Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Local authorities in England are to be examined whether they are meeting their legal obligations to identify lead-contaminated land following a Financial Times investigation into the risks of abandoned metal mines.
The Environment Agency has been ordered to reveal whether local councils are identifying contaminated land downstream of historic lead works as part of a review commissioned by the UK government.
The overview of affected areas in England is the first since 2016. A new report on the state of the contaminated land will include an investigation into the extent to which local governments monitor historic mine sites, officials said.
The UK has 6,630 abandoned industrial lead mines – more than 3,600 of which are in England – which continue to spew the metal into the environment every year. Lead can accumulate in watercourses and soil before it is eaten by animals and enters the food chain.
If ingested by humans, lead has a devastating effect on nearly every organ in the body, with any level of exposure potentially having a harmful effect, according to the World Health Organization.
Officials previously told the FT regulatory standards are not strong enough to monitor this industrial legacy and its impact on human health.
While the Environmental Agency is responsible for remediation of abandoned sites, local authorities, which are they face great budgetary pressuresthey must identify contaminated land that could pose a risk to human health and test food to ensure it is safe for consumption.
It is not clear whose duty it is to inform the public about possible risks for domestic food production.
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minister Emma Hardy told the House of Commons that the department had “recently commissioned the Environment Agency to produce another report on the state of contaminated land”.
“The EA will seek to include further questions in this desk-based survey to find out whether local councils are assessing the risks of contaminated land downstream from historic lead mines,” she added, responding to a written question from Conservative MP Julian Smith last week about the government’s risk assessment.
In response to FT reportThe UK Food Standards Agency also said it would to investigate lead levels in manufactured foods near abandoned places.
The UK Veterinary Medicines Agency, an agency of the Department for the Environment, tests only 400-450 samples of meat, milk, fish and honey each year for the presence of lead and other heavy metals. Experts say that testing such a small number of foods does not provide a sufficient assessment.
Last year, a Welsh Government-funded study identified potentially harmful levels of lead in eggs produced on two small farms downstream from abandoned lead mines in west Wales.
A young child who eats one or two eggs a day “could become cognitively impaired,” according to the study. Small studies of vegetables grown on farms have shown that they too contain “elevated and potentially toxic concentrations” of lead.
Defra declined to comment.
