It was an ambitious evening with 14 sets of presenters, spanning environmental charities, farmers, agribusinesses and government agencies – all discussing what must be done to restore the River Wye.
The overwhelming takeaway was that we need the regulators – the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales – to enforce the law. Currently, when it comes to dealing with agricultural pollution, they mainly dish out advice and guidance.
Charles Watson, founder and chair of River Action, screwed up a template advisory letter from the EA in frustration. He stressed the futility of this approach by comparing it to a speeding motorist being stopped by the traffic police, who simply say ‘I’m terribly sorry, you’re driving recklessly, we can’t enforce the law but please, we advise you to drive a bit slower’. Is that going to change peoples’ behaviour?
A strong regulatory presence would also create a fair playing field for companies and farmers. Major poultry company Avara Foods explained how it is now exporting the majority of its chicken manure out of the catchment and introducing new soil standards for farmers who want to apply the manure to their own land. These standards are being designed to close a loophole in the Farming Rules for Water regulations, which allows the over-application of phosphorus to soil. They’re addressing a failure of regulation.
Noble Foods, behind the Happy Egg brand, explained that they’re also asking their farmers to take action to mitigate the pollution risk from their chickens. In a competitive market, some farmers will instead leave them, choosing to supply other businesses with lower environmental demands. Essentially, those trying to do the right thing pay a higher price and risk being out-competed by less scrupulous actors with lower production costs, because the poor practice is not penalised.
The health of our river shouldn’t be at the mercy of individual companies and farmers. Preventing pollution shouldn’t be voluntary, it needs to be mandatory.
EA Chair Alan Lovell gave a presentation which mentioned the number of inspections the EA has done in the Wye catchment and how many improvement actions they’d issued. It didn’t say a word about enforcement. I asked him why and he admitted that they hadn’t really done much enforcement. I asked why the EA was still in ‘advice and guidance’ mode when it’s unique selling point is that it can enforce the law. There are loads of bodies doing advice and guidance (including the Wye and Usk Foundation, the Wildlife Trusts, Farm Herefordshire) but only the regulator has the ability to dish out fines and punishment. When Lovell said this ‘will happen’, people in the audience started shouting ‘when?’
It’s a good question. When will it happen? The River Wye’s official status last year was downgraded to ‘unfavourable, declining’. The next stage down is ‘part-destroyed’. What is the EA waiting for?
Disastrously NRW was no better. NRW Chair Sir David Henshaw said, “the best form of regulation is self-regulation”. The audience booed.
I hope those boos echo in their ears. People have had enough of this statutory failure. It’s beyond time to enforce the law. That message needs to be carried back to Ministers in Westminster and Cardiff.
]]>Reusable nappies are the greenest choice (avoiding thousands of throw-away nappies) and work out cheapest in the long-term. A win-win for people and planet.
Last year DEFRA published their life-cycle analysis comparing reusable nappies to disposables and found that reusable nappies have a lower carbon footprint, even taking into account the energy invested in washing the nappies. You can read the Nappy Lady’s summary here and find the full report here.
Recently, the BBC radio programme Sliced Bread crunched all the costs of reusable and disposable nappies with nappy seller Wendy Richards, providing a comprehensive price comparison of budget, mid-range and disposable options in both markets, and found reusables markedly cheaper, even when factoring in costs for running your washing machine and buying detergent. Wendy helpfully shared her sums here.
The trouble is, reusables have a high up-front cost and that can be a barrier for people investing in them. For this reason, they make great presents! If you take your child swimming regularly, I definitely recommend using a reusable swim nappy – and they make great gifts for other children too, saving a stash of disposable swim nappies.
]]>The Observer reported that free-range egg farms are polluting the Wye catchment. The Wye and Usk Foundation visited 49 free-range egg farms and discovered 19 had drains running from the poultry unit to a nearby watercourse, representing a clear pollution risk. This information was only brought to public attention thanks to a Freedom of Information request by River Action.
DEFRA then published a non-denial denial rebutting the story. In it, an anonymous Environment Agency spokesperson said ‘permitted farms are subject to regular inspections’.
This is disingenuous in the extreme. Why? Because only poultry farms with over 40,000 birds need a permit. Most free-range egg farms fall under this threshold. For example, most egg-layer sheds hold 12,000 or 16,000 birds and a number of farms have around 39,000 hens.
I recently asked the EA (via a Freedom of Information Request) how many farm inspections they’d conducted on non-permitted poultry farms in the Wye catchment from 2020-2023. Their answer was none. At least, not knowingly. To be precise, they said, “The Environment Agency does not regulate non permitted poultry units. We may carry out inspections as part of a general farm inspection but we would not keep numbers which would be readily available.”
So most free-range egg farms have gone without inspection, despite warnings for years about pollution coming from such farms.
Of permitted units (over 40k birds) supplying eggs in the Wye catchment, the EA told me they’d inspected 2 in 2020, 1 in 2021, 3 in 2022 and 3 in 2023. They didn’t know how many of those (if any) were free-range sites. They could all be from intensive indoor egg-layers.
I think Charles Watson from River Action is justified in accusing the EA of “scandalous neglect”.
DEFRA should admit they’ve not done enough and seek to do better. They should reduce the permit threshold so that units with fewer than 40,000 birds actually get inspected, and routinely. There’s an idea for the government’s promised ‘Plan for the Wye’, which is long-overdue.
]]>Hamza moved to the UK from Sudan when he was eight years old. Compared to the rich wildlife of his homeland, Britain seemed barren to him at first. But he soon started noticing birds and some of them were even familiar to him. For example, when he saw skylarks, he thought he recognised them from Sudan but reasoned “it can’t be the same bird” because their behaviour was completely different. In Sudan they were running up and down the Nile, picking things up. In the UK they were singing and calling, trying to attract mates. He started learning about migration and the incredible lives of birds.
He champions “birds without borders”. Birds need to be protected everywhere. They don’t belong to one country or another, “they belong to Mother Nature”.
With most birds, you hear them before you see them. Hamza can recognise their calls, like he’d recognise the voice of a relative calling him. He sees them as kin. With skylarks, you hear them for a long time before you see them. Chris Packham gave him a top tip once: when you see a skylark, lie down. Lie on your back with your binoculars up. Eventually you’ll spot them and see that they are incredibly high up. You can just lie still, enjoying the bird. When they’re done singing, they parachute down and you can get a proper good look at them, which is so rewarding.
Listening to Hamza is an uplifting experience. We also had some great questions from the audience, including one gentleman who asked Hamza for his thoughts about raptor deaths on shooting estates and whether shooting ought to be regulated. Hamza replied in some detail, starting with:
]]>Shooting is not a sport. If it’s a sport, give the animals a rifle back.
Nature is more depleted inside our national parks than outside their boundaries. Like me, you might expect that our ‘protected landscapes’ would be better for wildlife than the surrounding countryside. So why aren’t they?
Well, the short answer is that national parks are largely comprised of privately-owned farmland and farming has been the primary driver of nature loss due to intensification, over-grazing and use of pesticides and other chemicals.
Bannau Brycheiniog National Park took the bold step of making a short film with the world-famous actor Michael Sheen which told the truth about the degraded state of nature in the park. Sheen surveys the uplands and says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Then we hear the doubt. “Isn’t it?”
Where some see beauty, others see a barren landscape devoid of life. The poet Owen Sheers told me:
“I associated the environment [of the Bannau] with natural beauty, wilderness, getting back to an intimate connection with nature. But then your idea and perception of aesthetics changes with knowledge. I now see those upland areas as ecologically arid and not beautiful at all.”
The question of how to recover nature in our national parks is not only an ecological challenge – it’s a political, social and cultural one too. It’s about power and education.
I also appeared on the Prospect podcast to discuss all of this. So if this article interests you, do have a listen too.
]]>I welcome the fact that, in the short term, Avara has recognised that they “need to act urgently” to get manure out of the catchment. This is a major step forward from the biggest poultry producer in the area. I doubt it would have happened without public pressure.
It’s also been a long time coming. Cargill (which jointly owns Avara) has known since the 1980s about the damaging nature of high quantities of poultry manure to rivers - as a Judge in the US recently made clear. In 2004, Cargill & other poultry companies published adverts promising residents in Oklahoma that they’d develop manure management standards for muck spreading & ship more out the catchment. Sound familiar? Over the last 18 years Cargill expanded its operations on the Wye without mitigation.
Avara says farms who want to spread muck on their own land will have to comply with new soil management standards being developed by Red Tractor. Red Tractor does not have a good environmental record - so we need to see what these new standards are & how they’ll be audited. As I previously reported in an exclusive story for The Times, an internal report from the Environment Agency found that Red Tractor farms were more likely to fail environmental inspections than farms who were not part of the scheme. The devil will be in the detail. I hope they get it right.
Ultimately Avara's model of factory farming is out of balance with its environment and unsustainable. It imports soya from South America to feed the chickens. It will now expend emissions transporting the manure somewhere else. We need system change.
]]>Each Assembly was devoted to a different topic – for example, Energy, Food, Transport, Biodiversity etc. We’d hear from an expert witness (or witnesses) and then break out into groups to address the problems shared. The challenge was always: how we can move from where we are to where we need to be?
My final bulletin offers a summary of the ethos of the whole thing. My main takeaway?
We need urgent, radical action in every area of society. The good news is that many of the actions that we must take to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown will also help to restore biodiversity, make us feel more connected to our communities and less lonely, make life more affordable, and improve our health and wellbeing.
In addition to reporting on Planet Assembly, I also worked with Friends of the Upper Wye to programme a pop-up event discussing the plight of the river. We brought together an eclectic collection of twelve speakers, comprising journalists, lawyers, farmers, campaigners, poets and swimmers, to explain the crisis and advocate for solutions.
I also had the pleasure of chairing a fascinating discussion about the Battle for Britain’s Rivers, which is now available to watch on Hay Player.
The Festival coincided with Natural England downgrading the River Wye’s official status from ‘Unfavourable, Recovering’ to ‘Unfavourable, Declining’. Channel 4 News asked me for my reaction.
]]>Due to the high public interest, I thought it might be helpful to share the Judge’s Sentencing Remarks – it’s a 10 page PDF.
This is how the Judge summarised the farmer’s actions:
He has turned a traditional, tree lined, meandering river, full of wildlife, into a canal void of most life. It is nothing short of ecological vandalism on an industrial scale.
The BBC published an excellent summary of the case, highlighting Price’s many previous misdemeanours and offences. Price even ignored a stop notice by Natural England when carrying out this damage. The Judge said:
He seems to adopt the attitude that the rules do not apply to him.
When someone from the Wye and Usk Foundation saw the damage Price was doing and photographed and videoed it from a public footpath, Price pursued them for nearly 12 miles, driving aggressively, flashing lights and shouting for them to get out of their car. The Judge notes that Price had a “history of hostility” towards officials. This behaviour is relevant because the Judge said:
A significant aggravating factor in this case is Mr Price’s repeated aggressive and uncooperative attitude towards officials.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this case has sparked a debate about river ecology and flooding. There are farmers, like the YouTuber Olly Harrison, who insist that rivers are like gutters which need to be cleaned out. Over 10,000 people have signed a petition saying that Price “did the most amazing job clearing the banks and dredging the bottom of the River Lugg”. They believe Price was reducing the risk of flooding to local homes and acting in the public interest. On this, the Judge was crystal-clear that Price’s actions will have had the opposite effect:
In fact, Mr Price’s actions have made matters worse. The channel is deeper, wider and straighter which increases flow rate and volume as it approaches the road bridge which still provides a choke point for the water. The riverbanks have been denuded by the removal of trees and vegetation. It seems to me, that the praise of Mr Price’s remodelling of the river by some local residents arises out of a total ignorance of the true impact of his actions to nature and the environment.
There is clearly a need (and an opportunity) for public education here. Perhaps other farmers, the Environment Agency, Natural England and environmental organisations like the Rivers Trust and the Wildlife Trusts could put out content explaining why what Price has done will worsen the risk of flooding. By ripping up mature trees which would have acted as a buffer, Price has increased the amount of soil and silt that will now wash into the river.
The Judge wanted this sentence to mark the seriousness of damage to a Site of Special Scientific Interest and serve as a deterrent to others. Whilst some think a 1 year sentence is harsh, it’s worth considering that last week a Just Stop Oil protestor received a 3 year prison sentence for seeking to protect the natural world.
]]>Last year I wrote a story for the Guardian about an EA report that I discovered from North Devon which was condemnatory of pollution caused by the dairy industry & the Red Tractor scheme.
In the wake of that story, I decided to keep digging and submitted a Freedom of Information request to the EA for all correspondence between them and Red Tractor.
Earlier this year, I received a response with tens of email attachments. I spent hours scanning through mundane emails before finding that one of the emails contained an attachment: an internal report authored by the Environment Agency in 2020 titled ‘Assessment of the environmental performance of Red Tractor Assured farms’. It runs to around 50 pages and is a significant piece of work. I had no idea such a report existed.
The contents are shocking. It concluded that “Red Tractor Assured farms were less compliant (26%) with EA inspections compared to non-RTA farms (19%)”. In other words, Red Tractor farms were more likely to fail EA environmental inspections than farms who aren’t members of the scheme. That’s the case for nearly every agricultural sector — including dairy, beef, pigs, poultry and arable crops — with RTA members being found to have lower compliance with environmental regulations. The one exception was Red Tractor farms growing fruit and veg in the horticulture sector which were found to have “relatively good” environmental performance.
The report also says Red Tractor farms have caused more serious pollution incidents than non-Red Tractor farms.
The EA report concluded, “Red Tractor membership is not currently an indicator of good environmental performance, and therefore we do not recommend extending Earned Recognition to RTA farms.”
The concept of ‘earned recognition’ means that if the EA could be confident that an assurance scheme guaranteed high standards of environmental protection, it could consider such farms lower risk for causing pollution and depriorotise them for regulatory inspections.
The Red Tractor logo is meant to assure consumers that its products are ‘farmed with care’. It’s even running TV adverts at the moment, voiced by Sara Cox, saying: “When the Red Tractor’s there, your food’s farmed with care”.
Can you trust the Tractor? The Environment Agency don’t think so.
]]>Short answer: yes!
In the lead up to the Budget there was wall-to-wall coverage of the childcare crisis in the UK and yet nobody was talking about the children whose care is at stake and what’s best for them. The entire narrative was about getting parents back to work and closing the gender pay gap. Once you notice that silence, it’s deafening.
I spoke to Neil Leitch, Chief Executive of the Early Years Alliance, and he told me, “the child is right at the back of the agenda in everything coming forward at the moment”. That should raise alarm.
When Chancellor Jeremy Hunt made a huge childcare offer the centrepiece of his budget and said he was removing “the barriers to work” for “parents who have a child under three”, I saw the culmination of the logic. Are babies and small children merely barriers to work?
So I penned this opinion piece for the New Statesman, howling against the wind.
]]>I made the point that this is a problem caused by factory farming – by concentrating so many chickens in one place, we have created a nutrient hotspot out of balance with local ecology.
I enjoyed talking to presenter Anna Hill and you can listen to what I have to say, starting 7 minutes into the programme.
]]>I was surprised by their invitation but welcomed their willingness to talk directly, particularly because I was keen to scrutinise their new ‘roadmap for the future management of poultry manure’. Their headline promise is that: “By 2025, our supply chain will not contribute to excess phosphate in the River Wye”.
The fact that they’re now trying to take responsibility for the manure from their millions of chickens is welcome – but there are serious questions about how their plan will work and it is very late coming when problems on the Wye have been raised for years and a lesson from America should have prevented this situation from ever arising.
A landmark legal ruling in the United States recently found that Cargill and other poultry companies polluted the Illinois River with poultry litter. The Judge stated that the companies had known since the 1980s about the damaging effects to rivers of phosphorus in poultry manure. Back in 2004, Cargill and other poultry companies took out advertisements telling the residents of Oklahoma that they would incorporate new nutrient management standards and export more manure out of the catchment. Why has it taken over eighteen years to offer up a similar plan in the UK? Cargill has known for decades that poultry manure can damage a river system when highly concentrated in one area. Why didn’t Cargill use that knowledge to mitigate the risks in other areas, for example when they were expanding their operations on the Wye?
