What is a Section 78R(1) contaminated-land register entry?
Section 78R(1) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 (Part IIA) requires every UK Local Authority to maintain a public register of land that has been formally identified as contaminated. The duty was added by the Environment Act 1995 and came into force April 2000.
A Section 78R(1) register entry indicates that the LA's environmental health team has formally determined the land contaminated under the Part IIA criteria — i.e. the land contains substances that cause significant harm or significant pollution of controlled waters, and there's a clear pollutant linkage to a receptor. This is a high bar: the LA has to have inspected, sampled, modelled, and made the formal determination. The number of formally determined sites in England is in the low thousands, despite many more sites being suspected.
For conveyancers:
1. **Check the LA's register.** Each LA publishes their register; the format is heterogeneous (some have searchable web databases, some publish a quarterly PDF, some require a written enquiry). The Stratum postcode-intelligence API includes a per-LA adapter pattern that wraps these into one response shape — top 50 LAs covered in v1, expanding.
2. **Read the register entry carefully.** A property near a registered contaminated-land site isn't automatically affected; the entry typically describes the polluting source, the pathway, and the receptor. The risk to a specific property depends on its position relative to that pathway.
3. **Pair with the EA's national datasets.** EA publishes the permitted landfill register, the Pollution Inventory, and historical industrial-land records. Combining the LA register + the EA datasets gives the fuller picture.
4. **Commission a full Phase 1 Desk Study where the risk is material.** The Stratum API output is a triage signal, not a substitute for a chartered environmental engineer's report.
Mortgage lenders often require evidence that contaminated-land has been investigated + remediated where the LA register flags the property. The Stratum conveyancer-suite endpoint flags `contaminatedLand.band: 'high'` when an LA register entry intersects the property.
Source: Environmental Protection Act 1990 Part IIA
Last updated 2026-05-06.