NHBC Land Quality Endorsement – 10 years on

NHBC’s Land Quality Endorsement (LQE) service has just celebrated its tenth anniversary. Here, NHBC’s Engineering Manager John Jones looks back over the last decade and ahead to landmark projects that the team will be involved in over the coming months and years.

 

Developing brownfield or marginal sites can often involve significant risks, with geotechnical and contamination issues often contributing to unforeseen costs and obstacles during the potentially lengthy remediation process.

For residential developments, ensuring that the remediated site is acceptable for new home warranty cover needs to be considered from the outset by the project promoter. NHBC’s Land Quality Endorsement service can assist in providing this assurance for landowners and land developers remediating land for sale to the house building sector.

The LQE service delivers comprehensive technical risk management for clients on sites with challenging geotechnical and contamination ensuring remediation is in line with NHBC standards (Chapter 4.1: Land Quality – Managing Ground Conditions) for land quality and suitable for Buildmark warranty cover.

Over the past decade, our dedicated team of land quality and geotechnical engineers have assessed some of the most contaminated sites in the UK, contributing to the restoration of over 100 sites, with the potential for 45,000 new homes, back to sustainable residential usage.

Although UK housing levels have increased over the last three years, with volumes for 2015 on track to top last year’s total of 145,000 new home registrations, there remains a great demand for new, quality homes across the country – meaning that LQE has an important role in ensuring brownfield developments remediated by independent or third party land developers are suitable for residential end use.

Significant LQE sites have included the former Avenue Coking Works near Chesterfield, widely regarded as one of the most heavily contaminated former industrial sites in Europe and a former chalk quarry in the Kent new town of Ebbsfleet – soon to be home to 6,250 plots.

In these cases our involvement has helped to reduce uncertainty by identifying and assessing potential risk. NHBC’s early involvement checks that remediation solutions comply with the NHBC Standards for land quality, thereby ensuring acceptability for Buildmark warranty cover.

Indeed, NHBC’s LQE is fast becoming a pre-requisite for many developers looking at large brownfield sites, with typical locations including landfills, quarries, gas works, mine works, industrial complexes and collieries.

Looking ahead, NHBC is already helping on some of the largest remediation schemes and challenging sites in Europe – open cast coal mines, landfills, cement works and chalk pits. Additionally, the service is particularly beneficial to sites that will be remediated for subsequent sale to developers of new housing or mixed-use schemes.

One such project is the landmark Priors Hall Park development in Corby, Northamptonshire. Previously described as the “UK’s biggest building site”, the LQE team will be involved in two phases at the former ironstone quarry site, working on land on for up to 2,400 new plots.

Master developer BeLa Partnership has outline planning permission for 5,096 homes; creating the infrastructure for the next phases of the development that will help to deliver 400 new homes per year.

We will be working at Priors Hall Park for the foreseeable future while the team also work with many other land developers and house builders across the country to help transform complex brownfield sites into land meeting the appropriate Standards and suitable for Buildmark warranty cover on thousands of new homes.

 

For further information on NHBC’s LQE service please visit http://ift.tt/1UgGx94

 

 

 

 

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