Broken Britain: reports about toxic lead contamination ignored or ’buried’ by successive governments

Who does most harm?

For decades, academics commissioned by successive UK governments say their warnings and calls for tougher action have either been ignored or buried.

A Freedom of Information request made by the Financial Times revealed that government estimates at least 500 tonnes of harmful metals leak into the Welsh environment each year from abandoned mines.

Poisonous lead accumulates in waterways, soil and floodplains where it can be eaten by animals or seep into homegrown food or agricultural production and then passed on to humans. Any level of exposure can have a harmful effect on humans, according to the World Health Organization.

This was the misleading heading of a study commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) which warned in 2008, “Many river floodplains in the UK have become contaminated by metal-rich waste in concentrations that may pose a hazard to ecosystem and human health.” Predicted increases in flooding should make research and development on this topic “a high priority” (GOV.UK).

Laura Hughes reported that Professor Toby Knowles, University of Bristol, who led the research, studied farm animals across the country and found ‘troubling lead levels’ in the samples of livers and kidneys in British sheep. (FT)

But government officials discounted the seriousness of the problem, replying that offal — products such as kidney, liver or tripe — does not make up a large part of the average Briton’s diet.

Professor Knowles also warned: “The Food Standards Agency should be really worried about local people growing their own crops, not washing their own vegetables and eating domestically produced eggs”.

Every year, the UK’s Veterinary Medicines Directorate does test around 400-450 samples of meat, milk, fish, eggs and honey for the presence of lead and other heavy metals, with the exception of eggs, for which no lead level is set in the UK. But this size is insufficient to assess risk according to Professor Knowles. “It gives you no idea how big a problem it is . . . How are farmers meant to know their land is contaminated if no one is testing?”

A study by Dr Andrea Sartorius, a research fellow at the university of Nottingham, which looked at lead from abandoned mines in Wales, specifically documented eggs containing levels of lead dangerous to children, if eaten once or twice a day, and enough to significantly increase an average adult’s exposure (BBC).

“I really do worry there could be a major human health incident in the future if we don’t get a grip on this”:

So said Professor Mark Macklin from the University of Lincoln, who has been studying mine pollution for more than 40 years. In September 2023 he estimated as many as 557,000 people in the UK currently live on a floodplain contaminated by historic metal mining. The highest concentration was found in the northern Pennines, Cumbria, Cornwall, the Peak District, North Wales and the Yorkshire Dales”.

Adult exposure to the toxic metal is known to increase the risk of miscarriage, premature births, depression, chronic kidney disease and heart attacks. Children are more vulnerable and at risk of life-long reductions in IQ as well as behavioural problems.

While these long-standing concerns have led to a global ban on lead in petrol and paint, experts around the world continue to highlight risks of its presence in the food chain.

Too little, too late?

2021: contractors on site at the old Abbey Consols mine start work to stop metal pollution getting into the River Teifi. No record of completion, but said to be receiving sewage outflows

• In 2011, the Water and Abandoned Metal Mines Programme was established in England to develop schemes to treat abandoned metal mine water pollution. Officials said the programme currently operated three successful mine water treatment schemes that had improved 20km of rivers (Government paper 2016).
• In January 2023, the British government set a new legally-binding target to “halve the length of rivers polluted by abandoned metal mines by 2038 “.
• Work to build a £9 million mine water treatment scheme that will reduce harmful metal pollution in rivers in the North East and Cumbria was nearing completion in September 2023 (GOV.UK)
• And in March 2024, chair of the House of Commons Welsh affairs committee, Stephen Crabb, MP for Preseli Pembrokeshire, added that his committee would investigate the “impact of metal mine pollution on human health, plans for remediation, the information available to the public, and whether existing regulations and standards are fit for purpose” (FT).

Meanwhile an estimated 8,500 old metal mines across the UK continue to disperse toxic metals into the environment every year.

Far too little – far too late!

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