Welsh Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Industrial Legacy and Contaminated Land, HC 631
Thursday 10 September 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 10 September 2026.
Members present: Ruth Jones (Chair); Ann Davies; Simon Hoare; Gerald Jones; Ben Lake; Llinos Medi; Andrew Ranger; Steve Witherden.
Questions 1-24
Witnesses
I: Michael Sheen, actor, broadcaster and campaigner; Dan Ashby, investigative journalist; and Lucy Taylor, investigative journalist.
Witnesses: Michael Sheen, Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor.
Q1 Chair: Good morning, 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. The Committee is today holding a one-off evidence session on industrial legacy and contaminated land.
First and foremost, before we begin the session, I want to acknowledge the concerns raised by communities across Wales with regard to this contaminated land. I also want to pay tribute to those working to remediate these sites and support those who have been affected.
Today’s session is inspired by our inquiry into the environmental and economic legacy of Wales’s industrial past and the recent BBC documentary “Buried with Michael Sheen”. Thank you to Lucy Taylor, Michael Sheen and Dan Ashby for coming before the Committee today to give us your evidence; it is greatly appreciated. We hope that the session will allow us to discuss the findings of your research so that we can make informed recommendations about future policy, legislation, and funding and support for our communities living near these former industrial sites.
Before I begin, can I ask Members to declare any interests relevant to today’s session?
Steve Witherden: My wife and I are both featured in the documentary. My wife is a community councillor in the area where one of the chemical plants we are going to be speaking about was. She used to work there and had her blood tested as part of the documentary. We live about 100 metres away from the site in question.
Chair: Thank you, Steve. Let me start with Mr Sheen. Can you tell us how your interest in the topic was piqued and how your subsequent involvement with the documentary came about?
Michael Sheen: Thank you very much for inviting us to come today. It started very randomly, really, for me. I was living in Los Angeles at the time. I was contacted by a teacher in the Rhondda Cynon Taf area. Before I replied to this lady, who was doing a school project, I thought I would look up what Rhondda Cynon Taf actually means, so I went on to Wikipedia.
On the Wikipedia site, I saw one little entry that said, “Environmental controversy: Brofiscin quarry has been named as the most toxic place in Britain”—and that was it. I thought it seemed very strange that there was nothing more about it. I looked into it, and by the end of that day I was terrified and fascinated by what I had found out.
To cut a long story short, I came across the story of a man called Douglas Gowan, who had spent his life on this, it seemed. First of all, in the mid-‘60s, when he was a younger man working for the National Union of Farmers, there had been a call from a farmer in the Gros-faen area near Llantrisant, who had seen strange things happening to his livestock—aborted foetuses, malformed foetuses, dead crayfish and such in the streams—and wanted someone to come and investigate. Douglas Gowan went out to investigate. He tells a very powerful and emotional story about finding a lamb that was deformed and dying, with no genitalia.
He then discovered that there was a quarry nearby—Brofiscin quarry. It was a disused quarry that was being used for dumping from the Monsanto factory in Newport—the dumping of what turned out to be canisters of something called PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls.
Douglas spent many years after that testing and finding out what PCBs were and slowly piecing together a story that seemed to indicate that the dumping of these PCBs in Brofiscin quarry was leading to it leaching out and affecting the local farmers’ livestock, and contaminating what was happening there. Douglas then took that story on, because he believed there should be accountability and responsibility taken, and that led to a huge saga just around that Brofiscin quarry site.
Anyway, on that day when I was reading up about this and finding out a bit more about Monsanto as a company, both historically and in the years ahead, I was struck by two things. First, there seemed to be a terrible injustice, potentially, and not only a historical failure on many levels to protect people, but a very present danger and possibly a danger in the future. Douglas talked about how this was not just an idea in the past, but an issue for us now and for our children and our children’s children. I was very struck by that. I was equally struck by how little information there seemed to be that you could find out about this. There was essentially one big report in The Ecologist magazine and very little else.
That led me, ultimately, to trying to find out if this man, Douglas Gowan, was still alive, and he was. He lived in Norfolk. I asked if I could come and see him and get his story and he said, “Yes, please come and see me, but come quickly, because I think I’ll be dead soon.” I went with a friend who had a camera. I recorded him for two days and got about seven or eight hours of footage of him telling his entire story. Within about six months, he was indeed dead, and he believed that it was because of the effect of PCBs on his system. The story that he told was an absolutely extraordinary one. Me, Lucy and Dan have tried to sift through that story for a long time, and some of the most extraordinary and unbelievable things in it are the most true things. That formed the basis of my interest in this.
I then did something called the Raymond Williams lecture in 2017, and I mentioned it. I am not an investigative journalist—I did not know how to take this on. I was interested in it as a drama as well as a piece of investigative journalism, but in terms of following that on, I could not do it, so I mentioned it in the lecture, hoping that someone would pick up on it. It took a while, but eventually, years later, I had a call saying that Lucy and Dan were interested in telling Douglas Gowan’s story as part of a wider story about not only PCBs, but what are known as forever chemicals. We talked about it, got together and ended up making the podcast series “Buried” and, ultimately, the documentary series.
Chair: Thank you for setting the scene.
Q2 Andrew Ranger: Thank you all for coming today. We are mindful that we want to avoid any undue public alarm on the topic, but can you tell us—I am directing this at Lucy Taylor and Dan Ashby—about your findings related to PCBs at former industrial sites?
