The "Corby birth defects" case
On 29 July 2009, the High Court handed down judgment in the so-called Corby Toxic Waste case.
The judgment of Mr Justice Akenhead, which runs to over 200 pages, makes grim reading. It deals with claims by a class of children, born between 1986 and 1999, who allege that they all suffered serious birth defects because their mothers, who lived close to the sites whilst pregnant, were exposed to toxic materials as a result of Corby Borough Council's (CBC) remediation program in respect of 680 acres of heavily contaminated land acquired by CBC from British Steel in the early 1980s.
The claimants alleged exposure through ingestion or inhalation of airborne particles of cadmium, chromium, nickel, dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) released as contaminated dust during "dig and dump" remedial works performed by CBC between 1983 and 1997.
The evidence revealed that basic environmental protection measures, such as dust suppression, wheel washing and covering of lorries taking contaminated material along public roads to landfill, had not been implemented.
The court found there was a statistically significant cluster of birth defects between 1989 and 1999 and that CBC was in principle liable in public nuisance, negligence and breach of statutory duty, subject to each claimant proving causation and particular damage at a future hearing.
CBC was found to have owed a duty of care both to the then unborn claimants, and their mothers, in tort, to exercise reasonable care and skill in the execution of the works to avoid foreseeable injury or birth defects to them, and to have been in clear breach of that duty.
Comment
Clearly the failings of CBC were extreme, as tragically were the consequences of those failings. The Corby reclamation was a massive remediation exercise carried out without basic protection measures in close proximity to a large urban population over many years. For all these reasons, the case has been seen by many commentators as a "one-off" and obviously one hopes that it is.
However, large scale urban regeneration of brownfield sites is still common in the UK and likely to remain so as pressure to provide housing for an ever growing population continues. The facts of this case provide a stark reminder of why environmental protection measures are imposed under relevant environmental legislation and as a condition of redevelopment planning permission, and of the importance of allocating and managing environmental risk correctly as part of any transaction involving contaminated land.
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