To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what involvement (a) she, (b) other Ministers in her Department and (c) officials of her Department have with the Urban Regeneration and the Environment programme run by the Natural Environment Research Council; and what account has been taken of that programme in the programme of clean-up of contaminated sites being remediated for development. (167817)

The Chief Scientific Adviser of the Department worked with the co-ordinator of the NERC Urgent programme and the head of research and analysis of the Local Government Association to produce a four-page glossy digest of key findings of Urgent—distilled from 31 scientific papers—prepared explicitly for the heads of environment, parks and engineering at every local authority. The publication can be found on the NERC website at:

http://www.nerc.ac.uk/publications/other/documents/urgent.pdf.

The chief scientific adviser of the Department and the head of analysis at the Local Government Association hope to be able to repeat this exercise for the current Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council programme on the sustainable urban environment.

The Local Authority Research Council Initiative has been relaunched with CLG as a member, and a project of work, led by the chief scientific adviser of CLG, is being developed that will enable members of local authorities to become more sophisticated in articulating the research agenda they would like to see undertaken in universities rather than just receiving what comes out from work that the universities decide to undertake.

The Department sets out national planning policy for England for development on land affected by contamination in Planning Policy Statement 23: Planning and Pollution Control and its Annex 2: Development on Land Affected by Contamination. They can be found on the Department's website at:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/planningandbuilding/planning/planningpolicyguidance/planningpolicystatements/planningpolicystatements/pps23/.