The real 'Toxic Town' - the story of how 19 Corby families fought the authorities and won
It had been an eleven year fight.
Yet none of us who were in the Technology and Construction Court, just off The Strand, on July 29, 2009, truly understood the implications of the verdict we were hearing.
After the judgement was handed down, I remember rushing over to one of the lawyers to try to work out exactly what had just happened.
I had travelled down to London on that day on the train with several of the families who believed toxic waste that had been carted around the town on the back of wagons had poisoned their unborn babies, causing them to be born with deformities. Their story is the subject of a major new Netflix drama, Toxic Town, featuring an all-star cast.
The Northants Telegraph had been covering the case for more than a decade already by the time it got to court, and I was still at school when the first stories of a potential ‘cluster’ of birth deformities was first mentioned in our paper.
Many journalists before me had chronicled the case, right from its origins in 1999 when solicitor Des Collins phoned our Corby office to ask us to appeal for local people who were worried about birth defects in their children.
He’d already spoken to the parents of Connor McIntyre, Curtis Thorpe and Jordan Scott, and the Sunday Times had reported on their story. They’d met by chance while their children were being treated in hospital.
This was a case driven by mums. Women of steel who refused to back down.
Steelworks waste had been moved to speedway site
They believed their children’s upper and lower limb deformities had been caused by the council’s botched clean-up of a vast area of land that was once the town’s steelworks. The waste – a virulent mix of dry and liquid slurry that had been created during the steelmaking process – had been moved from various tips around the town to cells in Deene Quarry, an area now inhabited by the power station and the defunct speedway.
By the end of 1999, eight more families had come forward to report that their own children’s defects.
They were dealt a blow in 2000 when a report commissioned by the Northamptonshire Health Authority said that the number of deformities in Corby was the same as the national average.
Families and friends were pitted against each other – everyone knew someone who’d worked at the steelworks or the council and many had also been involved in the clean-up.
Undeterred, the families continued with their action. In 2001 eight families lodged a case with the High Court.
Nobody knew for sure whether the deformities had been caused by the toxic waste, but the court thought it possible enough that the evidence should be tested in court.
It took four more years before, in 2005, a judge said that they could fight their case as a group. It was the first hint that a senior judge might just believe that these children represented a ‘cluster’, and that there could be a single cause behind their injuries.
Class action
The following year four children lodged cases asking for £150,000 compensation, and finally, after several more legal battles, the case finally opened in February 2009, with 19 children now part of the class action.
The families of Kynan, Dawn, Simone, Sarah Jane, Anthony, George, Lewis, Jordan, Dylan, Curtis, Shelby, Connor, Daniel, Kerry, Jake, Samuel, Ben, India, and Ashleigh were asking the High Court for the right to sue Corby Council for damages to their children.
Our reporters have spoken to numerous council officials over the years who said they had been repeatedly reassured by experts that the families would not win, and if they did, the compensation would likely be minimal.
The evidence was astonishing. Only a handful of local reporters ever attended, including our own Kirsty Nicolson and the BBC’s Martin Borley, and so much of the evidence went unreported by much of the national press.
On day one, prosecuting barrister David Wilby QC told the court that Corby people had been living in an ‘atmospheric toxic soup.’
It soon became clear that even if the toxic waste had not been responsible for the injuries caused to the children, there had certainly been catastrophic mistakes made during the clear up, as well as obvious mismanagement and clear corruption.
These people responsible for keeping us safe, those making the big decisions, had simply not done so.
Whistleblower
The most compelling evidence came from Sam Hagen, a former council employee of 30 years, who blew the whistle repeatedly and vociferously until he was blue in the face. He’s played by Robert Carlyle in the Netflix adaptation.
He fearlessly repeated his belief that the toxic waste was not being handled safely. At one point in the 1980s, the clean-up contractor Weldon Plant threatened to sue the council over his claims.
The Honourable Justice Akenhead, who oversaw the case, said he was a ‘wholly honest and principled person.’
