Brownfield Land In The UK: Environmental Indemnities

In this second in our series of briefings on topics relevant to those involved in brownfield land, we focus on environmental indemnities.

These are perhaps most commonly encountered in an M&A context, but environmental indemnities are also frequently found in leases, storage agreements, service contracts and all manner of other contractual contexts where the nature of the relevant land, or past, present or future activities in question, carry environmental (particularly clean-up) risk.

Indemnities are obviously a standard mechanism for allocating risk in many areas of legal practice. However, there are various specific legal and practical issues that always need to be – but too often are not – borne in mind when drafting and negotiating any form of indemnity covering environmental risks. In this article we highlight just a few examples of issues to watch for.