Lucy Taylor: It is interesting that you talk about undue alarm, because that is exactly where we began as well. I remember the three of us having a conversation when we first started the podcast, which came before the documentary, and saying, “We have to be sure that everything we say is watertight here, because it is going to scare people, and we don’t want to scare people if it’s actually not a risk to them.” As we have gone further through this journey, we have shifted on that and felt that what we are finding out is quite scary. The public emphasis is towards thinking, “It can’t be that bad, because they wouldn’t allow that to happen,” when actually some of what is happening is quite worrying.
For example, we did soil sampling for the TV series in 14 different sites, and 13 of them showed above average or high levels of these chemicals in the soil. One of those was so dangerous that, if you touched it, it would be dangerous to health; the scientist we were with told us that if a dog ran through a puddle, the dog could die because of the levels of chemicals in the soil. Beyond that, we have done blood testing and found those same chemicals in the blood of people who lived in the surrounding areas. In some cases, they were at high or above average levels, and some of those people have experienced rare cancers. It is worrying, and this is just the beginning.
Dan Ashby: One thing that is worth emphasising is that we did indicative testing. We are a small team—we are not the Environment Agency or NRW. We tested only a handful of sites, and we found some truly alarming results. In my mind, it raises the question, “What would we have found if we tested hundreds of sites?” We just chose specific locations. As Lucy said, one of the places was so high, it was off the scientists’ charts. In almost all the locations across Wales, the scientists came back and said they warrant further investigation. They might not have been as high as the 2,000 or 12,000 times over of the highest result, but because they were more than 100 times over in places across Wales, and they were sometimes going into streams or on land close to people, the Royal Society of Chemistry scientists said, “Look, this does warrant further investigation.”
Q3 Andrew Ranger: You have touched on it already, but obviously there are some limitations to the research you have done because of the sheer scale of this. You have quite clearly said that there needs to be more testing, and we need to find out a lot more about this across the whole country—across the whole UK, probably. You have said that the research in the documentary is indicative, but do you think that there are more limitations to it?
Dan Ashby: With forever chemicals, and indeed chemical testing—you are probably familiar with this from looking at lead—there are two stages. There is testing, where you can find out specific concentrations in soils, and then there is a risk assessment, where you look at whether those concentrations are getting into people; scientists talk about a pathway and a receptor. We do not have the budget or the expertise to do the full risk assessment, but the chemical hits we got in some places were big red flags, in places where there is either no testing happening or very little. From our journalistic perspective, it certainly warrants more investigation. We cannot categorically say the risk without doing a full risk assessment, though.
Lucy Taylor: It is also worth saying that the person who did that testing for us was Dr Dave Megson, who is from Manchester Metropolitan University, with the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is one of the world experts on this. For the TV documentary, we were also supported by the Open University, which went back and scrutinised what he did for compliance reasons to make sure that what we put out to the public was fair. Although it is indicative, it is indicative because of the budget we had and the fact that we are not an environmental regulator that can survey the whole area, not because we are a TV crew. It is still quite robust testing; it is just limited in scope.
Michael Sheen: It is probably useful to say that the testing up until what we did with the documentary has been done by councils. It is difficult to see how that testing could be trusted by the communities as being appropriate, extensive and rigorous enough when, if the result of that testing went one way, it could lead to the potential bankrupting of those councils. People are being asked to trust testing that has an understandable but quite strong agenda behind it, and that is part of the point. However limited the testing we did was and whatever restrictions there might have been on it, I would suggest that there were even greater restrictions on any other testing done before this.
Andrew Ranger: That is a fair and interesting point, and we will come on to it later.
Q4 Simon Hoare: In the course of your research, have you identified anything that tells you that the companies or individuals doing the dumping in the first place did it with the knowledge that it was potentially harmful and injurious to public health? Or did they not know because of the time it was done, and did they just think they were storing a by-product of whatever they were doing in an appropriate place? Do you have a view on that from anything you have unearthed or discovered?
Michael Sheen: I immediately think about the case that happened in Anniston, Alabama on behalf of the community there. We spoke to one of the lawyers who took on that case, and he showed us internal memos from Monsanto dating certainly as far back as the ‘50s and potentially back to the ‘30s that indicated that there was an awareness in Monsanto of the effect on the community. We also found internal memos from the time it go to the point when they had to shut down production of PCBs in the plant in Anniston that said, “We cannot afford to lose one dollar of business.” It was at that point, as we discovered in that moment in the documentary when Dan told me, that they turned their sights on Newport in south Wales, knowing—I would say full well—what damage had been done to the community in Anniston, and they just moved production to Newport.
Of course, there is a history across south Wales of heavy industry and chronic illness. If one wanted to be cynical about it, you could say that there was the possibility of masking any potential damage to the community because of what already existed there, as well as a desperate desire for employment and jobs to come in and take the place of the industry that had gone, and communities that perhaps do not get listened to as much. We are not talking about Oxfordshire, where there was a case recently.
Dan Ashby: The big waste crime site in Kidlington.
Michael Sheen: Yes.
Chair: I am mindful of time, so I will move on to Ben Lake.
