Welsh Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Metal mine pollution in Wales, HC 268
Wednesday 1 July 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 1 July 2026.
Members present: Ruth Jones (Chair); Ann Davies; Gerald Jones; Ben Lake; Andrew Ranger; Henry Tufnell; Steve Witherden.
Questions 1 - 20
Witnesses
I: Laura Hughes, Public Policy Correspondent, Financial Times; and Professor Mark Macklin, Professor, University of Lincoln.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Professor Mark Macklin MMP0008
Witnesses: Laura Hughes and Professor Mark Macklin.
Q1 Chair: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this oral evidence session of the Welsh Affairs Committee. My name is Ruth Jones, and I am the Chair of the Committee. Today the Committee is holding a one-off evidence session on metal mines as part of our inquiry into the environmental and economic legacy of Wales’s industrial past. Although some of this work is devolved, our inquiry is looking at the legacy of the industrial past of Wales, which predates the devolution settlement. That is why we have got involved in it.
This session has been informed by the Committee’s very recent visit to historical metal mine sites and remediation work in west Wales, which happened on Monday. I would also specifically like to thank the Mining Remediation Authority and Natural Resources Wales for their time and effort on Monday in navigating us round the wilds of beautiful west Wales and taking us to various sites, which we definitely would not have seen if we had not been with them.
Without any further ado, we are going to crack on. Laura Hughes, could you outline who you are and give us a very brief overview of the findings from your research?
Laura Hughes: I am Laura Hughes. I am a public policy reporter at the Financial Times and I have been looking into the issue of our lead legacy across the UK for a number of years. My reporting started in west Wales and has moved on since. Anything I say today applies to the whole of the UK, but I know we are focused on Wales today.
I will try to be brief. It all began with a tip-off about horses dropping down dead in fields in west Wales. The working theory was that the reason they were dying was their exposure to the legacy of lead in the environment. I became totally fascinated with the lack of any information out there on this particular topic.
The reason I became so interested is that I found an academic paper that was written quite recently, which referenced something that caught my eye in terms of the human effects of this potential pollution problem. I read this report and there was one line that really stuck out to me from this academic. She had studied the lead levels in eggs on two farms downstream from old lead mines in west Wales. She found levels of lead in those eggs that were so high that, if a child was to regularly eat one or two of them, they could become severely cognitively impaired. That was a smoking gun that really got me interested in this.
As part of my reporting, I went down to Wales on a number of occasions, and I just knocked on people’s doors and tried to get a sense and a feel as to whether the farmers or people living in these parts of Wales, near old lead mines that I found on maps, had ever experienced anything like horses dying. It became clear to me very quickly that, yes, there were people who reported a number of things, from animals dying to not being able to grow vegetables. In the most severe case, I found a mother whose daughter’s gums actually turned green. She went to the doctor and the doctor identified lead poisoning, and that really was the start of it.
This has been a very long story. I will stop here. I was initially interested in why animals were dying, and it has moved considerably into looking at food. The most important thing for me has been trying to understand the impact on people.
Q2 Chair: Professor Macklin, do you want to give us an overview of your research?
Professor Macklin: I am Professor Macklin. I have been studying this issue for more than 40 years. I first met Laura probably about two or three years ago. She phoned me just before I went to New Zealand to do some research on mining, and that is when the conversation began. In terms of my own expertise and background, I have lived in Ceredigion for 36 years on and off. My main area of research is looking at the way that legacy or historical mining impacts on the environment, particularly on river systems, ecosystems and human health. It is not just me, as a large team has been working on these problems for many years.
The big inflection point that we made, probably 25 years ago, was pointing out that while mines themselves—I understand that you visited Cwmystwyth and Frongoch—constitute a point source, arguably the bigger problem in terms of contamination is the river channels and floodplains that lie downstream. The reason for that is that Wales, or the UK, was the first industrial nation. In the 18th and 19th centuries, we had no regulation as such, although the first royal commissions on pollution were done in mid-Wales and in Tyneside in the 1860s.
Specifically, over the last 25 years—sometimes struggling, with a slightly wry smile, to convince the regulators that this is important—we have been illustrating that it is a two-part problem. It is the mines themselves, but also the channels and floodplains downstream where people live, grow their crops, have their allotments and have their grazing chickens and contaminated eggs.
I have one other related point. There is a strong climate change flooding-related issue. In some cases, the contaminants can be up to a metre and a half thick. It extends, in the case of where you visited in Aberystwyth, from Cwmystwyth down to the sea, so a course of 30 miles. The whole of the Ystwyth is contaminated. As a consequence of more frequent floods, the contaminants—things such as lead, the original forever chemical and a neurotoxin—reside in soils and sediments effectively forever. As a consequence of more frequent flooding, channel banks are being eroded and that material is reintroduced into the channel. It is moved downstream and contamination occurs.
