Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast
Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and this is a rather unusual episode. This is the start of a mini series that we do every year to showcase the journalists who are shortlisted for the Paul Foot Award. For those of you who dunno, maybe those of you who are new to the podcast, Paul Foot was an extraordinary campaigning and investigative journalist. He worked at the eye for many years. And he died much too young.
in 2004. For some years now, the Eye has run the Paul Foot Award in his memory and to celebrate the amazing campaigning and investigative journalism that is still happening across the British media ecosystem in spite of all the headwinds against journalism, these brilliant stories are still coming out and they're being written by some brilliant journalists.
So for the next six days, we are going to be speaking once per day to one of the journalists or teams of journalists shortlisted for this year's award. Then, a week from now, we're gonna be having the winners announcement, which is gonna be live from the award ceremony, and we'll be speaking to last year's winner and of course to Ian, about the awards themselves. So let's dive straight in and find out who is up for the award on day one.
I am Laura Hughes and I'm a public policy correspondent at the Financial Times. And
And what's the story that's brought you to the pool foot walls this year?
it's about the legacy of lead in multiple forms and how everywhere I looked, I found the government wasn't looking for it, testing for it, and uncovering the consequences of that, whether that's lead in our food chain, which is incredibly. Toxic and poisonous, or in our children, in our houses.
I'm vaguely aware that lead is toxic. Don't be around it for too long. Don't be around it at all if you can avoid it. But I don't really know how I would encounter lead. And what you found is that there are sites all over the uk, which contain large amounts of lead, which might be getting into water supplies and food.
Yeah. So this reporting journey began a year and a half ago with the tip off about the Welsh government's poor remediation efforts of these thousands of old lead mines in Wales. And these were abandoned years and years ago. And at the time there was no legislation that required the companies to remediate them, so they were just left. And every year they continue to leach.
This toxic poisonous metal, which is harmful to almost every organ in the human body into our environment where it seeps into waterways and soil and where it can then be ingested by animals, which of course humans then eat. And I had this tip off and I started Googling around and I found a PhD study. And as I was reading it, the hairs on my arms honestly stood on end.
This academic was brought in to investigate whether or not horses had died from lead poisoning as a consequence of being reared downstream from abandoned lead mines in Wales. And while she was there, she tested the vegetables and the eggs and the soil and the water on these farms. And she found concentrations of lead in the eggs that were so high, if a child was to regularly eat one or two, they would become severely cognitively impaired.
And I'm reading this, I didn't read all of it, but I got near the end and she, thanks Natural Resource Wales, which is the Welsh Environment Agency for helping to fund the work. So then I'm thinking, oh my God, the Welsh government knows about this. and that's what got me onto it.
and it's, the way that it's getting into the food chain and... could be impacting humans that are living in those areas, eating those things, that is so extraordinary and to my knowledge, those eggs are still being sold... Because no one quite wants to take responsibility for telling the farmer or clearing up. And then I found there is no safe lead threshold for eggs. In the UK anyway, so even if someone was out there looking and testing, there was nothing to test against.
So that's terrible. It clearly needs to be sorted out... but at least this is a geographically limited problem.
You would think so. I did all these stories in Wales, did a freedom of information requests, which ran at how many tons of lead, the Government actually expected, to be leached every year and we made some impact, but I was getting frustrated that people weren't listening to the line in the piece that said, academics behind this report of warning, there could be 'hotspots' like this all over the uk.
So I asked other academics could they help me break breakdown, lead mine by Parliamentary constituency and couldn't believe it when they gave me the results and the Member of Parliament who had the most lead mines, two and a half thousand, was Rishi Sunak; then Prime Minister. So I got in my car at the weekends, driving around Richmond, I found old lead mines.
I followed the rivers down from the mines and I was knocking on farmers' doors to see if what the academics had warned, which was, this is a problem everywhere. Was true and couldn't believe it, that within two knocks I found a farmer who told me how all his lambs had died after a flood, which is extraordinary
You've mentioned already some of the toxicity when it comes to children, but we should just list a few of them. Things like, greater chances of miscarriage, depression, kidney disease, heart attacks, and as you've said, children's IQs being, being damaged by really small amounts. problems
in children is a massive thing,
right? So these mines are everywhere. the livestock slash eggs are still being sold, which may contain these. who's in charge of this? What's happening next?
Defra would say to me: this is a matter for local authorities to make sure that they are monitoring land and that it's not contaminated in a way that poses a risk to human health.
Local authorities are meant to be in charge of that, okay.