Q5 Ben Lake: You mentioned the testing of particular sites. I want to scrutinise how much we understand about the total number of sites that may be contaminated in Wales. In the documentary, you referenced NRW figures that state that some 15,000 sites may have been contaminated. How confident are we that the figure of 15,000 is accurate and reliable? I ask because in another strand on lead contamination there is a question about how much we understand about the extent of contamination. Do you have an idea how the regulator came to that figure? What sources of information is it relying on to state that there are 15,000 sites?
Dan Ashby: There are different numbers quoted for contaminated land. Friends of the Earth did its own look at council records and said that there are potentially 45,000 contaminated land sites. Interestingly, it said that something like 80 had been declared contaminated, but that many councils do not keep public registers or even have full inspection teams.
The NRW figure is much lower. I think we can say with some confidence that there are thousands of contaminated, risky sites across Wales—I would say probably more than 10,000. The question is, how contaminated are they and what contaminants are we talking about? From what we have seen from Douglas’s evidence, internal Monsanto memos and years of our own testing, our worry is that there are many sites with high levels of PCBs.
Remember that, as Michael alluded to, PCBs are much scarier than lead in some senses because PCBs in tiny amounts can affect you for the rest of your life. Not only that, but you pass them on to your children, so they contaminate from generation to generation. They are the godfather of forever chemicals. For us, the risk is higher and the thresholds are lower. The NRW will also be looking at those. One of the scary things is that there are fewer rules around PCB testing than, say, some water testing, so in many cases they do not need to test for PCBs.
Q6 Ben Lake: How much record-keeping was there for the sites that we fear have been contaminated by illegal dumping so that we can know what was potentially dumped? The numbers are big—10,000, 15,000, 40,000 sites. I imagine one of the first things we need to do is try to categorise them according to potential risk. In order to do that effectively, we would need some information about what has actually been deposited. From your investigations, how much information is there to guide that sort of undertaking?
Dan Ashby: Each site is different. Douglas did really well at finding the right memos and documents in the councils. NRW also knows what is in many of the sites. For some sites, to be honest, nobody knows. The authorities will come out and say, “We just don’t know.” There are organisations like Watershed, which has tested all around the UK and published a map. That is a great start, because it is pulling in public data from everywhere so that localities will say, “My goodness, we’ve got this on our doorstep.” But there are many thousands of so-called orphan sites where nobody knows what is in them.
Michael Sheen: In the documentary we have people talking about looking out their window at night as children to see trucks dumping stuff in the darkness of night and coming out the next day and finding a jelly-like substance on the road, and kids playing with it. I don’t know if that is being recorded by anyone, but it doesn’t look like it.
Lucy Taylor: One final thing on the testing that I do not know if we emphasised is that we are talking about mostly former landfill sites, or in some cases former industrial sites, but we did not test the sites themselves; we tested the public land around them. Everywhere we tested and got higher levels was public—footpaths, public woodland, public sports fields, roads. You would expect higher levels in the sites themselves, but we are talking about the public land, so we are talking about chemicals leaching out of those sites.
Michael Sheen: Exactly. Because a lot of these places are fenced off now, which, of course, does not stop contamination getting out, we cannot actually get into the place to be able to do the testing that we would like to do, so we have had to rely on a lot of anecdotal stuff. But when you hear someone like Michael in the documentary, who is up in the Wrexham area, and who played in the lagoon as a child, saying that he got cancer, and it was such a rare form of cancer that his surgeon said to him, “You getting that cancer is like you’ve won the lottery, in a negative way,” and then his best friend, who also played in the lagoon, gets exactly the same rare form of cancer, and the surgeon says, “That’s like winning the lottery every day for six months,” that anecdotal evidence starts to make you think that we need to get inside these places and test this stuff.
Dan Ashby: On that lagoon, I was speaking to a really well-placed contact who works with the regulators, and he said that when he watched the documentary he almost thought he was drunk on Rattler, as he put it. He is an expert. That lagoon is a shame on Britain, and it is a scandal really that it is there. With Kidlington, there was an action plan, and it was cleared up; that the lagoon has stood there for 20 years is outrageous. I think Wrexham council would acknowledge that, and acknowledge their frustration that they do not have the money to clean it up. Probably NRW would as well. That should not be there today.
Chair: I am conscious of time, and I know we have a lot more questions to go, so I will ask for brief questions and brief answers.
Q7 Steve Witherden: Following on from the question about Natural Resources Wales, Lucy and Dan, how on earth can we make a balanced assessment of the genuine concerns posed by PCBs if we have no idea which sites are contaminated and which are not?
Dan Ashby: There are obvious low-hanging fruits here—many people would say that the lagoon is an obvious thing that needs to be cleared up. Look at what the authorities and councils are saying. If you look at the internal paperwork, when Wrexham council assessed that lagoon, the first choice was to clean it up, but it would cost £40 million. The second option was, if you do not have the money, put a fence around it and just monitor it—but that is only if you do not have the money; if health and the environment came first, you would clear it up. So look at the low-hanging sites that even the authorities agree on.
Where there is contention and where people are not sure, there should be more funding. Whether that is a national fund I will leave to the policymakers, but there should be rigorous funding for more testing, so that remediation is an option, not a burden. Remember, until 2014, this country had a national remediation fund. At the moment, we are the laggards in the world: America is digging and cleaning up these sites, and PCB levels in fish and oceans are falling much faster in America. We have some of the worst seas around Britain for PCB contamination and we do not have a national fund any more. If we do not have that, the question is: who is paying for it?
