Don’t take a risk, get all the knowledge that you need

Property diligence information is the name of the game when it comes to protecting your home, writes Richard Hepburn

Bolton or Bathgate – what’s the difference? Quite a bit if it comes to the level of risk awareness you will typically have at the completion of your residential property transaction in each of these places. In Bolton you will know that you are likely to be safe from any future flood event which has the potential to cause (UK average) £25,000£30,000 damage to your home.

You will also have some assurance (or more likely, insurance cover established as part of your conveyancing) to safeguard you from the impact of your local authority deciding to designate the former 19th-century gasworks land your home is built on under the Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 – low risk but high impact if you and your neighbours are faced with an expensive bill.

If you are in Bathgate, it’s unlikely, even if the same risks existed, that you’d have either awareness or protection.

At recent events around the UK, Millar & Bryce, hosted speakers focusing on some of these risks. One of the benefits for Millar & Bryce as part of Landmark Information Group, the leading UK provider of property diligence information, is the access to skills, resources and expertise to add value in these areas.

At our conveyancing workshops in Inverness and Aberdeen, Mark Taylor from Argyll Environmental, a specialist consultancy division within Landmark, highlighted the challenges presented by flooding, with specific reference to these two cities which have both been badly hit in recent years.

In Aberdeen, for example, the 2015-16 winter floods were a result of the wettest winter on record since 1910 with the Ythan and Don both bursting their banks, widespread surface flooding and overwhelmed drainage causing millions of pounds of damage to residential and commercial property.

Providing an indication of the degree of flood risk to residential purchasers seems obvious in highprofile scenarios like this and the argument that “it’s only 1 in 100 years” is flawed – what if the year when that risk is realised is next year, or in five years? Would that go as far as influencing your decision to purchase if it were a very high-risk area? Or, as is happening in some parts of England & Wales, would more awareness change how you set up rooms and use your property?

Flood risk is here to stay and it’s evolving – in fact, Landmark has recently been active with Ambiental Risk Analytics in developing Floodfutures, a flood mapping data set aligned to climate change which predicts the impact on land and property in future years.

Contributors at our annual Millar & Bryce Conveyancing Conference in Edinburgh included Alex Lee, Technical Director of WSP, one of the world’s largest environmental consultancy practices.

Alex is much sought after as an expert witness when things go wrong in terms of land contamination and water pollution in Scotland, from apparently innocuous domestic oil storage spillages through to major issues with brownfield developments.

In his presentation, he emphasised what could be done in raising awareness of potentially low incidence but high-impact scenarios in this context, particularly when the current legal treatment in Scotland for residential transactions (in Property Enquiry Certificates) only extends to establishing whether the land or property is on the Part 2A register of very high-risk sites. There are only a handful of such sites in Scotland currently, yet as Alex pointed out, there are estimated to be 67,000plus potential sites in Scotland which have some identifiable risk of land contamination as a result of the post-industrial legacy in many parts of Scotland. This excludes those affected by mining risk.

The reports used by solicitors in England & Wales, provided by Landmark, have existed for several years in providing both flood and contaminated land risk indicators to support conveyancing transactions – these don’t rely on solicitors becoming environmental experts as the reports provide a clear view on any risks posed with recommendations on the next steps. They are also available in Scotland through providers like Millar & Bryce but tend only to be used to any extent in commercial property due diligence at present.

Richard Hepburn is Managing Director of Millar & Bryce