And as you will know, local authorities have no money. They have no people. There is no one going round asking Mr. Boggins, can we please test your soil? that isn't happening. And actually something that was really shocking is I went through. All you know, 40 years worth national archives, government veterinary reports where they detail incidents of cows frothing at the mouth, seizing Blind dying of lead poisoning. Why? Because of their proximity to old lead mines.
so someone in a position of authority has known about this for a very long time. I've spoken to academics who wrote reports for government over the last 20, 30 years. I spoke to one who did a report for the Food Standards Agency and feels it was slightly misrepresented what he had found. it's a can of worms that no department really wants to open. Or take accountability for.
And honestly it's been farcical the way I have been passed between, I just keep getting past around departments effectively.
can we discuss the case of Luke, who you spoke to when he moved to an area in rural Wales, which he was new to?
Yes. So this is something I find in more case studies like this of people living in really rural parts of the uk. They move somewhere to become self-sustainable, live this sort of idyllic life, and they have a private water source. And if you are living like the character I have in the, one of the stories... yes. ...near old lead mines, it is. Potentially possible that your drinking water could be contaminated.
So this particular man with a chance conversation with a neighbor prompted him to test his drinking water. It was 10 times over the legal limit. Luckily, he'd only just moved in, but if he'd been there with a pregnant wife or small children, drinking that lead concentration every day... that is potentially incredibly dangerous. And
And there's no warning. The estate agent doesn't list that as a feature of
the property. No, No, and I spoke to a lot of people who did not want me to tell their story publicly, but I can generalize and say I spoke to individuals who moved somewhere, had a dream of growing all their own vegetables, but then couldn't. And they couldn't because the lead in the soil, our concentrations were so high. The vegetables wouldn't grow and that is not declared.
And those people can find this out and they can sell their house onto somebody else, and it will, never be picked up and no one will know about it. And this is the, scary thing about lead as well is the symptoms aren't always obvious and the effects can be cumulative. Yeah. So a child eating those eggs at granny's house, for example, later in life have behavioral problems not perform very well at school. But at no point Would that child have ever been tested and that link ever have been made?
Can these mines actually be treated?
They can be remediated and that is the plan. But we're talking, a handful have been across the uk and is that six and a half thousand? There's a lot.
Are you a lead journalist by profession or is this, are you a chemical element journalist?
Absolutely not. Honestly, if you'd asked me about any element on the periodic table a year and a half ago, I wouldn't be able to tell you Anything, but The story has just grown and grown in terms of the exposure that we all might be susceptible to
let's move on to that now then. So it's not simply a matter of waterways, old mines and soil. lead was used in lots of other different ways, including in paint before 1992 as you reported. paint could be up to 50% lead by weight and lots of places which had lead paint won't have been repainted since then. So it's in our homes.
Exactly. So there will be a very substantially large number of houses in the UK that will have lead paint in them that isn't reason to panic. But if you start dry sanding your walls, you can release a toxic dust and you can contaminate your house effectively, and it's invisible. And it's odorless, but it is there. And in other countries like America for example, if you buy a house, you get this enormous pamphlet. And I couldn't believe it honestly, when I found this pamphlet.
And it lists all the dangers. It tells you how to decorate safely. It references the routine screening of children they do in America, and it just acts as a kind of preventative. Warning system that protects people, and America still has a lead poisoning problem, so I can't even begin to think. What ours is here, given we have some of the oldest housing stock in the world, we didn't ban lead paint till 1992 and obviously lead pipes as well as an issue.
And I've been doing more work recently on the use of lead sold. So even if you live in a modern house A plumber that uses the wrong shoulder, which is cheaper, can contaminate drinking water. And I've got case studies of children poisoned in that way. it's a huge, issue. It is classified as a hazard in a house. Yeah. The government knows that. No, no one would deny it, but it's not a mandatory part of a home survey. My feeling is people dunno how to protect themselves.
And I have spoken to more and more parents with children who they poisoned by renovating their houses or who were living in old houses with, window sills, that with flaky leather paint and they were putting the paint flakes in their mouth in the way that children do. Just put things in their mouth to learn and explore the world and. America screen the majority of their children at the age of one and two, and we don't. Test children in this country.
So a lot of the case studies I have, the parents had to fight to get a test. They had to go private. I have one case study, a man, it took 12 doctors to receive a lead poisoning diagnosis. And again, the cause was his old house and a renovation of it. If we were sat here in America right now, we would be laughed out of this room because what I would be saying was so totally obvious.
