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Contaminated Brownfield Sites

: I understand where the hon. Gentleman is coming from, and I shall try to address what he says. The issue is complex and I am trying to go through the points methodically for him. The legal test in contaminated land legislation comes under part IIA of the Environmental Protection Act. It is based on the notion of an unacceptable intake of a substance. If the calculations are properly applied, as I said, exceeding the SGV will not automatically equal unacceptable intake, because there is a judgment to be made about what is unacceptable. That judgment would be easy in the case of a huge exceedance, but in many cases it is difficult to make. A judgment has to be made on the level of risk and therefore of contamination, and the SGVs are a tool to use when doing that. The question raised, not unreasonably, by the hon. Gentleman is how to make the issue clearer to local authorities. I accept that we need to give more help to assessors, who generally work for the local authority, to decide whether a concentration in soil will give rise to an unacceptable intake under the legislation. The debate is about definitions and risks.