Q8 Steve Witherden: As a follow-up, given that we are talking about councils and NRW, councils report that some of the sites have been investigated but did not meet the legal definition of contaminated land. We are told about the thresholds—“It doesn’t meet this threshold.” With that in mind, do you think that the legislation needs to be updated to address that?
Michael Sheen: I would question—and I think it is a sensible question—that if the judgment around thresholds and what is safe for communities comes from councils that, if they judge it not to be safe for communities, cannot afford to pay for the remediation, it is very difficult to take that at face value. In any conversation around any of this, we have to start by saying that the people responsible for doing this in the first place seem to have got away with it. They seem to be protected, buffered and inured to any responsibility. Everything we are talking about, and will presumably go on to talk about, is in the absence of the original perpetrators of this action getting away with it.
Q9 Gerald Jones: My question leads on nicely from that. From the research, what response do we need from the Government to make sites with contamination or PCBs safe? When answering that question, could we think about the point that was just made and about who, in your opinion, should pay for identifying and remediating the sites?
Michael Sheen: I have come to believe more and more, the longer we have worked on this, that the burden has to be taken off the councils. At the moment, it feels like there is a sort of stand-off. You have councils that are terrified of making a judgment one way, regardless of what the data, evidence or information might be, and in fact are probably very nervous about really looking into it too far because if they were to find out that they were financially responsible for this, that would be the end of that council. We have to go beyond that; we have to take it off the councils. The testing has to be done completely independently, and there has to be a fund beyond the council at a national level—I would say even possibly at a multinational level, but certainly at a national level—that means that councils are not just sitting there, terrified of looking into this too much. That would be my take on it.
Dan Ashby: The British policy differs from the American one in that we have tried to outsource remediation and decontaminating to companies, really. In Britain, the advice is to try to get developers to come in and sort it out for us. In some cases, they do a good job—they test beforehand and they remediate—but in many cases, there is no incentive; the developer does not want to clear up that mess, so the land just stays there. In other countries, if the land is contaminated and it is a risk, the Government move in and pay for it.
In terms of “polluter pays”, to be honest, Britain has a woeful record on that when you compare it with other countries. We are not taking up many of these cases and going back to, as Michael says, the people who did this—many of whom have budgets set aside to pay for this sort of thing. We need to look at why “polluter pays” is not working. Why are we “polluter profits”, not “polluter pays”, and how does that change? If you look at the figures, we have taken up so few cases over the past 20 years.
Q10 Simon Hoare: I will take my questions slightly out of order, if I may, to get them both in at the same time. Mr Ashby, picking up on the point you were just making about how America does it, we all know that there is a huge difference in its capitalist model, if you will, and in the federalist Government and the state Government, so it is often very difficult to compare America with the UK. Could you point us to a European country that has also had a long industrial past that has done remediation well, which we should be looking at as an example? These are not unique problems to Wales or the broader UK, are they?
Dan Ashby: One of the ironies here is that we do not have the companies to do some of this remediation stuff, because we do not remediate. The Dutch are particularly good at some of the remediation, as well as the Germans. In terms of forever chemicals more generally, you are seeing the EU go much further than Britain in legislating to stop the pollution getting there in the first place. The prevention is more what I know about; I do not know about specific models of remediation in Europe. In America, one big consideration is that they have class action lawsuits, which are really effective for enforcing change and which we do not have.
Michael Sheen: One of the added complications is that, when we talk about the original perpetrators of this, they have managed to transform their companies, so it is incredibly complicated to find out who is now ultimately responsible for this—who actually owns everything. Just trying to find that out is complicated enough, and that tells its own story.
Q11 Simon Hoare: I suppose, Mr Sheen, that this is a question to you. You and your colleagues have highlighted that private companies have caused the problem, and that there is now a legitimate expectation that the taxpayer, whether the local taxpayer or the national taxpayer, somehow picks up the tab for that, which demonstrably does not seem to be particularly fair. I wonder, taking your point about councils and their exposure—their financial vulnerabilities and so on—has anybody, post the broadcast, picked up the phone to you, whether from the Welsh Government, the Wales Office here or whoever it may be, to say, “Come in; we want to have a chat. There are some strategies that we are evolving, and we would like to pick your brains about it,” or has it just met a stony silence from officialdom in its broadest sense?
Michael Sheen: To me personally, no. I got in touch with the First Minister before the documentary went out, and invited him and whoever he would like to bring forward to watch the documentary before it went out publicly. This is not about trying to point blame at anyone. I thought it was a very good opportunity for an incoming First Minister to be able to get on board with this—to look for solutions.
I have always said that everything that we are doing with this is not about just shouting about it; it is about looking for a practical way forward—a practical solution. So I invited the First Minister to have an opportunity to look at it and talk to us about it. Unfortunately, that offer was not taken up. Subsequently, I have not personally been contacted by anyone that you have mentioned. Has anyone got in touch with you, Dan?
Dan Ashby: No. We had right of replies from DEFRA, but they were mostly towards our concerns. Obviously, we got replies from anyone we made allegations against. This issue has been met with either indifference or an attitude of not knowing what to do or not wanting to engage from pretty much across the political spectrum.
That is surprising because I don’t think that chemical contamination and toxins in our communities is a politically divisive issue. It is not something like climate change where you are seeing divisions in parties. It is stunning to me. We have had so much response from the public and so many people have said that the angriest moment for them was reading the end slates—the responses. That is what made everyone’s blood boil.