Mm-hmm.
it wouldn't be a story, but here it feels incredibly niche. So the people look at me like I'm a bit mad. And yet in a For the Americans, it's as routine as talking about asbestos or declaring that in a, home survey it's totally extraordinary how. Effectively the, government's approach to lead is if you don't test for it, you won't find it. And if you don't find it, you don't have to deal with it. So they test 400 of food items a year for lead, which is the equivalent of a supermarket shelf.
They're not testing houses. I know people, if you ask for, have a lead. Paint test as part of a home survey, people might look at you a bit strange. And we don't test children, so we have no idea in the UK what our exposure is to a metal that we know is so dangerous and so toxic. And academics I've been talking to all around the world can't really believe that the uk, such a scientifically advanced country. Could be so outta step with other countries around the world.
And there's this huge global effort to tackle this problem in lower to middle income countries. And I'm sitting there screaming on page three of the ft. What about the uk? We
have
problem too.
Normally I, would ask what the legal challenges were in reporting this story. It sounds like absolutely everyone is denying any knowledge or culpability. So there's no one to sue or there's no one to run this past. Is that
fair? The funny thing is I don't think any of the government departments, if they were sat here and able to speak freely, would deny anything I'm saying. But they don't really want to comment, and I find that quite tricky.
So the UK Health Security Agency, the public body, tasked with protecting our health hasn't commented on record in any of these stories, and they did put up this sort of information pack on gov.uk last October as if any normal person is looking at Gov UK when they renovate a house
yeah,
They identify themselves that we pick up on a very small number of lead poisoning cases in the UK every year because most doctors don't even think to test it. And they themselves will cite international studies, which estimate at least 200,000 children in the UK will have lead poisoning today. So I think everybody knows. And this is the beauty of the story from a journalistic perspective. I haven't come up against Yeah. Lawyers or calmed down dear.
And I was waiting for it, and I've asked for background briefings and on record interviews, everything because the U-K-H-S-A saying that, their own advisors write reports from the last 10 years saying a major way that you prevent something that is wholly preventable, such as lead poisoning from your house. It's to educate the public, to talk about it regularly, to, give guidance on how to renovate successfully and extraordinarily.
Earlier this year, I found out that there was a leaflet, but it was removed, and they've said in a, in an answer to an MP who's been asking some questions about lead, that they have no plans to update it. A and I, honestly can't. It must feel
you're going mad reporting
the story. I do. No, I completely do. I think my colleagues, friends, families, sometimes on this journey have probably thought, and I have myself felt a bit mad because it feels so niche. And then all I have to do is. Go and look at that US pamphlet or their lead poisoning prevention program, which they've had for over 30 years.
I go back and read New York Times articles from 30, 40 years ago, and they're saying what I'm saying now, but their job was a thousand times easier as journalists because Path five of the story is routine screening showed little Jimmy had elevated lead levels of X. we don't have that screening. Finding the case studies of these children has been near and impossible. And the FD, we have a very high bar.
I have to have the number of the child's lead levels, but also the ledge that was picked up in the house. I mean it's, and it's really scary when you talk to the parents who have children that were poisoned and have been given no support and nothing because this is the, thing, and this is why I think the government doesn't really want to open the can of worms. If you find out your child has lead poisoning, there isn't a hell of a lot you can do. The main thing that you do is remove the source.
Which is why if you did screen or you were to do a sort of survey of houses or a representative sample of children, we could get an idea of what we were looking at. Yeah. Raise awareness and parents would know it. The, guilt that parents are speaking to feel about poisoning their children from doing something as simple as some DIY in their house. it makes me very angry because no one told them. No one told them that could be a problem or a risk or hurt their health.
Where does the story go next?
I am still very much working on this. The Food Standards Agency and Environment Agency have launched two inquiries into the presence of lead in the food chain. So I feel a small win there. The Welsh Affairs Select Committee have launched an inquiry, but no one has yet grasped the nettle of this legacy housing problem. So I am working on something that I hope a sort of much bigger story that will bring everything I've talked about here. Interview into one place.
And this is the sort of crazy thing. I've spoken to mps get it and have said, we need that panorama moment. We need this huge moment. And I hope if I keep going, this will, become more mainstream. It won't just be page two, page three of the FT for the next five years.
Right? Other journalists. There's your challenge. congratulations again, Laura.
Thank you very much.
that's it. do get yourself tested for lead, I guess is the message there. an extraordinary story and, we'll be back again tomorrow with another one.