To end on this thought, we saw that in the 2012 June floods in Ceredigion. As you may be aware, there were a significant number of cattle deaths as a consequence of the animals inadvertently being fed contaminated silage. I am in it for the long haul. There is a biblical saying that I am sure I am going to get wrong: no one is a prophet in their own land. Our work is used worldwide. We work in South America and in eastern Europe, and they use our methodology. In terms of Wales and the UK specifically, although we have drafted a lot of the policy documentation, we have not got this over the line quite yet, in terms of the risk maps that we developed.
Q3 Ann Davies: Thank you, both. We spent the day with the Mining Remediation Authority on Monday. It is working towards dealing with this, but of course it is a long process even to begin to tackle this. I am delighted that both of you are here today to bring your expertise. You mentioned, Laura especially, the potential health risks associated with metal mine pollution, such as lead poisoning. Can you elaborate a little on that?
Laura Hughes: The first thing to say about lead and why it is so dangerous is that the World Health Organisation now agrees that there is no level of exposure to lead in our bodies that is without harm, so any level that you have is not okay. The reason lead is so awful is that it contributes to a number of health problems. It has a devastating effect on nearly every organ of the body. Once you are exposed, it is absorbed and stored in the bones and teeth. The cumulative effects can lead to things such as heart disease, heart problems, kidney issues, infertility and miscarriage.
Children are the most vulnerable to lead exposure because their bodies absorb it more than adults do. In children, it can lead to reductions in IQ and behavioural problems, among other serious health issues. That is why I became, when I read up on it, so absolutely fascinated and obsessed with this topic.
In terms of how this particular issue affects human health, there are a number of routes that I have identified in my reporting that could be exposing people in Wales, and the rest of the UK, to lead. There is the soil issue, which could affect vegetables that are being grown and animals that are being reared on that soil, but also children. There is a lot of hand-to-mouth activity in the way they explore the world. That is another big risk. In one family I spoke to with one child who had lead poisoning, the source of their lead poisoning was putting soil in their mouth.
There are people living in really rural bits of Wales who have private drinking water sources. That can be contaminated by the environment. Through my reporting, I have found people who had lead levels in their water that were 300 times the legal limit. That is another contributing factor.
My concern is that there might be hotspots where you have a number of sources of lead exposure. It might be the food that you are consuming, so if you are a farmer eating the offal from your produce and the eggs. We can get into that later maybe, but that is another source. One reason I found for that was that people were using the spoil from the old lead mine tips as gravel on their driveways, because it stopped weeds growing. Then your chickens and animals are grazing on it, and that is how it is getting into their food system.
There is also the issue of the spoil and the dust that is created. I spoke to families who would let their children ride their bikes over the spoil tips. There are people who are living very near them downstream. When the wind gets everything moving, it can come into your house, so you could be exposed that way. Those are the main sources.
Professor Macklin: To underscore the scale of the issue, I think I have shared the paper, not in confidence. There is a document I have given you in confidence. There is a paper we are just about to submit. We estimate that something like 140 square kilometres of Wales’s floodplain, so that is 14,000 rugby pitches, are contaminated. The scale is very important. It is dynamic because the sediment soils are being remobilised, partly by wind erosion, but mostly by flooding.
There is a great pressure, particularly in Wales, in terms of food security and new housing. Unfortunately, this issue has not been taken into consideration, even though—and we will probably go on to discuss this—we have, and I can outline it in some detail, some new flood risk mapping and modelling technologies. They give a resolution down to about 50 metres, showing where the likely contamination is going to be and how we can manage it. It is possible to remediate a mine site to some degree, to turn off the tap, but it is very difficult indeed to remediate floodplain and soil contamination. It is a different issue. It is a two-part problem.
Q4 Steve Witherden: Professor Macklin, if I could turn to your research on contaminated soil, a representative on a previous panel told us that there are a number of measures the public can take to mitigate the risk with contaminated soil. Could you provide us with some examples, please?
Professor Macklin: The first stage is to know whether your soil is contaminated. That is the biggest challenge. We will be able to provide it. There is currently no systematic data available.
If the soil is demonstrated to be contaminated, as you know, there are various thresholds in terms of contamination. Say, for instance, you were using your soil to grow your own vegetables; you would not want lead concentrations to be much above 200 ppm, and certainly not much above 300 ppm.
If you discover that it is contaminated, the simplest thing is to remove yourself from that exposure, so not to grow vegetables and to be careful with your children, or in my case now my grandchildren, dealing with these things. If you want to, and I would encourage people—my wife is a very keen gardener—you can build raised beds, import your soil and have it tested.