Michael Sheen: When you say that there is an expectation for the taxpayer to take this up, I would disagree. No; my expectation is that the people who are responsible for this originally should pay for it. The problem is that there appears to be a lack of appetite to take it to them from the people in power—yourselves. Not you personally, but the reason we have come here is because, as I said earlier, we are having to talk about second best options because the people who are actually responsible for it do not seem to be held accountable.
Q12 Simon Hoare: I take your point entirely on that, but have any of you done any research? It is not an area of my expertise. I am still trying to work out what my area of expertise is. But are there any residual liabilities that the perpetrators have through public liability insurance that they may have carried, etc, that may provide an avenue for exploration for funding? As you say, these companies have transformed over the years. They are different parent companies. They change the name. They change the purpose of the business, etc, for motivations that we will not necessarily go into. But they will have always had some form of insurance, so the question is whether there is any historic legacy insurance that could be tapped into as a way of, either in whole or in part, meeting remediation costs. Has anybody come to you with that as a thought or an avenue to be explored?
Dan Ashby: Yes. The liabilities are there. As Michael says, they are incredibly complicated, and you would need someone like a specialist law firm to go through the liability contracts. They are not always there because they sort of disappear over time. We had one case where a council bought the site for £1 and stupidly took all the liabilities. But in many cases, they exist.
Q13 Andrew Ranger: One of the documentary’s biggest impacts on me was actually the impact on people who live in those areas and in those communities. Mr Sheen, can you describe the impact that contaminated land has had on the people that you met in those communities?
Michael Sheen: There is huge fear, because so little is known. We talk about the two Jans, as we call them. They feel like they have been pushing back against their local council. They do not feel that they can trust the information they have been getting from them about the contaminated land. You saw the meeting that we had where local people were talking about the effect on their pets—their dogs. I was hugely affected by Michael, who I alluded to earlier. He had played in the lagoon when he was a child, as had his best friend, and both of them then got the same very rare form of cancer. He talked about his son saying to him, “Have I got it as well?” I still—I will never forget that.
You see the effect on people. They are just terrified about what might have happened to them historically. There was Paul and Wendy; Paul and his father handled this stuff on their land, and Paul’s father died of cancer. Paul does not know what will happen to him. The levels in his blood were through the roof, and on that land. You can just see the fear in people’s eyes, because of what is not known. That is why I think we have to push for testing. The best outcome would be that testing is done and we find out: “No, it’s going to be okay. There’s a way to deal with this.” But unless that testing is done, people are going to have to live with this fear.
That was the gamble, I suppose, that we have taken with the documentary and all the work that we have done. The last thing that we want to do is terrify people and scare people, and then not be able to follow through with anything that allays those fears. I think the testing has to be done. For me, with everyone we met who talked about how it affected their lives and how they are worried that it will affect the lives of their children and their children’s children, that is what will stay with me forever.
Andrew Ranger: It was very powerful for me as well.
Q14 Ann Davies: You have talked a lot about the effect of PCBs on human health. How can we raise awareness among the public? To be honest, “Buried” has certainly done that; we are talking about it, hence your being here today, and we need to move forward. But what can we do to move forward and raise awareness within these communities and within the agricultural community as well, because at one time sheep dip was a PCB? We have lived with this within the agricultural community as well, to be honest. How can we raise awareness, on top of what you have already done?
Dan Ashby: I think you are seeing the first stirrings of a genuine public campaign forming. I went to Wrexham afterwards and nearly 200 people turned up. It was a hair-raising moment, where people stood up and broke down in tears, and told stories. They were people we had never heard from before, and we have had an enormous response from the public. We have had people email from inside the authorities, and emails from people who worked in Monsanto. There is more to this story and certainly our ambition, as storytellers, is to keep telling it, in order to bring about change; that is the main thing.
The problem always is that many hands that make light work. We are only part of the journey. If there is not a political reaction, and if there is just silence, it is all for nothing, because you can see with the Post Office and many other examples that you need the storytellers, you need the communities, and you need the politicians all to be in favour of change, and also outraged by what they are seeing.
Lucy Taylor: One of the difficult things about this story is that so many people have come up to us and said, “What can I do?” or “My brother had cancer, what can I—?” But actually, as individuals, there is very little that people can do. They do not know that these chemicals are there; they are invisible, they are odourless, they cannot see them. People cannot just quit smoking to reduce their risk of these chemicals, because they are there on public land, and they are in our food, and they are in our seas. So, I do not think that it is something where individuals can step up, other than by campaigning and trying to bring the issue to people in power like yourselves. This needs authorities to take it on and protect people; it is not something that individuals can do for themselves.
Michael Sheen: Our conversation now, and literally when we leave here we will continue the conversation, is about what we can do to keep this momentum going. People have clearly engaged with this and are alarmed by it. As Lucy said, people are saying, “What can we do about it? What can we do about it?” Well, from our point of view, we need to keep moving forward with this story and keep telling the story. But from the public point of view, the most important thing would be that, once these fears are raised, they see that something is being done about it and that they are being heard.
Like I say, I do not think it is a coincidence that all the places—the main places—where this dumping has been done, not just in Wales but across the world, tend to be in communities that do not have much of a voice and do not necessarily expect to be heard. We need to show that their voices are heard. That was what was so powerful about bringing people together from all over Wales to the Senedd, because those people did not even know that the others existed; they thought they were in isolation working on this stuff and now suddenly they are coming together. That makes a difference.
