Welsh Affairs Committee — hearing of 1 July 2026: transcript & video

00:02 - 01:15

Speaker 1

Order. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this oral evidence session of the Welsh Affairs Select Committee. My name's Ruth Jones and I'm the chair of the committee. And today the committee's holding a one-off session in to evidence on metal mines as part of our inquiry into the environmental and economic legacy of Wales' industrial past. Now 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's why we've got involved in it.

This session has therefore been informed by the committee's very recent visit to historical metal mine sites and remediation work in West Wales which actually happened on Monday. So I'd also specifically like to thank the Mining Remediation Authority and the Natural Resources Wales for their time and effort on Monday in navigating us round the wilds of West Wales, beautiful, and taking us to various sites which we definitely wouldn't have seen if they hadn't been with them, so yeah. Excellent. So without any further ado we're going to crack on. So can I first start and ask Laura Hughes perhaps could you outline who you are and maybe give us a very brief overview of the findings from your research?

01:15 - 03:16

Speaker 3

I'm Laura Hughes, I'm a public policy reporter at the Financial Times and I have been looking into this issue of our lead legacy across the UK for a number of years now. And my reporting started in West Wales, it has moved on since and I would say anything I say today actually does apply to the whole of the UK but I know we're focused on Wales today. And it I will try and be brief but it it all began with a with a tip-off essentially about horses dropping down dead in fields in West Wales and the working theory was the reason that they were dying was their exposure to the legacy of lead in the environment. And I became totally fascinated with the lack of any information out there on this particular topic. And the reason I became so interested is I found an academic paper that was written quite recently which referenced something that really caught my eye in terms of the human effect of this potential pollution problem.

And I read this report and there was one line that really stuck out to me from this academic which was that she had studied the lead levels in eggs on two farms downstream from old lead mines in West Wales. And she found levels of lead in those eggs that were so high if a child was to regularly eat one or two of them they could become severely cognitively impaired. That was a sort of shooting gun for me that really got me interested in this. And as part of my reporting I went down to Wales on a number of occasions and truly just knocked on people's doors and tried to get a sense and a feel as to whether or not the farmers or the people living in these parts of Wales near old lead mines which I found on maps had ever experienced anything like horses dying. And it became very clear to me very quickly that yes actually there were people who reported a number of things from animals dying to not being able to grow vegetables and in the most severe case I found I found a mother whose daughter's gums actually turned green.

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