The annual Risky Business conference took a new direction this year - into the territory of Brownfield Briefing's sister publication Sustainable Building - with talks on sustainability in relation to property, buildings and energy performance.
Impassioned talks on brownfield and contaminated land, from ERM's Phil Crowcroft and Buro Happold's Hugh Mallett kicked off the morning.
Crowcroft called for increased professionalism in the wake of an occupational death in a trial pit.
In the landmark Phase I Benchmark report, 59% of respondents had no formal accreditation system and 22% of respondents used staff with less than three years experience to do industrial site interviews.
Staff with less than five years experience were used by 17% of respondents to do a final review of a report. Phase 1s are also reportedly still seen as loss leaders and a route into the main piece of work.
Crowcroft stressed the importance of Phase 1 being as comprehensive as possible. He said in short timescales one should tell the client if there will be missing data and in longer timescales go out and get the data from libraries, interviews and site visits.
He used the anecdote of blue billy from a fifties housing estate, whose shoes always rotted, to say you MUST DO the investigation.
Technological advances have changed the face of Phase II with sonic drilling and the Waterloo profiler - allowing innovative solutions.
He also said the Triad approach should be considered, with its systematic planning, dynamic work strategy and realtime measurement.Crowcroft concluded that competent people create competent solutions and you need to work early with regulators to deliver good solutions.
Hugh Mallett has to be congratulated for bringing passion to outlining R&D66:2008. Guidance on safe development of land affected by contamination assessment. He succeeded in portraying a simplified step by step process which will help avoid pitfalls.
Colleague on the project, Louise Beale from Enviros translated the differing approaches of R&D66 as against CLR11 into the simple task of tea making. R&D66 would say: "Get a tea bag. Put tea bag in cup."
CLR11 would say: "Define objectives of the task in hand ie: consider what flavour tea you want, when you want to drink it and how much you want to drink. Put tea bag in cup, re-assess if objectives are still valid; if not repeat step 1."
But Mallett, rather than just outline the simplified step by step route, stressed that the business we are in affects people's lives with issues ranging from homelessness and affordable housing to potential social division and value.
He said that housebuilding was down 50% since the 1970s but the number of households is up by 30%. And he reminded the audience of the economic and financial context we are working in with Barratt's share price falling from £12.66 to June £0.53.
Echoing Phil Crowcroft's talk, he warned not to do initial risk assessments on post codes, as they are no wholly accurate and can result in assessing the wrong site.
Landmark took the opportunity to demonstrate their forthcoming Envirocheck Analysis tool which enables overlays and data transfer between old maps and new.
