May I finish? Not all land contamination may be able to be remediated, for a variety of reasons. A risk-based approach is used to define contaminated land, where regulators are required to intervene in cases where land poses an unacceptable risk.
The cleaning up of contaminated land ensures that brownfield sites are safe for their intended use, such as housebuilding. Land contamination has been successfully addressed in many cases through the planning system. In the majority of cases the risk is likely to be very low and the value of the land may not be high enough for remediation to be economically viable.