Are you one of the many who has watched the BBC’s two-parter Buried with Michael Sheen? If so, you may have experienced increasing levels of outrage as the actor helps to uncover the scandalous dumping of toxic waste across sites in Wales and England — and lays out the effects, only now fully emerging, that this has had on local residents’ health.

Sheen, is, of course, the big draw; the well-loved actor getting the UK to take an interest in a complex, localised topic. But in several scenes, you’ll also have seen Paul Cawthorne, vicar and environmental campaigner: helping to test soil at the contaminated sites; sharing a testimony from one of his parishioners who had been employed to dump the chemicals; and providing background information from more than a decade of investigations.

What you won’t necessarily have realised is that much of that background information has been obtained, over the years, from Freedom of Information requests made on WhatDoTheyKnow — this case stands as an example of how FOI can play a crucial part in bringing malpractice to public attention.

Over a decade of dedicated investigation

Paul’s investigation into the dumping dates back many years, and he has made great use of Freedom of Information to secure the evidence to show that giant chemical company Monsanto was appallingly negligent in the disposal of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), now known to be cancer-causing “forever chemicals”, going back as far as the 70s.

Paul was happy to talk to us and let us know all about the part that FOI and WhatDoTheyKnow have played in his search for the facts — you can see his more than 200 requests for yourself, on the site.

Entering the public consciousness

He’s pleased that the programme has brought the topic that has been absorbing him for so long to the public eye: “For the first few years, everyone just assumed that I was making a fuss about nothing, and now it seems to have suddenly reversed.”

The first sign of that was a call from the TV production company, seeking evidence that they could shape the programme around.

If you’ve watched Buried, you’ll know that much of the programme is based around the meticulous records of whistleblower Douglas Gowan, now deceased. He had been an equally dedicated investigator into the issue, years prior, and Michael Sheen had interviewed him before he died. 

“Michael had read an article in the Ecologist magazine that I contributed to in 2007, and that’s how he came across Douglas Gowan’s story. I managed to source him a briefcase full of Gowan’s papers, the one that we see in the TV programme.

“It had been very securely lodged, after his death. I’m not even allowed to say who with, but we managed to get access to it, and so it’s been quite a detective story, really.”

Don’t ask awkward questions

And that’s not the only dramatic detail: it was also mentioned in the programme that Paul was first alerted to the whole topic by one of his parishioners who had been involved in the dumping, on his deathbed:

“Yes. Well, more accurately, he had only a few months to live. And he asked to see me, so we sat over a pint, and he told me about all this night-time dumping that had been going on in Telford at Stony Hill, and how a driver had got some yellow crystals on his hand, and his hand broke out into an immediate rash. 

“The poor worker, he’d felt very uncomfortable about this dumping, and he’d gone to the site manager and said, ‘What’s going on?’, and the site manager just looked him straight in the eyes and said, ‘You don’t want to go asking questions like that’.”

That was the start of it all, setting Paul off on his tireless campaign for truth. At what point did he realise that Freedom of Information was going to be useful? 

“It’s been a steep learning curve. For the first few years, I very naively wrote to the various regulators, and they sent me their fob-off replies. And of course, there was nothing on the public record about that. 

Putting information into the public arena

“So when I discovered WhatDoTheyKnow, it was a real breakthrough because I realised that if I asked authorities in public, they would realise that their responses were going to go on the public record. So they were less likely to lie to me. And with it being on the public record, future researchers could could follow up on stuff that I may have missed. 

“I mean, it’s such a big subject. I suspect people in 50 years will be doing studies of what I’ve uncovered. Not to be pompous. I’m just being honest about the importance of it all.”

Paul soon realised he could do more on WhatDoTheyKnow than just lodge requests.

“Another benefit is that I can do searches on the relevant terms to see what other people have requested on the same subjects.

“But also, one of the lovely things has been to be able to put an enquiry with one regulator on WhatDoTheyKnow, and then forward that to another regulator to say, ‘You weren’t telling the truth, were you? Because these other people have said something so different’. That kind of-cross referencing has been incredibly valuable. 

“That approach forced some information out of the Mines Remediation Authority, including the existence of some secret testing that had been done below the Stoney Hill site at Telford, which no one had told me about, so that was brilliant.”

But it hasn’t always been so easy. 

Now you see it…

“A lot of the key lorry manifests from Telford, which was the first site I looked into, went missing. The Environment Agency’s Shrewsbury office had shown me them in person, proving that a lot of the dumping into this site in Telford had been done from the two Monsanto plants at Newport and Ruabon. And then when I asked to see them again, lo and behold, they’d gone missing. 

“They said that they’d sent them to Telford Council, and Telford Council said, ‘We haven’t received them’. So I had two FOI requests, which said mutually contradictory things, and you just feel like locking the two parties in a room and saying come out when you’ve made your minds up!”