This is not a way of blighting these communities or landscapes in any shape or form. This is providing information that allows us to manage it in a grown-up way, which we are not doing now. Yes, in a straightforward sense, there are ways. Once we know there is a contamination issue, there are straightforward ways of not so much remediating but managing the problem.
Q5 Steve Witherden: That leads me on to my next point. The thing that stood out for me was when you said that the best thing to do is to remove yourself from that exposure. The best mitigations would be ones that do not impact too much on people being able to enjoy their gardens and homes. Would it be fair to say that the most appropriate mitigations, other than removing yourself from the exposure, are ones that prohibit people from enjoying gardens and homes in the area where they live?
Professor Macklin: No, absolutely not. I still play football twice a week. It is very important that people use their outside space. There is probably more of an issue, and we may come on to this, in terms of the farming community. This was brought into stark contrast in the 2012 floods. Those problems can be managed through what we have recommended.
The 2012 floods in Ceredigion were unusual, but as I said, I have been doing this for 40 years. Some of the original studies we did were in Swaledale in 1986 following Hurricane Charley, and in the millennium floods of 2000 in the Yorkshire dales and parts of those areas. The key recommendation that we gave to farmers at the time, but there was pushback, was to take their animals off the land. We live in a smallholding. We know how to deal with these things, so to speak. Remove your animals. Make sure that you do not cut silage and inadvertently feed the contaminated silage to your livestock.
As Laura said at the beginning, it is not so much the vegetation that is contaminated; it is the soil. Animals, particularly sheep for example, eat quite a lot of soil, particularly when the grass is quite short. It is the soil, rather than the foliage, that is very often the main source of contamination.
That was a long-winded answer to your question, but households can have raised beds. For farmers, after a major flood we can say, “Take your animals off the flooded land. Don’t feed them. Don’t cut silage”. There are very practical ways that we can still enjoy the landscape. As I mentioned, I have lived in Ceredigion on and off for 36 years and I want to continue to enjoy it, but in a way that understands the nature of the risks. Those risks are localised, but the public, policymakers and you need to be aware of where those risks are located so we can appropriately manage them.
Q6 Steve Witherden: That leads me on to my final question on this point. How can we—when I say “we”, I mean your MPs, this Committee and expert stakeholders such as you—support the communities that are suffering from contaminated land to make the adjustments to minimise, and ideally eradicate altogether, any impact it may have on quality of life?
Professor Macklin: The first step is to have an understanding of the nature of the hazards and risks. The second step is to produce risk maps, and we are in a position to do that, exactly as you have flood risk maps. There is no difference between these things. That is so people can understand the nature of the risks, so it is not hearsay that there is a problem.
Proper testing is needed. For the cost of around £25,000 to £30,000, each local authority could have—Laura has seen it working; it looks like something out of “Star Trek”—an XRF gun that allows you to do very rapid on-site measurements. Instantaneously in some cases, or within 30 seconds, you could have a heads-up of whether there is a problem. There are lots of very straightforward things that we can do, and we probably should have done them sooner than later.
Q7 Andrew Ranger: Good afternoon, both. This question, which follows on from that, is for both of you, starting with Laura. Do you think that the communities you have spoken to in the last year have received sufficient information to help them understand where the contaminated land is or may be?
Laura Hughes: No, absolutely not. It is something that has been really shocking for me. I mentioned the spoil tips as an example. I have driven up to them, and I have seen them. They are completely exposed. There is no sign saying that this is potentially toxic. The fact that parents are allowing their children to cycle over them, which could be really dangerous, was quite shocking to me.
There is no information. I am sure that we are going to get on to solutions, but it is not as if, when you buy a property, the disclosure of sources of lead is in the home survey. You go into a situation with absolutely no idea. I have come across families who, for example, could not grow vegetables and could not understand why. They got their soil privately tested, found extraordinarily high levels of lead, sold their house and moved on. There is no information sharing.
Most of the people I spoke to knew that the lead mines were there, but it was part of their history. They were celebrated. People walk all over them and run through them. Very few people knew of the potential health risks. I found some farmers, who were not thrilled to talk to me, who I think did know but were not really doing anything about it, for reasons I understand.
There is no leaflet through your door and, as a result, hearsay spreads. Some people said to me, “When we moved in, we were told not to grow rhubarb because rhubarb apparently absorbs lead”. That is not true. The lack of information means that false narratives are spread and people do not have the information to know, “Take your shoes off, wash your vegetables, use raised beds and rotate your animals in fields”. There is a complete and utter lack of information.
Something else interesting, which I would flag, is that a lot of local GPs do not know anything about this. That is something else I would really want to drive home. If doctors living in these areas knew that their patients were living on potentially contaminated soil and in contaminated houses, it would enable them to start thinking a little differently. If a child presents with anaemia, is struggling to sleep and has stomach problems, do a lead test. Because no one is testing anything, no one knows anything.
