In References 1 and 2 we showed that the error in the finite‐element solution has two parts, the local error and the pollution error, and we studied the effect of the pollution error on the quality of the local error‐indicators and the quality of the derivatives recovered by local post‐processing. Here we show that it is possible to construct a posteriori estimates of the pollution error in any patch of elements by employing the local error‐indicators over the mesh outside the patch. We also give an algorithm for the adaptive control of the pollution error in any patch of elements of interest. Copyright © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd