Searches
Normally your solicitor will submit a search (covered by the Local Land Charges Act 1975) to the local authority directly before you purchase land or a property. This will include standard questions about various item such as previous planning permission, adjacent roads, rights of way, water, drains etc. Many local authorities are making this type of information available on the web or at their offices.
UK Home Information have useful details on what the searches cover. However you may want to get hold of information at an earlier stage. For example you may suspect that the area is prone to flooding or contamination and there is no point in going any further with plans to purchase. This is when you could contact a surveyor and ask them to look into specific areas of concern.
Local authorities are obliged to keep registers of contaminated land. Maldon Council have useful information on the status of surveys for contaminated land. Web sites such as Home Search are not usually much help for this sort of thing because the information they produce is so generalised as to be virtually useless or misleading.