Q8 Andrew Ranger: That is interesting. I am quite interested in your point about signs. On the trip on Monday, we were talking to various people from the Mining Remediation Authority and NRW about signs going up. This was on spoil at Wemyss, I think, was it not? We were interested that there were no signs at all, and there was a caution about having signs in case it created too much worry, if there could be such a thing as too much worry. People import lots of different meanings on to that as well. I take it from your answer that you think there should be more signs.
Laura Hughes: Yes. I understand that there is this constant balance between not wanting to terrify everyone and giving them information. The approach so far has been, “Just don’t mention it. Don’t talk about it. You are going to freak people out. Parents are not going to want to buy that house because they don’t want their kids playing in the garden”. It does not have to be that way. Other countries have different ways of dealing with this and there is no need for panic. Of course my journalism is a little sensational, but nothing will happen unless you put a little fear into people.
The reason I care so deeply about this subject is that I have spoken to parents whose children have become very sick. It is my belief that, because we do not screen anyone for their lead levels, there will be many people out there who are not reaching their full potential or who are suffering health-wise, as a consequence of something that we have decided to bury our heads over.
Professor Macklin: You went to Cwmystwyth and Frongoch. You can look at the new visitor boards at Cwmystwyth. I am very interested in archaeology. It is a very pretty and informative board, but it says nothing about the damage it did to the miners themselves, which was absolutely horrific. It says nothing at all about the damage that was done to the environment. It is a little perverse.
Without being too jokey about this, as Laura was saying, it is about information. It is about understanding what the processes are. If it was a very difficult problem to resolve, highly complex, with lots of moving parts, it would be reasonable to say, “We need to do a lot more. This is intractable to some degree”. Actually, it is a very straightforward problem, and that has been the frustration.
It is not something we haven’t been aware of. It is something that we have been very aware of. DEFRA, NRW and local authorities in all the areas I have worked in the UK, including the north-east, the dales and Ceredigion, so all the authorities and regulators, have known that there has been a problem. The focus, to repeat myself, has been just on the mines, which can be important, but it is the channels and floodplains downstream, where people live. The notion that these could be contaminated, despite 35 to 40 years’ worth of research with our group and highly cited papers in Science, which I think was where Laura picked up back in 2023—we showed it was a global issue—seems a little perverse.
Laura Hughes: There is such an easy fix. There are so many people I have spoken to whose drinking water was contaminated because their water came from a private bore in their garden. If they had known, they can get a water filter. You can get yourself connected to the mains. That is such a simple fix.
I have gone to people’s houses and they got in touch with me to say, “I read your piece and thought, ‘I have a private drinking water source’”. They got it tested and there were really high levels of lead. They got themselves tested and they had really high levels of lead. Since installing filters, their lead levels have gone down and they are able to read a book again. These are real people’s lives. It is something you add to a home survey and it tells you, “You need to get your water tested”. It is not that complicated.
Q9 Andrew Ranger: I am guessing from your answers that you do not think that the communities you have visited have received sufficient support to mitigate the risks of metal mine pollution. Were there any examples where sufficient support has been put in place that you could point to?
Professor Macklin: I can give one example, and it is the confidential document that you have sight of. Ben has been part of it and has been fantastic in his support. I am not going to name names, because that is not appropriate. We will talk about it generally.
There is a village that was significantly impacted by the 2012 floods. We knew, on the basis of the work that we did on that, published in 2014, that there was significant contamination of that area from flooding. I have kept in contact with that group. After the last meeting that we had—was it May 2024?—and the lack of progress, not from you, although the general election did not particularly help, but that is the way these things go, we decided to work with this community, with my colleague Professor Paul Brewer at Aberystwyth University.
We decided to do our own citizen science, in effect. We went to the community. We worked with local councillors and local people. They had been primed to some degree, because I had had a major project, funded by NERC, 10 years before, looking at the flooding and contamination issues. We asked them whether they would like to be involved with this. Over a period of a year or so, they collected soil samples. They were brought to us and tested. Unfortunately, 80% of the samples that were collected were found to be significantly contaminated.
This was a strong validation of the mapping and modelling work that we were doing, so that was good news, but not great news in terms of other things. We had long discussions with their leaders, so to speak, and with local councillors. We had a community meeting, and Ben came along and listened to it. That was a very positive meeting. Obviously it is a very private thing. We provided information; I think I have shared the presentation with the Committee on how we fed back data. It was done very carefully. We took supplementary questions and we were there to give advice on what needs to be done. We did that in our own time, because we know that it is important.