The fact that we have come here today and you have very graciously listened to us—if people know that that is happening and then something is done about it as well, it is taken forward. We are not going to get to the end in one go; this is a long road. As Dan says, it is going to take many different strands to make this work. But if people see that something is being taken seriously and moving forward, I think that will do a huge amount, rather than thinking, “Well, we can’t do anything about this, can we? It’s just another one of those things.”
Q15 Steve Witherden: This has been touched on already in relation to cancers. This is very personal to me. I refer back to my declaration of interests: three generations of my wife’s family worked in the Monsanto plant featured in part two of the documentary. Why do you think that so little research has been done into the correlation between PCBs and cancer clusters in the UK?
Michael Sheen: It comes back to something that Simon alluded to earlier. To begin with, people did not know. When PCBs were first being produced, they were this sort of miracle thing. They made things safer for us. They are in electronic goods. They are a coolant. They are in paint and all kinds of things. It took so much work by people like Douglas Gowan to start to highlight that there is actually a problem with this stuff.
Moving forward from that, it is difficult to get the people who are actually responsible for this to admit it—they still don’t—and to get any evidence showing they were aware that it was harmful. That is hard enough as it is. To get them to take responsibility and do something about it is incredibly difficult. Given that, you are then asking the taxpayer and councils to step in when the perpetrators are not prepared to do it themselves. That is a hard place for those people to be.
Like I keep saying, while they are in charge of the testing, it is very hard to take the results of that testing at face value. That is why we have to call for an independent body to be in charge of testing.
Q16 Steve Witherden: Thank you, Michael. Dan, do you want to come in?
Dan Ashby: When we think about illness, there are different levels. First, there are people who are directly affected by interacting with those places, such as Michael Phillips. There will be hundreds of those people whose cancers will have been caused by playing in the tip. So many people have emailed in. They are obviously at risk. There will be people who worked in the factories who will be really at risk. For me, it is unacceptable that those people have cancers, but cluster surveys will not necessarily pick up those people because they are not massive clusters; we will be finding localised people. They might be in the tens or the hundreds—we don’t know. They might be in the thousands across Wales.
Then there is the bigger concern of communities who live nearby. I want to reassure people that living within a mile of a dump does not mean you will get ill—that is not the case. But there will be cases where people are getting ill, and it is not always cancer. We do not survey for all the other illnesses. There is asthma and there are deformities and things, which are not really surveyed. My fear is that we are not surveying properly for all the illnesses. Even on cancer, the problem is that with PCBs, there is a lag in time, so it will turn up many decades after the pollution happened. I want to reassure communities that they do not need to suddenly panic, but at the same time, I do not think we are scrutinising enough.
Chair: I am conscious of time. Could the witnesses spare us an extra five or 10 minutes? I am conscious that we will move on to testing shortly, and we are looking for the way forward. Today we are looking for solutions, so if you could stay, that would be really helpful.
Michael Sheen: Yes, of course.
Q17 Gerald Jones: This question is more for Lucy Taylor and Dan Ashby, but feel free to chip in. During the research, did you come across any of the UK Government’s guidance on how we manage human exposure to PCBs, and what did that look like?
Dan Ashby: We have an approach in Britain where we try to limit—let me go backwards a bit, because this might shock any members of the public listening. Think about these sites as the poison tap, if you like, and the communities we worry about are trying to stop the tap and splashing around. The poison is obviously flowing towards all of us, because over the last 50 years, PCBs have gone into the streams, into our fish and into our food chain, and we are all eating them. We have all had our blood tested and we all have 80 PCBs in our blood. You all have PCBs in your blood and there is no safe level, so you are being harmed in some way—hopefully in a small way. Hopefully it is taking days off your retirement rather than years, but we do not know.
To answer your question, the UK manages it by setting a kind of toxicity diet. There are officials out there who are trying to make sure that you eat enough PCBs that it does not hurt you too much. Your toxic quota, if you like, is really contested among scientists. To give you an example, the EU sets a much lower threshold than Britain. The EU worries that our thresholds are too high and are creating hormone defects and all sorts of things. British scientists say, “No, we think we have the right amount.” The challenge with that approach, though, is that it has to make some really big assumptions. It makes assumptions about how much meat and fish we are eating. We went out and tested supermarket fish and we found that if you ate two portions of fish a week and other foods, you would be well over your PCB quota—you would be being poisoned. One fish we tested was so high that it was illegal to sell. Officials should go in and take it off the shelves.
Our worry is that these chemicals have built up more than we think in all of us. Again, we are not all going to collapse suddenly and get cancer and die, but we are worried that more of us are getting ill from PCBs and other toxins. The worry is that cancer rates in under-50s are spiking in the UK, and some scientists believe that the cause is in the environment. It is a worry. PCBs are part of a worry about what is getting into all of us. Does that answer your question?
Q18 Gerald Jones: Kind of. I wanted to know about the UK Government policies on that exposure and mitigating it. Did you come across anything?
Dan Ashby: On the land side, the only other thing to say is that we have thresholds—we have soil guideline values. For commercial use, allotments and residential, the Environment Agency says, “Here is the maximum allowed,” and if you hit that number, it says that you should do a risk assessment. The difference with America is that it is a lot stricter. There is a strong limit and if it hits that limit, they send in diggers and remediate much quicker. Ours is more complicated. We go through this complicated risk assessment procedure.
