Corby MP wants answers as local authority refuses to name potentially contaminated sites
The MP’s office is working with a national environmental charity to test the town’s waterways for heavy metal pollution
Corby’s MP has said questions need to be answered after the local authority has refused to provide campaigners with a list of potentially contaminated sites in the town.
At a meeting at the Steel Bar in Corby on Monday night Lee Barron MP told concerned families he would ‘stand shoulder to shoulder’ with them as they attempt to get answers from the local authority about where potentially toxic waste could have been dumped in the former steel town.
In 2009 a group of families was successful in a legal action against the former Corby Borough Council which proved that their child’s birth defects had been due to the mismanaged clean up of the vast heavily polluted steel works land in the 1980s and 1990s.
Following the Netflix drama Toxic Town, which aired earlier this year, many more families have now started to question whether their own health issues are connected to the reclamation.
Toxic chemicals such as arsenic, cadmium, chromium and zinc were moved and buried in Deene Quarry, which now sites Rockingham Motor Speedway and there are fears the waste could also have been dumped in unknown locations.
Health secretary Wes Streeting has said the authorities should be transparent and North Northamptonshire Council’s public health team is undertaking a data exercise to try and work out whether childhood cancer cases in Corby during the last decade are higher than other areas.
But the authority is refusing to tell campaigners which sites could have been potential dumping sites.
A letter from the council’s senior litigation and governance solicitor Sarah Flaxman to campaigners Tracey Taylor and Alison Gaffney on October 3 said the council had decided that ‘the weight of public interest (public good) falls in favour of non-disclosure’.
At the meeting the Labour Party MP said he was ‘aghast’ at the response from the council’s legal officer and that it was ‘a red rag to a bull’.
“Questions need to be answered and my job now is how we can take things forward.
“My quest in this is fairly simple and that is I will do whatever it is that you want me to do, in terms of getting those answers for you and if that calls for a public inquiry then I will stand shoulder to shoulder with you.”
He told the concerned families:
“We keep going. This isn’t going to be resolved, a week next Thursday. When we don’t get what we need down one avenue, we go down another. We start to raise the temperature.
“We need to fight and I think that’s the start.”
He said he would take the issue to parliament and to ministers.
His office is working with a national environmental charity to carry out a town wide experiment to test the waterways for heavy metal pollution. He said it could be used ‘as part of a package of evidence’ to demand answers.
He also said that the newly introduced Hillsborough Law, which puts a statutory duty of candour on public officials, could be used to get answers.
Agnes Anderson, whose family has been affected by health issues and whose daughter Nicola was born in 1990 with hand defects, said:
“Where were those contaminated sites? Tracey (Taylor) and I worked within throwing distance of the major one, but your whole life in Corby was touched by it at lots of different sites, where you could be socialising. We need to know where were the sites and what chemicals were there?”
Toni Middleton’s baby died at just six months old after being born in 1996 with a congenital heart defect. She was working at a site close to the reclamation site when pregnant with her child.
She said:
“It was my daughter’s birthday on Saturday. She would have been 29, so that’s 29 birthdays that I have not been able to celebrate. What gave me comfort when I lost her was thinking it was no-one’s fault. Now I think, yes there is a fault.”
Thomas Duffy, who lives in the Little Stanion area, has a six-year-old son Thomas, who was born with a hand deformity and a shortened leg.
He said:
“There does not seem to have been anything (since the 2009 court case) to safeguard the future. And there does not seem to be any urgency from the council. It seems they have buried their heads in the sand and they have been playing with our future.”
Well done Lee everyone can relay on you to get answers. I would be happy to join any campaign in support of this.