The other thing that I have sent you is the methodology and some of the validation for our mapping and modelling technologies, which we are going to submit for publication, probably next week. We wanted to convince ourselves that we had got the technology right. Although the number of gardens and soils that were contaminated was disappointing, and the levels were quite shocking as well, we felt that we had done the right thing. We can provide a sensible way forward for dealing with the issue. Ben might have reflections on that meeting.
Q10 Chair: On Monday, during our visit, the MRA and NRW were very keen to show us what science and testing they have been doing. Quite rightly, they have been doing it. Your citizen science is doing the same testing, but a different group of people are getting the results. My question is whether there is a gap. Do you feel there is—I will not say withheld evidence—a gap with the corporate bodies that are doing the testing, say in waterways? We know that, where there are no fish, there must be a problem. We know those sorts of issues. Is there an issue with there not exactly being joined-up thinking?
Professor Macklin: Yes, absolutely. There is not joined-up thinking. I am a river scientist. I am what is called a fluvial geomorphologist, looking at the way that rivers shape landscapes. You need what is called catchment thinking, and we have been advocating this for many years. You need to look at this in the round, over different spaces and timescales.
The other bodies that we need to talk about are the local authorities. In terms of the mines themselves, they are orphaned. That is the phrase that is used. No one owns them any more, but we have to deal with the pollution legacy. Usually that is the responsibility of the regulatory authorities, which is NRW in Wales’s case and the coal board.
In terms of contaminated land, we move into the realm of local authorities. After the 2012 floods, we tried to engage. Things have probably moved on, because we are 15 years further on. They were slow to engage with us, at best. They need to be brought into the realm from a regulatory perspective.
We did the presentation to this particular village. My colleague and I were there—we are both now retired—in a private capacity. We were there as Ceredigion citizens. As academics, we wanted to help, but it was done in a very careful way. We rehearsed the issues, but what we were left with was that, although we could field the questions from local landowners, it was the local authorities that need to be fully involved in this process.
If I remember correctly, one frustration at this meeting was not with us, and it was not really with Ben either. It was a frustration in terms of the local authorities: “Shouldn’t they have known about this?” Yes, they should have known about it. “Why haven’t they done anything about this?” They have not adopted the methodologies that we have developed, which are used in many parts of the world, but not in Wales or the UK.
We might come on to this towards the end of what we perhaps need to do. We need to get together in a room at the highest level to talk it through and join it up. This is not done in a confrontational way. I have skin in the game, because I live there. As Laura said, a lot of the problems are relatively straightforward to deal with, but it is joining them up, as you suggested at the beginning, and having the information. We have the information. It is time, as I said before, to nudge it across the line, so to speak, and sort things out.
Q11 Chair: I am thinking about that. As well as the local authorities, would local health boards be another area?
Professor Macklin: Yes.
Laura Hughes: Yes, exactly. Everyone is operating in silos. All the regulators say, “We are testing the water”, because that is what they are responsible for, but they are missing the fact that they are not testing the land. What we are saying is that it is the land that is impacting people’s health. This is the problem. No one seems to be telling the local authorities, “You have this number of old lead mines in your area. This is the estimated area of contamination. Here are the tools. Here is the XRF gun. Here are the farms you should be testing. Here are the people you should be telling”.
No one is exchanging information. No one is talking to GPs. What are they finding? What are they seeing? What should they be testing for? The biggest frustration with this story is that I would be following something very specific, so let us take those eggs in the academic report, and everyone kept passing me round to the other authority. No one is seemingly responsible, so it is slipping under the carpet.
Professor Macklin: In the draft paper I shared with you, I have written down here that it is 1,700 km, not 500 km, as NRW says, in terms of river contaminated by lead. It is not quite an order of magnitude, but it is a significant difference. The regulators just focus on the mines. There are 140 square kilometres, as I mentioned, so 14,000 rugby pitches, of contaminated land. We know where it is. There are 24 affected catchments. I could go through them one by one. We have this information at our fingertips. We need to transfer it into a risk management system pretty quickly.
Q12 Steve Witherden: Professor Macklin, Natural Resources Wales, the Mining Remediation Authority and local authorities all have a role to play when it comes to contaminated land. The focus today is on metal mines. In my constituency it is forever chemicals. We had a very big chemical plant for 143 years up to 2010. Do you think that NRW, the Mining Remediation Authority and LAs are sufficiently resourced to do their jobs in relation to contaminated land? I must say that I am incredibly sceptical based on my own work in this area, but I would be very interested to hear your thoughts.
Professor Macklin: Everyone needs more money. That is a slightly cheeky answer, but that is obviously a lot of the case. Thank you for asking that question, because I can give you some specifics in terms of the costs of these things. I did a bit of digging, as I am sure many of you have. I focused on the legacy mining issue.
