What is under your feet, and why has nobody checked?

Somewhere near you, almost certainly, there is an old tip. It may be a playing field now, or a wood, or even a row of houses. Nobody who lives on it knows. The company that filled it no longer exists, the paperwork is thin, and the last person who could have told you what went into retirement decades ago.

England has over 20,000 recorded historic landfill sites. Most closed before modern environmental regulation, almost none have ever been formally Audited, and no national programme exists to check them.

The Toxic Ground investigation by Investigate Europe and Watershed Investigations identified more than 60,000 historic landfill sites across Europe, many located close to communities, rivers, coastlines and areas vulnerable to flooding.

Germany has had one since 1999: a Federal Soil Protection Act that requires suspected contaminated sites to be found, registered, investigated and, where needed, made safe, with each state keeping a public register. 

We are still waiting for a register.

We find out the hard way

The way we usually learn what is in an old landfill is when something goes wrong. A fire at a tip and suddenly everyone wants to know what was buried there. A flood, and residents ask what the water passed through on its way into their homes. A development, and the diggers turn up a history nobody remembered. Clusters of unexplained childhood cancers – and so it goes.

Then the scramble starts: old maps, planning files, company records, photographs, memories. The questions that matter most- what is in there and who is responsible- are asked at exactly the moment they are hardest to answer.

The BBC's investigation into chemical contamination in Wales this year showed what that looks like after decades of not asking. Natural Resources Wales told the BBC that a 2015 survey had identified more than 9,000 sites needing further investigation, while being careful to say that not all of them pose a risk. That caution is right. The point is not that every old site is dangerous. It is that almost nobody knows which ones are. To my mind, that makes "not knowing" itself a risk.

The cost of asking late

In 2014, seven-year-old Zane Gbangbola died during flooding at his family home in Surrey. Fire crews' detectors registered hydrogen cyanide in the house, and Zane's father, Kye, was left permanently disabled. Did the gas come from the historic landfill next door, a former MOD site? It took until 2026 for the Government to announce an inquiry into his death. And this was only after the most dogged of fights by Zane's parents, Kye and Nicole. Their campaign, Zane's Law, asks for something that should not be controversial: a public register of contaminated land, and a duty on councils to inspect it.

Twelve years of a family fighting for answers is what "we'll look into it if something happens" costs. Their lives have been permanently torn asunder.

The conditions are changing

What was buried fifty years ago has not gone anywhere. What has changed is everything around it. Rainfall patterns, groundwater, the sea. More than 1,200 historic landfills in England sit in coastal flood zones; one in ten could erode by 2050 if defences are not maintained. Sites that were stable when they closed are becoming active liabilities, and the people living beside them have no way of knowing.

Ask first

There is a better order of events, and it is not complicated. Find out what is known about a site. Be honest about what is not, and work out who is responsible. Then decide whether anything needs to happen.

That is what an ISRRA® Audit does. The Initial Site Risk and Responsibility Audit is a Stage 1 Audit of a historic landfill site, structured to be consistent with the Environment Agency's own  guidance. It gathers the historical and environmental evidence, scores the risk from what is in the ground, how it could move and who or what it could reach, and, unusually, says where responsibility sits. It does not declare a site contaminated because it was once a tip, and it does not replace a full investigation where one is needed. It tells you whether one is needed, and gives you the evidence to make someone act.

Town councils in Lincolnshire, Cheshire and Sussex have already commissioned ISRRA® Audits. Skegness learned of five historic landfill sites the council had not known existed. In every Audit so far, risks came to light that nobody had recorded, and each has pushed the question up a tier: from town to district, from district to county. Lewes Town Council received its Audit at Full Council on 23ʳᵈ July 2026 and is now taking it to the district, the National Park, the Environment Agency and the fire service.

None of those councils waited for a fire, or another flood.

What you can do

If there is an old tip near you, and there almost certainly is, the first step is a conversation, not a crisis.

If you sit on a parish or town council: put an ISRRA® Audit on your next agenda. Our founder, Luke Douglas-Home, is a chartered environmentalist and will come to talk over the issue in micro-to-macro terms. Skegness, Frodsham and Lewes have shown what it produces, and we can share their reports and the wording they used. A Stage 1 Audit is a fraction of the cost of the site investigation it may save you, and a small fraction of the cost of finding out the hard way.

If you own or manage land, or rent from someone who does: ask whether anyone has ever Audited what is beneath it. If the answer is no, put your landlord in touch with us, or write to us yourself.

Email info@afwr.org, and tell us where you are. We will tell you what the Environment Agency's records show for your area, free, and what an Audit would involve. That first conversation costs nothing. Not having it can cost a great deal.