Laura Hughes

While policy makers were busy tackling the well known issues posed by raw sewage and air pollution, Hughes uncovered another environmental human health hazard.

Hughes has revealed how abandoned lead metal mines continue to leech this toxic metal into the environment, where it accumulates in waterways and soil before being consumed by animals and seeping into the food chain.

There is an absence of regulatory standards when it comes to monitoring this legacy of Britain’s industrial past, or informing the public of the risks they pose to both food production and human health. Her reporting has prompted both an MP select committee inquiry and an investigation by the UK’s food regulator.

Hughes started her reporting in Wales after uncovering a PhD, part-funded by a Welsh government body, that found dangerous levels of lead in eggs produced on farms downstream from two abandoned lead mines.

Subsequent FOI requests revealed how many tonnes of harmful metals the Welsh government estimated were being discharged by the country’s mines each year.

In the wake of the coverage, a cross-party working group of MPs launched an inquiry. The Welsh government is now facing “urgent” calls from the House of Commons’ Welsh affairs select committee to take action to avoid a potential “environmental and public health scandal”.

Academics in Wales told Hughes that what they had found was likely to be replicated across the UK. Hughes spent weeks driving to abandoned mines in England, following rivers downstream from the sites, before knocking on nearby farmers' doors.

She found dead and deformed animals who were being reared for public consumption; confirming both her own fears, as well as the expert warnings.

Writing the investigation was not without challenges: many interviewees were only prepared to be quoted on condition of anonymity over fears for their livelihoods and the value of their land. Others were not prepared to be quoted even anonymously.

But Hughes joined the dots, bringing together government commissioned reports produced over the last twenty years and tracking down the retired academics behind them. They told her for their warnings had been ignored and the government was risking a major human health disaster.

Her reporting prompted the chair of the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment to call on ministers to assess the scale of lead contamination throughout the UK food chain “from farm to plate”. He said he “agreed with the conclusion” of the investigations, which found that the scale of lead toxicity present in animals reared for consumption was unknown.

The UK’s independent food safety watchdog has now said they will investigate lead levels in food produced near abandoned lead mines after the impact of the toxic metal on human health was highlighted by Hughes’s work.

She is hopeful another of the newly formed select committees of MPs will also launch an inquiry in England.

Her reporting showed FT public policy coverage at its best, setting the agenda with exclusives and deep analysis of a never-reported subject.