As far as I can see, since 2020, I think, the capital expenditure for NRW is about £4.5 million. That has partly contributed to the clean-up at Frongoch, and I think it will go towards Cwmystwyth as well. There are something like 230 large mines that need to be remediated. If you multiply that, you end up with about £250 million to £300 million that is going to be required to do this. On its year-to-year budget, it is about £45,000 in terms of monitoring.
This is joint work with my three long-term colleagues: Professor Chris Thomas, Professor Karen Hudson-Edwards at the University of Exeter and Professor Paul Brewer at Aberystwyth University. The paper I have shared with you provides us with a way of mapping across the whole of Wales. We estimate, for the cost of cleaning up one mine, say Cwmystwyth, £1.2 million. My border is on the Ystwyth catchment, so I know it quite well. For the same cost of cleaning up, or trying to clean up, one mine, we could produce risk maps for the whole of Wales, which would address your point in terms of resource.
This would be resource well spent. For the first time, we would be able to say to the medical community, “These are the areas you might need to test”, and to farmers, “These are the areas you need to be mindful of when you are flooded next”. It becomes a management tool. We estimate that, with somewhere between 750,000 and 1.2 million quid, we would be able to do that across Wales.
In terms of the financial issue and cleaning up a single mine, those costs are large. I have worked on mining problems all over the world. That will clean up a point source and turn off a local tap, which is important—don’t get me wrong. As I mentioned, there are 2,300 lead mines in Wales. There are 220 very large ones, so the costs are huge. The point I am making is that, for a fraction of that, rather than—I do not have any hair to pull out—Laura pulling her hair out over why people are not doing these things, we would have a process-based understanding. This would be a layer in land-use planning. It would be a GIS layer that local authorities could use and we would be in a different place.
It does not mean that we would not still work on these mines. Frongoch is problematic. There are other mines that are significant as well. At least in the short term it would get us to a much better place, because the climate impacts are going to be more on the river channels and floodplains themselves, and less so on the mines. That is the key. In a sense, there is going to be more bang for your buck by spending a relatively small amount of money, in terms of getting a nationwide heads-up.
I have one last point on this. Wales could be ahead of the game internationally, in terms of our Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act. We could export worldwide both the mine remediation at site and the map methodology. We could make a virtue out of this, but as I think a number of you would say, we need to join these things up. I hope I answered your question, Steve.
Q13 Steve Witherden: You have, Professor. I want very quickly to come back. You elaborated on cost, and I am aware that it may not be an area of expertise, but I thought I would try you anyway. Is the “polluter pays” principle something that we have looked at? I know that some metal mines are very old. I think about the one on our boundary. Where there is an existing company, or a company that has taken on the liabilities of a since-closed mining company, chemical plant or whatever it may be, would you see scope for “polluter pays”?
Professor Macklin: In terms of first principles, the polluter should pay. As I am sure you understand, these are orphaned historical mines. I appreciate that this is not a critical minerals or metals committee, but in terms of the green transition, I know from work that we are doing, particularly overseas, again with the British Government, that there are thoughts on reprocessing some of this mine waste. If someone wanted to do that, they probably should take it on—I can see some smiles—as an idea for getting remediation done.
The scale of the issue is so large. It is not that it should not be attempted, but in terms of a short-term, two to five-year window of moving things on significantly, particularly in terms of the flooding and erosion issue, if we can combine turning off the tap at the most contaminated mines with understanding the risks and challenges on floodplains themselves, we would be in a 100% better position than we are now.
Q14 Henry Tufnell: You have touched on it already, Professor, but I want to touch on the co-ordination across these different bodies that are responsible, whether it is councils, NRW or the Mining Remediation Authority. We have reports from the BBC—I think this was in March 2025—that half of the 22 councils said they could not or would not provide figures. Then 698 high-risk sites were identified, of which 586 had not been inspected. That is in terms of that testing. If you get to identifying in terms of the mapping, you have heavy disclaimers from the Mining Remediation Authority as well. There seems to be a lack of co-ordination across these different bodies in terms of their approach when you are looking at the identification and testing.
Professor Macklin: Yes, absolutely. I have been in the game, fortunately or unfortunately, for a long time. If we went back to, let us say, 2000 or even 2012, it was a very different environment for bringing up these issues. They were not really discussed in a grown-up way. My feeling is that you should get the appropriate people who are steering these organisations and the technical experts who work with them. We need to get in the same room. We need to have, as I say, not a huge amount of funding, but we need to use the funding currently available in a much smarter way.
We have to see each other not as combatants and not in terms of confrontation. This is a team game. Unfortunately, we live in a very litigation-based environment. We have worked with the FT, Laura, the BBC and very good investigative journalists. Without the investigative journalists, we may not have been here today. I have been pushing this for decades.