The discoveries are still coming. 

“Only two weeks ago, we unearthed a 1,100-page document which shows that Telford Council have known all along how bad the site was, and that the site linings aren’t even non-porous because a cheap load of colliery spoil was used to line the bottom.”

Sometimes, the results of an FOI request have been quite surprising.

“I’d done a request about Cefn Mawr in North Wales — which features in the programme — and the answer came back with the information I’d asked for. 

“But there was more information included, about the American Monsanto court case, and I thought, ‘That didn’t need to be included in the answer’. So, I believe a whistleblower managed to get out to me a piece of information that they knew I was looking for about an American court settlement. That’s somebody very honorable, who knows the significance of that document, and that’s why they’ve given it to me.”

As you can tell, Paul has been extremely meticulous and tenacious in his investigation. The circumstances of the toxic dumps haven’t made the job any easier, either: 

“A lot of it was dumped at night, so isn’t recorded, and a lot of it was dumped in the early 1970s before the Control of Poisonous Waste Act came in, in ’74. 

“So there was no stipulation to do it particularly carefully in most cases, and it’s left a really nasty legacy. A lot of the dumping was done in barrels, and the barrels are now rusting, so the stuff’s leaking out. 

“A whole load of councils seem determined to avoid classifying the sites as contaminated land because they’re worried about obligations that they feel may be put upon them, and unfortunately, they don’t seem to understand that the legislation clearly says that if councils that own some of these sites aren’t able to pay, then the polluter can be approached to pay.”

What happens next?

Perhaps this TV programme will be a turning point, beginning to bring justice to the people and the communities that have suffered such severe health issues? 

“If you see it as a chess match, I’d say that we’ve finished the end of the opening game, and we’re now moving into the middle game. Even this last week there’s been so much happening [We spoke to Paul just over a week after the programme first aired]. A legal firm is recruiting for for a major class action, so I’ve been giving them my contacts, especially people who’ve got cancers. And very sadly, there’s quite a lot of child leukemias turning up near the different sites, as well, which we didn’t include on the TV because it’s a bit heavy and a bit personal. 

“A national newspaper is pursuing the idea of a series of features about things which we just touched on but didn’t have time to develop in this series. 

“Plus we’re preparing for two judicial reviews. One of those is is likely to be a challenge against DEFRA for breaching the Stockholm Convention regarding persistent organic chemicals and pollutants; and the other one is against Caerphilly Council because they’ve issued a report saying that Ty Llwyd Quarry, which featured in the series, isn’t contaminated land — but they haven’t even tested the layby that’s known to have PCB in it, and they haven’t tested the river below the nearest village, Ynysddu, which we know from previous tests that there’s PCB in the bed of the river for at least three miles downstream. So, why aren’t they testing those miles downstream?” 

Hopefully, this important work will continue to have significant outcomes. Many thanks to Paul for taking the time to share his remarkable investigation. If you’d like to help see justice done by the victims of the toxic waste dumping, look out for Paul’s crowdfunder page, coming soon — we’ll drop a link here as soon as it’s live.

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Image: Ilya Yakubovich

Our website WriteToThem helps you contact your elected representatives, quickly and simply. In a recent blog post, we explained that we’ve added a Welsh translation across the site, and made it easier to navigate recent changes to the Senedd.

And while those improvements clearly have a great benefit for residents of Wales, the work has also introduced a couple of features that will help all users of WriteToThem, no matter where they are in the UK.

1. Extra help in getting the right message to the right place

If you live in an area with a devolved parliament, you have a lot of politicians representing you: not just your local councillors and an MP; but also Members of your nation’s parliament. For anyone deciding to make contact with a representative for the first time, this can be bewildering — who’s the right person for your specific message?

And to be fair, it’s not always straightforward even for those living elsewhere in the UK. For example, you might have both district and county councillors: do you know the difference? Likely not unless you’re a real democracy maven.  

More people representing you might be a good thing, but when it comes to an individual wondering who best to contact about, say, bin collection, housing issues or the state pension, faced with a long list of potential recipients, it’s easy to just give up.

So how are we helping with that?

Once you’ve entered your postcode on WriteToThem’s homepage, the site displays a list of all the representatives you can write to, from councillors right up to Lords.

If you’re not sure which category of representative is right for your issue, there’s some brief guidance on the left of the page, explaining the top level of issues each is responsible for.

For more information, you can click “Not sure who to contact?” at the top of the page. By default, this takes you to an information page giving more information about every type of representative; but, as you’ve already input your postcode at this stage, it will only show you the information relevant to the representatives covering your area. 