Q19 Llinos Medi: We will move on to testing. I congratulate you on what you have achieved in raising awareness and the way that you have done it with these communities. Thank you for being with us today to raise awareness. We have to be careful, because we have to find the answer. I think the answer starts with the testing, because if we are going to find who is accountable and will pay for it, we are losing time. The testing has to happen, and that is where the remediation comes from. There are examples of where it has worked. You mentioned the USA, but we also have examples in the UK of where it has worked. Can we focus on the testing now? We need to recognise who is accountable. Which body is it? You have said that it needs to be done independently, but funding that must come from somewhere. I believe that it is the UK Government’s responsibility, because of the legacy of these sites. I believe that the UK Government should find a legal way of getting that money back. Where do you believe that that ownership starts? Do you think that we have the capacity and the capability, given the scale of the sites in Wales and across the UK, to deliver that testing in a timely manner?
Michael Sheen: What do you two think? It’s the big question.
Dan Ashby: No. I don’t think the NRW has the capacity to do this, and I don’t think the Welsh Government have the budget or certainly the will to do this. A lot more funding would be needed, for sure. I have spoken to many people in the NRW, I have seen documents over the years, and you can see that the NRW is really stretched. We are facing an environmental crisis. It is facing all sorts of pollutants. Contamination is going up. No, we are not meeting this challenge with enough resources. I think that is a fact. In terms of who pays for it, I probably would not want to answer that. That is more political, but from a factual basis, there are certainly not the resources. Would you agree?
Michael Sheen: We were talking about this earlier. There is a precedent for the companies that are the original perpetrators of this getting involved with payments. It becomes very complicated when it comes down to taking responsibility and that kind of stuff. What did they call it? Good-will payments or something?
Dan Ashby: Yes—voluntary payments.
Michael Sheen: Voluntary payments. So it is not impossible. I know it is going to be very difficult for us, the two Jans, Rev. Paul, or whoever, to get the top level of where this all started from to do that, but it is not impossible to get it done, historically speaking. We have to always hold on to it. Every time I talk about anything to do with this now, I force myself to say that the people who are responsible for this are somehow buffered from paying for it or taking responsibility. Everything we are talking about, around councils, taxpayers and all this stuff, is all secondary to what ideally should happen. That always has to be the first thing, because otherwise we just write it off and let them get away with it. That has to be said, so whenever there is anything to do with “Who pays for this?”, that always has to be the first thing that we look at.
Next to that, the testing itself, which was done for us by Dave Megson, was independent, obviously, because it was done by scientists and they were not working on behalf of anyone. What is the body that becomes the umbrella organisation and takes responsibility for making sure that the testing is done, and who pays for that? As Dan alluded to, there was a fund pre-2014; we are not necessarily asking for something that has never happened before, so that is maybe a starting point.
Dan Ashby: It is also worth saying that it falls between the cracks quite a bit, because NRW is obviously responsible for the environment, as is the EA, and councils are primarily involved in land and some human health, but then you have the public health agencies. We have seen it fall between all of that, so that is a problem.
Michael Sheen: The one thing I do know is that, if individual councils are worried that they are going to be held financially responsible themselves, nothing is going to happen—nothing will change—because it can’t.
Lucy Taylor: It goes back to Steve’s question about legislation: this testing could happen. On the whole, it is the local authorities’ responsibility, although in many cases they are not legally required to test for PCBs, and there isn’t anybody policing and checking that they are doing that.
In terms of declaring contaminated land, the guidance is for any other solutions to be found first. Essentially, declaring it contaminated is a last resort. That might work in cases where developers are coming in and the responsibility can be passed on to them, but for most of these very contaminated sites in rural areas of Wales, there might not be developers coming forward to do it, so what is the back-up option?
There is a sort of gap in who is policing this and overseeing whether testing is actually done. In a number of cases, when we looked into these sites and asked the councils, “Well, when did you last test?”, there had been no testing for many, many years. We would hope and assume that there would be a regular programme, but in many cases there is not.
Dan Ashby: One important point in all this is that the UK Government are obviously dealing with risk all over the place—there are so many different pollutants. It is a bit like during covid, when they had to make a calculation—“What’s an acceptable number of people to allow to die before you shut down the economy?”, and all those debates they were having. They are doing that all the time with pollutants, of course; they cannot stop every single pollutant.
I think the questions that “Buried” really raises are: “Have we set an acceptable risk level here?” “Is Wales bearing a disproportionate brunt of the harms?” And it’s not just Wales; there are places in England, too. “Have we got the risk assessment right?” Our early evidence suggests that we have got it wrong and that what’s happening isn’t fair.
Q20 Llinos Medi: Did you find any evidence that that change in 2014 changed the attitude of those responsible? Did the attitude change? Is there any evidence that you have seen since that decision to stop the funding in 2014?
Dan Ashby: I think it is fair to say that there has been much less remediation. The other big thing was that there was statutory guidance issued in 2012 on how to interpret the original legislation. The original legislation was really radical; it was kind of amazing stuff in terms of environmental foresight, saying, “If there is a significant possibility of significant harm to people, rivers or the environment, it should be cleaned up.” But guidance was issued in 2012 that really qualified that and said, “Well, the first port of call is to get developers in. Don’t always declare it contaminated land. Don’t trigger ‘polluter pays’ legal action.” “Go for the more pragmatic approach,” I think it would say. I think that guidance has really changed the picture in the UK.