We need to get everyone together. This is not a woolly jumper, hug-in moment. We need to talk it through. I was giving a presentation to the mining community, which involved all the regulators, in Cardiff back in November. I presented an earlier version—it has not changed that much—of the draft paper I have given to you. I got no feedback and no invitations. I do not take it personally, but I find it extraordinarily surprising that people have not leaned in. This is about issues, not personality—I am not saying that about the individuals—and it applies to local authorities as well.
There is a great hesitancy to be involved. Speaking now as a retired emeritus professor, and this is not a reflection on my own previous institutions at all, in any shape or form, even some of the academic community can be slightly hesitant in speaking out, because they are at universities. As I say, that did not apply to my previous universities, but I know for a fact there is some hesitancy in speaking truth to power.
Q15 Henry Tufnell: Laura, do you think that is one of the issues, in terms of being so risk averse, and that no one organisation is getting the bull by the horns because of lawyers and liability?
Laura Hughes: I think it is because of who pays for it. Who is going to sort it out? I really think that is part of the problem. You go to the UK Health Security Agency and it says, “You are talking about a health issue, but it has an environmental cause, so it has to be the environmental agencies”. Then they say, “No, it is a local issue, so it has to be the local councils”. No one wants to be held accountable. No one wants to pay for it.
I would say, “Create a whole new thing”. Connect all these different dots. That maybe has its own funding to specifically deal with this problem, in the same way we have dealt with radon, as an example. There is a whole UKHSA website about radon, where you can see whether you are living on it. There are examples of how UK policymakers have done this sort of thing before and got it right.
It is cynical, but honestly I think it is a money thing. Everyone is under huge pressure. It is about the political priorities of the day. You cannot always see, taste or smell lead contamination, but you can with sewage, so the public get really wound up by it. You do not know that your child is suffering from lead exposure because no one has tested for it. It makes it easier, in a way, for politicians not to do anything and for regulators not to do anything.
Q16 Henry Tufnell: Can I move on to testing? I think you have done some work. You had a podcast called “Untold: Toxic Legacy”, where you said that the equivalent of one supermarket shelf’s worth of produce is tested every year for lead. I think that is what you said, which is quite remarkable. Why do you think that is? Why is it so low?
Laura Hughes: That is a very good question. That is for the whole of the UK, I should say. We test around 33,000 products; 450 of them are tested specifically for metals, including lead. I do not know why. Why are we testing so few products for lead? It makes absolutely no sense to me at all.
Another point I would raise is that we have lead thresholds, but our thresholds are higher than those of the European Union, for example, which has lowered its thresholds. There is a growing general consensus that no level of lead is okay in food. We accept that you cannot get rid of it entirely, but you want it as low as possible. Why have we not caught up with the EU? Why do we have the levels we do?
We do not have a lead threshold for eggs. To go back to the very specific example of eggs, which is where I began, who is responsible for making sure that people in Wales are not selling contaminated, poisonous, toxic eggs at the end of their driveway to their neighbours or in local farmers markets? The Food Standards Agency says to me that it is up to local food businesses and local authorities. Local food businesses and local authorities are not testing for lead, and you do not even have a level, so what would they be testing against?
The lack of testing of food is extraordinary. There was one study done in 2010 after the European Union became concerned about this. It put a call out to member states and said, “You need to do some sort of report or investigation looking at this issue”. I have interviewed the academic who did this report for the Food Standards Agency. He found really quite high levels of lead in the animals that he studied. The Food Standards Agency presented his report with the line that there was no risk found to consumers. That is not what he would say. There is a total reluctance to engage with this at all, and that is about the only serious testing I can see that has been done.
I spent a lot of time looking through the National Archives. Over the last 20 years I found—I cannot remember—over 700 examples of either vets or farmers raising concerns with authorities and saying, “There is something wrong with my animals”, so cows that are blind, twitching, seizing up or not growing. They are studied by the Animal and Plant Health Agency on behalf of the Food Standards Agency. It found really toxic levels of lead. In those 700 or something reports, the reason they concluded those animals had toxic levels of lead was that they were being reared near abandoned lead mine sites.
This evidence is not easy to find, but it is there. Government Departments have known about this as a huge problem. When I read those reports and I read about a Red Tractor farm where a cow has lead levels in its kidneys that are three times what they should be, there is a complete lack of curiosity as to, “If there are lead levels on this farm that are high enough to do that to a cow, what about the people living on or next to that farm?”
After these investigations, those farmers are given a leaflet and told, “You really should not sell that, and you might want to check your soil”. It is entirely voluntary. What really should be happening is that farmers, if they are told their land is potentially contaminated, should be declaring that on their food chain information sheets and discarding the offal. These are two simple things, which I do not think would massively impact their livelihood on that front, that you could do to help reduce the amount of lead that might be being sold in various markets.
