting place in a licensed landfill site.

Possibly it even extends to the waste regulation authority itself that licensed the use of that site.

It will certainly include intermediate owners and occupiers, if they knew of the contamination and could have dealt with it but did not.It is obscure what is intended if the polluter can be found but has no money.

Still more obscure is what should be done if the polluter has deliberately transferred his or her assets away to try to escape liability.

It is expressly stipulated that where a person who would otherwise be liable under the new provisions has transferred that liability to the current owner or occupier of the land, then it is the latter who is the 'appropriate person'.

In such a case, a remediation notice may not therefore be validly served on the transferor.

This offers an open invitation to all who own contaminated land to transfer it and all associated liabilities to a £2 company.

Although the government is now aware of the need to counter such avoidance, it has yet to suggest proposals for achieving this.In addition to these numerous types of 'appropriate person', both owners and occupiers are also equally liable to be served with a remediation notice.

This will require detailed attention to be paid to the terms of leases and licences to ensure any liability is clearly allocated to one of the parties, or shared between them in an agreed manner.

Accordingly, in any particular case there may be a large number of people, all of whom can be held liable for the entire clean-up costs of the contaminated site - a scenario closely comparable to that of the Superfund system that has led to so much litigation in the USA.The government proposes to address this problem by guidance, which is yet to be issued, on who of two or more potentially liable people should be served with a remediation notice.

However, this will still leave open what rights they may have to claim contributions from each other.

Clear contractual provisions as to this must always be included in transfers of interests in property therefore.

Sellers must, in appropriate cases, consider requiring suitable indemnities from their purchasers.

Where the extent of the potential liabilities on each of the parties is properly appreciated and the sale price takes these fully into account, this requirement should not be the deal killer that currently it often is.A separate draft section contains complex provisions for allocating liability where pollutants have escaped from the original site to neighbouring land.

In such a case, the owner of the neighbouring land is not to be held liable for cleaning up any further land to which the pollutants might have migrated from his or her land; he or she will remain liable for clean up costs in relation to his or her own land.

Also, where a person has innocently acquired contaminated land from which pollutants have escaped, he or she will not be held responsible under the Bill for what happened off-site before he or she acquired it, except to the extent that he or she contractually accepted liability for any relevant acts or omissions of his or her predecessor(s).However, if after the acquisition he or she knowingly permitted pollutants to escape from his or her land, then he or she will be liable for the consequences, which raises the question as to what degree of knowledge would bring this provision into play.

Specifically, would it apply where the purchaser either shut his or her eyes to what looked to be a problem situation, or even where he or she would probably have found out about the contamination had he or she organised a reasonably adequate survey, but did not do so?Failure to comply with a remediation notice is a criminal offence.

Moreover, the local authority or the agency can then step in and clean up the site itself and send the bill to the person who should have done this.

Where he or she is the current owner of the land a charge may be imposed on the property for the amount of the clean up costs.

The Bill fails to give this charge priority over previous loans that may already be secured on the property, although in the framework document preceding the Bill the government indicated it was in favour of this.Appeals against remediation notices are generally to be heard in the local magistrates' court.

This proposal has provoked much adverse comment, in view of the considerable delays experienced in these courts, the magistrates' lack of relevant experience of, or expertise in, the complex technical and legal issues that would often be involved, and the consequent inevitable lack of consistency across the country, this last being an aspect of the present regime that was criticised in the recent Deregulation Task Force's report.

Somewhat ironically, although in certain cases appeals may be made to the secretary of state, he is said to consider his involvement in such matters not to be in accord with the government's concern for deregulation.Although registers of 'con taminative uses' are now not to be, local authorities will be required to maintain registers of contaminated land that has been identified under the Bill's provisions.

The Bill currently gives no opportunity to include on the register details of any clean up steps that have been taken, although there is pressure for a 'remediation certificate' that would confirm that a remediation notice has been complied with, the existence of which could itself be noted on the same register.There are bound to be several major amendments to these provisions of the Bill during its passage through the Commons, and at least until government guidance is available (and very possibly not even then, since the issues it must cover are highly complex), it is not possible to say who is most at risk of having to deal with contamination of land, or what they might be best advised to do.

Even so it is already clear that the new regime will make it far easier to ensure that a person who can be made to clean up contaminated land does in fact do it.Though the risk of enforced remediation already exists, in many cases it has proved to be theoretical, since in practice statutory liability for clean up costs only arises if the regulatory authority has itself spent whatever is needed to deal with a problem, and the authorities have not had the resources to do this, given the very real risk that they might not be reimbursed.

However, when the Bill is law, appropriate persons may be designated and required to spend their own money on clean up, without the constraints that lack of funds has hitherto imposed on the regulators.Although the government has said that under its proposed guidance remediation notices should be issued only where they are really needed, and even then only impose clean up standards reasonably sufficient to make the land suitable for its intended use, the authorities' attitudes as to these issues could rapidly change, particularly if there were to be change of government.

Meanwhile, all those owning, buying or selling interests in land and lending on the security of land, and their advisers, must prudently take what is to be the new law into account now in assessing the value of any land, and all dealings with it.