And at the end of a three-month ordeal, on Wednesday, July 29, 2009, Judge Akenhead returned his verdict. Corby Council was ‘liable in negligence’ and had ‘breached its statutory duty’.
He said contaminants were present on the Corby Council sites over the whole period from 1985 until 1997, and possibly before, which caused birth defects affecting the hands and feet.
The judge said: “There was an extended period between 1983 and August 1997 in which Corby Council was extensively negligent in its control and management of the sites which they acquired from British Steel and otherwise used.
“That negligence and breach of statutory duty on the part Corby Council permitted and led to the extensive dispersal of contaminated mud and dust over public areas of Corby and into and over private homes, with the result that the contaminants could realistically have caused the types of birth defects of which complaint has been made by the claimants."
The whole steelworks clean-up had been botched, and the people of Corby, for nearly three decades, had been in the dark.
Settlement
Council chief executive Chris Mallender initially refused to apologise, and said the council would look to would appeal. But that came to nothing, and after emotional and stormy public meetings, the authority finally agreed to pay compensation to the affected families, and two others who had not been included in the judgement. It meant they wouldn’t have to go to court individually to sue the authority.
The council agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to each recipient. Corby Council borrowed the money and agreed to pay back £750,000 over 20 years, a debt that will continue to be serviced by the taxpayer for another five years.
It should have been the end of the story. But those of us who read every planning application ever submitted to the council know that the waste is still down there, buried under the speedway and the power station.
Cadmium, chromium VI, nickel, PAHs, dioxins.. they’re still spread over a large industrial area of the town and sit festering in the ground.
Netflix drama
Now, more than 15 years on, Netflix is re-telling the story. Their dramatised version is not always a faithful re-telling.
Some local families have told our reporters they are upset that they weren’t involved in the project.
Corby is a place you can only really experience by being here. There’s nowhere like it. It’s a village of 80,000 people, with generational bonds formed among people who worked, lived and played alongside each other.
Tight knit? Well you only need to ask ‘Do you know Rab from the Candle?’ to find out within seconds that Rab’s married to Sheena who lives up the Danesholme opposite Pav who has four bairns who go to Kingswood with Mandy’s boys whose wee granny used to work at Solway with Jimmy whose dad ran the Corinthian up the town. Welcome to Corby.
You come to our town, you trip over and before you’re back up on your feet, there’s a benefit night arranged for you.
Netflix’s decision to call the series ‘Toxic Town’? Probably not fair. Their decision to not film the series in Corby? Their loss. The choice not to consult with all the families who were involved in the court case? Short-sighted.
And yet, as we have seen with so much TV and film in recent years, drama can bring these real-life situations to the attention of the whole world. It can only be a good thing that people know what happened here so they can prevent it happening again in the future. So I guess we’ll forgive Netflix. And we’ll all be watching with pride at those women who fought through exhaustion, corporate greed and public mismanagement to right a wrong.
Deeds not Words
The people of Corby are do-ers. Our motto is Deeds not Words. This town has suffered more than most – 14,000 people in the steelworks and supporting industries lost their jobs when the works closed. At one point we had 22 per cent unemployment. In the 1990s we had the highest crime levels in the county, some of the highest teen pregnancy, obesity and smoking rates in Europe and quickly became one of the most deprived areas in the UK. Housing fell empty and some estates left to rot.
What did the people of Corby do? They cracked on, faced forward and tried to put their troubles behind them.
People here don’t dwell on the past. And that’s maybe why the toxic waste scandal is barely known outside the town. These awful things that happened to these innocent children were largely forgotten because Corby folk rolled up their sleeves just got on with life.
Perhaps that can-do attitude is why businesses still want to to open here, more and more people want to live here (our population has increased from 52,000 when the works closed, to 78,000 today). We build and we expand. We have a lovely new theatre and civic hub, our town centre is the best in Northamptonshire, our schools are good and our woodland and urban open spaces the envy of the midlands.
Toxic? Not a chance, hen.