The thing I would be most concerned about are these hotspots where local communities are eating a lot of the produce that they are creating themselves. No one is testing it, and they have no idea. There will be children there who might get diagnosed with behavioural problems and no one would ever think to connect it to the food that they are eating.
Q17 Gerald Jones: Apologies for being late. Leading nicely on from the discussion we were just having, you talked about the testing. Samantha Power from the US Agency for International Development has said that they are testing in the US and in other countries. What is your view on whether children should be tested in Wales?
Laura Hughes: I really believe that the only way the dial is properly going to change on this is if children are tested and we find elevated blood lead levels in communities that are living in these areas. At that point, this does not become a hypothetical risk; it becomes a very real problem. At that point it gives everyone the political impetus to ask, “Why? Why does that child have elevated lead levels? Where is the lead coming from?”
Other countries have biomonitoring, so they know what their population’s lead levels are. We have absolutely no idea in the UK what our lead exposure levels are. If you have listened to the podcast, you will know that my reporting started in Wales with lead mines, but it has ended up in houses. I have looked at paint and plumbing. I have found children who died from consuming lead paint in their house. This is not just a lead mine problem. Our lead legacy goes much further and deeper than this. That is why the testing is so important, because then you find the source and can work on remediating the source.
Q18 Gerald Jones: What do you think the awareness level is among GPs and other professionals?
Laura Hughes: It is extraordinarily low. I normally write about health. Whenever I have spoken to a doctor over the last few years, I have mentioned this. They all say, “We dealt with it. We banned lead. Why are you harping on about lead?” We forgot to clear up the lead we had already used, and it does not go anywhere, so generation after generation are still potentially being exposed.
No one is looking at this and no one is testing. No one is telling GPs, except in Leeds, which we could get into on another occasion. There are parts of England where children have died from lead poisoning, where there are GPs who have automatic pop-up systems now, but it is still very limited. I do not understand why it is so localised to one part of England.
Q19 Ben Lake: Thank you both for coming this afternoon and for your evidence. The question I would have is to summarise some of the evidence you have given this afternoon, specifically on the one ask that you would both have of the Government. What is the big change that you would like the Government to make with urgency?
Professor Macklin: The big change or inflection point is to roll out the risk-based mapping and modelling across Wales. It is ready to be done. Gerald, touching on your question in terms of testing, Leeds is an urban environment. There was evidence in the 1970s from the Aberystwyth area. We are able to indicate rural communities in floodplain agricultural areas where testing should be targeted, rather than doing it in a slightly abstract form. Obviously not many people live on mines, or very few. In terms of the catchments, the channels and the floodplains that are affected, the contaminations decrease downstream. There are higher concentrations towards the mine, but they gradually decrease. You can actually map where these communities are and target testing on them.
Ben, to answer your question, as I mentioned to the Chair, for the cost of cleaning up one of the poster-child mines, such as Cwmystwyth, Frongoch or the equivalent, we could roll out this technology. It would be the first time in the UK, and we would have a world lead in this.
The other point I would stress—and we have all touched on it—is joining things up. I would be more than happy to help you to join up the regulators, NRW and the coal authorities. We have not talked about industry. Industry is very keen to work with us on this, and I can help with that. We need to work with the local authorities to educate them, not in a patronising way, but on what needs to be done.
To end, we need to help the local communities. Laura was there. Did you do it accidentally? It was fate. You turned up the day that we were doing the testing in this particular village. It was quite stressful, because I know some of these people quite well. It is a real problem. In some instances, to say, “No, it is not an issue. We can get round it” was reassuring. It is from very high-level stuff to what we are talking about here, down to individuals and perhaps down to individual X, but I will leave that for Laura.
Laura Hughes: I would say testing people, which I have already made my case for. More broadly, it is just test, test, test. Test soil, water, food and people. Make it part of a home survey. Make testing a regular thing, not something that retired professors have to do in their free time. Make it proper, systematic testing. If I, as a journalist, can find all these case studies from driving around in my car at the weekend and knocking on people’s doors, what would proper systems actually find?
Q20 Ben Lake: It is testing so that we know the full extent of the problem?
Laura Hughes: Yes. If you do not know what you are dealing with, you cannot deal with it and there is no reason to deal with it.
Chair: I will bring the session to a close now. I want to say thank you so much to you both, Professor Mark Macklin and Laura Hughes, because the evidence today has been fascinating, interesting and really to the point. We have a lot of food for thought. I am not sure that people such as Ben Lake will let us leave it lying now. We will probably be revisiting this in the future. I want to say thank you so much for your time and for your enthusiasm and commitment to this. It shines out, so thank you very much.