Michael Sheen: Remember, it wasn't until two years later after the fund went that I came across this story, and I could find very little about it even then. It shows the difficulty that there is in getting involved in this stuff in the first place—and that was two years after the fund had gone.
Q21 Ann Davies: We recently wrote to Stephen Kinnock, the Secretary of State, to ask for a four-nation approach on this and that testing happens to communities across the UK near to post-industrial sites where people are now living. Do you agree that that is the way forward: a UK-wide, four-nations approach?
Michael Sheen: Absolutely. The bigger the umbrella, the better. On the one hand, that spreads resources, which is good. The danger is that the bigger the umbrella becomes, the more chance there is of it dissipating somehow. I definitely think that a four-nations response is right—and possibly even beyond the four nations. I know that there are some complications around that.
Dan Ashby: Yes, remediation and testing is phenomenally expensive. I think that pooling resources is probably a must to deal with this.
Q22 Ann Davies: Following from that, as a Committee, what is the best way that we can support the communities, specifically for us in Wales, when we go through the testing? What can we do as a Committee to ensure a way forward with this?
Dan Ashby: I think that political parties and the Government are not taking this seriously enough. The Committee can be a voice for how serious this issue is. We are seeing MPs such as Steve, who live in the community, who are utterly outraged by this, but we are not really seeing anybody assessing this risk seriously. That change within political parties is one thing. The problem is the anonymity of the environment. If we never see the child who has died from cancer, because they are never a headline, then we all feel better about it. However, statistics show that those children and families are out there. If you can change the attitudes of the parties, then that is the first thing. It is weird for us as environmental reporters that we know from scientists that they are terrified of what is going on with forever chemicals. Yet, weirdly, political parties are just not across it.
Q23 Chair: You have talked a lot about the hard evidence and the digging, research and everything. I have a final question. Michael, during the programme—which most of us watched—you were tested for PCBs. On a subjective level, how did that make you feel? Going forward, you are part of the story now. How does that make you feel?
Michael Sheen: I agreed to being tested because I thought, “Well, I’m not affected. I haven’t been living in these communities, and I haven’t been playing in lagoons, so of course I’ll do that.” Then, once someone is sitting there telling you that you have 82 different PCBs in your blood, and one of them is the deadliest when it comes to being carcinogenic, it is shocking. Then again, when you say, “Well, what is the baseline here?” you are told, “We do not really have a baseline in Britain because we have not got enough research, so we use the American baseline.” You then think, “Hang on, can we get the British one, please?” Once it becomes personal to you, you want to know a bit more about it. You can only imagine what it must be like for families such as Steve’s and Michael’s and everyone else, where it is incredibly personal, yet the lack of information about it is terrifying.
Also, to know that communities in the area where I come from were chosen to have this stuff put near them because they could not fight back and because it would get hidden—it would be buried—I take as a personal affront. I have been involved with this now for 10 years, since I first came across this story. I am involved in a lot of different issues, and it all comes down to a basic thing: unfairness. That is mainly what I respond to. I have never come across anything more unfair than this. Communities and families, unbeknownst to them, have potentially been poisoned by this stuff, and it is going to continue. It is very difficult to get anyone to do anything about it. While I have any ability to raise the alarm, push people to do something about it and make sure people’s voices are heard, I will do that, and I will not let go of it.
Q24 Chair: Thank you. Lucy and Dan, do you have anything that you want to add?
Lucy Taylor: Just to echo the importance and urgency of this, the lagoon in Cefn Mawr is a really visible symbol: it has an 8-foot fence around it and warning signs that you cannot go into it, and yet it is not legally contaminated land. That really makes you ask questions. That is the visible sign, but there are so many more invisible sites like that. They are affecting us all, and they are affecting our waters. If this chemical were slightly less insidious—if it glowed green and smelled, and if touching it made you keel over within 24 hours—we would be acting very quickly. It is because it is invisible and odourless and sits in our soil—you might come into contact with it and be affected 20 years later—that it is a much more intangible issue, but it is no less urgent.
Dan Ashby: It is helpful to remember some of those vignettes, which I still cannot believe are true. We have officials who are paid to monitor our poison quota. Britain’s resident population of killer whales will go extinct because of PCBs. Lulu, the killer whale who washed up on a shore, had so much PCB in her that she had to be declared toxic waste. This is really dystopian stuff that is happening on our watch. Think of these sites as taps that are flowing to all of us.
Michael talked about unfairness. There is an argument about geographic unfairness, but there is also an argument about generational unfairness. The latest studies on PCBs and the forever chemicals that are still in production show that 14% of teenagers tested across European countries have levels in them that are harmful or potentially harmful to their health. If we continue to do nothing, we are potentially condemning future generations or at least passing the buck to them. What I see from the future generations is that they are desperate to know more. They are really against personal contamination. They want to be tested, and they want information about what is going on, but they are not being met with enough action.
Chair: Thank you so much for coming before us this morning. Thank you for your time. This is such a vital issue. Obviously, this is part of a process for this Committee. We hope that this session has gone some way to acknowledging the concerns that our constituents have raised with us. Certainly, as the local MP in Newport West and Islwyn, I have had many letters since the programme, so thank you for raising the issue.