You can see this for yourself if you replace the postcode at the end of this url with your own: https://www.writetothem.com/about-yourrep?pc=LA1+2ES.

For those using the Welsh site, this guidance is also, of course, available in Welsh.

Watch this space, as we also plan to introduce help for those who are looking at a list of representatives within the same category (eg, several councillors or Assembly Members), and wondering how to choose which of them to contact.

2. A simple way for campaigns to mobilise their supporters

Are you working for a cause and want politicians to know about it?

Ever since its launch back in 2005, WriteToThem has been a useful (and completely free) tool for campaigners on a low budget. All you need to do is direct your supporters to the site and encourage them to get in touch with their representative/s.

If that sounds helpful, take a look at our guidance, which we’ve recently refreshed.

Even better, we’ve updated the code that lets you put a professional-looking widget on your site. This looks a lot smarter than just a plain link, and you don’t need to have design or development skills — just copy the html and put it on your web page. 

We know that a lot of organisations don’t use WriteToThem to send messages: for them, the most useful part is being able to help their clients see who their representatives are, so there’s also the option to amend the widget so it says “find out who represents you”.

This widget can also be set up so that it toggles between English and Welsh, with your choice of what appears as the default.

There’s something else useful for campaigns, too: if you have a database of your supporters, including information such as their postcodes, you can make the path even smoother by sending a personalised link that saves them one or more steps in the email-writing process.

For example, if you know which type of representative you want them to contact, you can skip the screen where they have to select that; if you know their address, you can pre-fill those fields for them; and if you have their postcodes on file, you can take them directly to the letter-composing screen. 

Finally, we’ve added information about building big impact locally, and evidence-informed campaigning, making use of some of the other free websites we run.

All of this is explained in more detail in our guidance, so if it sounds helpful, do take a look!

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Image: Dinah Makhmutova

The democratic landscape in Wales has changed… and so has our ‘contact your politician’ website WriteToThem.

In a webinar today, we invited Jess Blair from ERS Cymru to talk through how the Senedd looks, how the power balance has shifted and how that affects those living in Wales.

Now that each Welsh resident has several representatives, including councillors, MSs and an MP, deciding which one to contact is not necessarily a straightforward question! So, after Jess had spoken, mySociety’s Alex explained the changes we’ve made to WriteToThem to help our users get the right message to the right place.

Oh, and one more thing: did we mention WriteToThem also now has a Welsh translation? You can navigate the site in Welsh, and, if you wish, email your representatives in Welsh too. This work has been made possible thanks to the Welsh Government’s Democratic Engagement Grant.

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Image: Nazarii Taran

Whether or not you voted, or no matter who you voted for, every person in Wales is now represented by six MSs in the Senedd. 

And the good news is, we’re here to help you navigate the new system!

✉️ You can find out who your six MSs are, and contact all or some of them, through WriteToThem.

🔔 Want to follow what they’re up to? The new MSs have been loaded into TheyWorkForYou, so you can also set up alerts to receive an email any time they speak, or whenever a topic you care about is mentioned in the Senedd. 

📊 If you use constituency data based on postcodes in your work, you can easily convert it using our new tool — more about this below. 

✉️  Find and write to your representatives in seconds

Just enter your postcode in WriteToThem and we’ll show you:

• your six MSs
• your MP
• your local councillors

From there, you can send a message directly through the site. 

PS: We’ve been funded by the Welsh Government to make improvements to WriteToThem: more news on that soon!

📊 A brand new postcode converter tool

With new constituencies having been created across Scotland and Wales, organisations will find that any postcode data they used to depend on to map their supporters to representatives is now out of date. Happily, we can help. 

Enter your postcode into our online tool and it’ll give you a simple copy-and-pastable output you can plug right into your spreadsheet. 

🔔 Democracy doesn’t stop on election night

Elections matter, but democracy is also what happens in between them. TheyWorkForYou covers the Senedd in English and Welsh, so you can keep track of what is happening locally on the issues you care about.

We’ll send you alerts directly to your inbox, and we’ve upgraded the customisation functions recently! Need some more help? Here’s our guidance page.

Thanks to new funding from the Welsh Government’s Democratic Engagement Grant, we’re going to be doing some really exciting work around WriteToThem over the next couple of years, specifically focused on helping people in Wales. This grant is both an opportunity for us to improve our approach, and to help get our tools into the hands of people who can take it further. 

WriteToThem’s core mission is to make it very easy to send an email to your politicians — and to help people send the right message to the right representative. This is especially relevant in Wales, where devolution brings decision-making closer to people, but can also mean people have to discover who is responsible for different public services. 

And so, what does this new bundle of work look like?

