HW Environmental Searches

There are so many extra searches on the market, who needs what, why do they need them, and how do they get the right ones.

The murky world of environmental searches. You have your Local Land Charges search done, you know that you need a Drainage and Water search from the local drainage and supply Authorities, but what else should the conveyancer be looking for? I will try to give an overview here of how they came about and what’s good about them

Around the turn of the last century

I was charged with going from our Cardiff office to London to see something called “HomeCheck” and to see if it was something that my search firm at the time wanted to start providing these to our client base. No one had ever heard of these environmental searches until just before this event.

At that time, the Law Society had issued a practice note to their regulated members that an Environmental Report should be sourced in all conveyancing cases. The main concerns were contaminated land and flood risk.

A lot of highly newsworthy flooding events had made people ask “surely the home owners should have known of the flood risk when they bought the property “. And, possibly more importantly, the homeowners were now finding out that while their house insurance covered fires etc., the very reason they were in a high risk flood zone, meant their insurer would not pay out for the damage caused by such events.

A bit of a double whammy: you didn’t know that you are in a high risk flood area, but your insurers does, and they won’t pay out because you weren’t told that they knew. 

So, armed with such knowledge

I knew that we had to find a provider for these reports. And I was shown around, despite being promised by the Sales Director that I would find it “pretty damn sexy”, I was disappointed, if not surprised to find I didn’t feel that kind of excitement. 

But I did see a company that knew what they were doing. They had all the data required and they produced a nice 7 or 8 page, colourful report. Colour in conveyancing reports was truly ground breaking at that time. And in the days pre emailing of electronic reports, conveyancer started to worry about their old printers capacity to print these things out. Some even printed them out in black and white (or greyscale as we now call it). 

Commercial Property: Environmental Reports are compiled on a radius from the centre point. A commercial report does the same thing but on a bigger radius, hence they cost more.

Flooding

If you are near the coast with a sloping type geology, then your flood risk is different to that of a flat plain next to the seaside where rising groundwater is the issue.

Contaminated Land

Buying a property on a property on Tannery Lane? Better check the historic land use. Old tanneries from the 1800s were notorious for being near a stream, conveniently to dump all their chemicals and waste products into.

Is the property downstream form that tannery? What about buried fuel dumps. Better take a close look at that disused petrol station nearby. 

Development

In the last twenty plus years, these reports have evolved, the technology behind them is better and the information contained within them is much more robust and reliable. They were starting to reach anything over 40 pages in length as the need for printing faded into the memory.

The market has demanded a shorter report in recent times, and all-in-one reports are now the default or “go to” option in the vast majority of conveyancing transactions.

Planning Reports

As the various providers have competed over the years, the need or desire to give planning information on nearby land has become almost standard practice, and the best environmental reports include such data as standard. 

Your Local Land Charges Search will only legally cover all issues affecting the land within the “boundary of the property being subject of the search”. At HW Conveyancing Searches, we have always gone beyond that for our clients and give information that we can find on not just the land adjacent but also nearby.

There are now planning reports, or the better environmental reports that do this in a more formal manner. Lists and location pins of all planning applications near the property are shown . Particularly useful if you are looking at potential development of that nice bit of green space nearby.

There are 3 main providers of Environment Reports

There are 3 main providers of Environment Reports, plus one who provides minerals and mining reports, which are different.

These are covered elsewhere in this library. All of these producers of the reports supply their searches to the conveyancing industry via personal search companies.

At HW

We simplify this by putting them into our popular search packs, but there is also a tick list of all the various searches available, as commercial versions have various prices for different sized plots. Easy as that. Just order them at the same time as you order your standard searches, you should get them back in a couple of days, and you will be invoiced for them along with the rest of the searches for that transaction.