• First off we’ll be doing some concentrated research with representatives and community groups to understand barriers to constructive communication, which we’ll use to inform new development on the site.
• We’ll also be doing work to ensure that more people are supported to write to representatives for the first time, particularly in the most deprived areas of Wales, where typically there is less engagement with democracy — and all the more need for it!
• Just as important will be the translation of every part of the WriteToThem user flow into Welsh — that’s webpages, buttons, confirmation emails, error messages, the lot. 
• And finally, there’ll be improved guidance about where to send messages — people already appreciate WriteToThem for its succinct descriptions here, but we know there are improvements that can be made, especially in the devolved regions.

We’re excited to get going on this, and to work with other grantees on how we can help each other go further. We’re starting to plan our research phase, and will have more to say about our plans soon, so watch this space or sign up to our newsletter to be the first to know.

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Image: Catrin Ellis

Thanks to funding from the Welsh Government, our parliamentary website TheyWorkForYou now includes debates and a list of all Members of the Senedd, in both English and Welsh. Find them via www.theyworkforyou.com/senedd/ and cy.theyworkforyou.com/senedd/.

Completists will be glad to know that, with this addition TheyWorkForYou now covers all the law-making parliaments of the UK.

Those familiar with the site will know that the email alerts service is one of TheyWorkForYou’s key features. Anyone can sign up, for free, to receive emails when their representatives speak or vote, or when their topics of interest come up in debates. We send millions of these email alerts out per year, and they’re also indispensable for charities, companies and governments who use them to monitor parliamentary discussions on topics relating to their work. 

Alerts are now also available for the Senedd, to help people and organisations living  and working in Wales — and anyone else who’s interested — to stay informed about what is said and done in the devolved parliament.

When users in Wales enter their postcode on TheyWorkForYou’s homepage, they will see the members of Senedd as well as their MP in the UK’s national parliament. 

They’ll be able to check when their Senedd Member last voted, and what they’ve been saying in debates; as well as using the site’s powerful search function to access previous mentions of their topic of interest. More technical users may also use the data for their own projects through TheyWorkForYou’s API.

We have wanted to add the Senedd for many years. Now, thanks to support from the Welsh Government, we’ve been able to complete the work needed to make it available in TheyWorkForYou’s fully accessible format.

This is a continuation of our mission to make the UK’s Parliaments easier for everyone to access, understand and engage with. Through the regular publication of debates, plus TheyWorkForYou’s search and alert functions, we want to support Welsh citizens and civil society to play an active part in democracy.

Our WriteToThem service, which allows people to send an email to their elected representatives quickly and easily, already covered members of the Senedd. The two sites link together so that, having checked your Senedd Member’s activity on TheyWorkForYou, if you wish to respond to them, you can click through to WriteToThem and send an email.

Mick Antoniw, Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution at the Welsh Government, said: “We’ve been pleased to work with mySociety as part of our efforts to involve as many people in our democracy as possible. Being able to follow topics and receive updates about what happens in the Senedd will help people see how we discuss the issues that matter to them most. We’ll continue to work to increase democratic engagement and open up democracy to more people.”

Our own Chief Executive Louise Crow added, “By extending our coverage – and especially email alerts – to the Senedd, we hope to help people and organisations living and working in Wales stay informed about what is said and done in their devolved parliament”. 

This addition represents dedicated effort from staff members. Matthew Somerville made TheyWorkForYou work as a bilingual site and wrote the code to work with Senedd data. Alex Parsons and Struan Donald also contributed significantly.

Translation has been diligently handled by Wyn Williams. TheyWorkForYou is open source software, and this work — in particular, the import of Members — built on previous code submitted by Ross Bowen and Sam Knight. Thanks to them all.

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Image: Senedd Cymru (CC by/2.0)

mySociety’s Head of Research Dr Rebecca Rumbul will be speaking at the first ever Welsh Citizens’ Assembly next week. She’ll be exploring how citizens might more easily feed into the questions posed to ministers and the First Minister in the National Assembly for Wales.

Questions are a fundamental part of all of the UK’s parliaments, most famously in the form of PMQs, the half hour every Wednesday when MPs can raise any issue they deem important with the Prime Minister.

In the devolved parliaments there are also various formats for Q&As, both written and oral. But, Rebecca will argue, there are fundamental problems inherent in all of them, from a lack of representation of the views of the general public, to the political motivations that lead to many questions lacking meaningful substance.

Of course, a Citizens’ Assembly is most concerned with hearing from the general populace, and Rebecca will go on to present our recent research into the digital tools that can help with that process, while examining the pros and cons of each.

Rebecca is one of several speakers who will also include Dr Diana Stirbu and Professor Graham Smith. The event is being co-facilitated by Involve and you can keep up to date with the Citizens’ Assembly’s activities on their dedicated website.

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Image: eNil (CC-by/2.0)