These are all points raised by my Guardian article today. Here I want to share a few other things that I learned from my exclusive interview with John Reed.
A major study published by scientists at Lancaster University focussed minds in the Wye catchment on quantifying phosphorus flows and identified a huge surplus of livestock manure. Reed told me he welcomes Lancaster’s work but disputes their figures. The scientists used standard DEFRA figures to calculate the amount of phosphorus in poultry manure. Avara have undertaken their own analysis. They say they asked all of their 120 farms to tell them how much manure they produce a year and they also took two samples from every farm, one of poultry litter (poultry manure mixed with bedding material) and one of pure poultry faeces, and tested them in a laboratory to obtain their phosphorus content. Reed said that due to reducing the phosphorus content of their poultry feed and breeding increasingly efficient chickens, their manure and nutrient footprint is smaller than that estimated in the Lancaster study. Avara has sent their data to Lancaster for review because they say they don’t want to be ‘marking their own homework’. Their figures have not yet been independently verified.
Avara’s roadmap says they have reduced the phosphate in their feed by 27% since 2016. Yet the company also significantly expanded their operations over that period, putting millions more birds into the Wye catchment. Reed acknowledged that the company’s expansion offset their nutrient reductions, telling me, “they kind of cancelled each other out”.
Avara pledges to introduce ‘more robust nutrient, soil and manure management standards’. If farmers in their supply chain want to use poultry manure as a fertiliser and spread it to land, Reed says they will need to prove the agronomic need. Avara has not yet determined how this will happen. Reed told me that he’s trying to figure out where this independent third-party verification will come from.
Avara don’t own the poultry farms in their supply chain, nor the anaerobic digesters who receive some of their poultry waste, so much hinges on how they will write their contracts and how they will police manure management. This merits utmost scrutiny.
Avara’s plan also involves exporting some manure out of the catchment and sending manure to a proposed new Anaerobic Digester in Herefordshire, which would be owned and run by a third party, and use a novel phosphate-stripping technology to make a fertiliser which could be more easily exported out of the catchment. The latter plan is contingent upon the project being granted planning permission and there are many concerns and objections linked to the application.
Reed said that Avara currently processes around 2 million birds a week, which is the capacity of their factory, and they have no current plans for expansion. However, he added, “I can’t promise what will happen in the future or offer any guarantee that we won’t expand.”
Christine Hugh-Jones from the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales told me, “The court judgment in the US has proven that Avara’s parent company Cargill knew that they were polluting waterways decades ago. During the 13-year wait for the judgment, Cargill turned a blind eye to the known risks as it treated the Welsh Marches to the American experience, ramping up intensive poultry farming in Herefordshire and Powys. Only now, when there is a public outcry, has Avara pledged to bring its phosphate pollution of the River Wye to zero by 2025. What happens in the intervening years and what hard evidence is there that they can and will achieve this goal?”
That should be the question ringing in all of our ears. Reed also told me that he would welcome more regulation and enforcement from the Environment Agency. Will our governments and environmental agencies in England and Wales feel emboldened to step into the breach?
]]>This means that a Welsh Government Minister could ‘call in’ the application to make a decision on it, rather than leave that decision to the local planning authority. In the meantime, Powys County Council can’t approve the unit.
Could this be the moment that the Welsh Government show some leadership to protect Welsh rivers? Powys County Council and the environmental regulator, Natural Resources Wales (NRW), have continued to approve intensive poultry units (and all other intensive livestock operations) despite scientific evidence showing that the Wye catchment is overloaded with phosphorus, primarily from intensive livestock. There are too many animals creating too much manure in one concentrated area and its throwing the whole ecology out of balance and driving the death of a once-thriving river.
I tweeted this news and soon the nature writer Robert Macfarlane tweeted to ask the Welsh Government to call in the application. He said it was “a crucial moment in the life or death of the Wye”. The Guardian asked me to write the story.
The BBC Wales Investigates programme What’s Killing Our Rivers? reported that NRW told them that “when it comes to muck spreading, they don’t proactively check how its done”. This is the crux of the issue. Nobody is checking or policing what happens to all the manure in the catchment and that’s a disaster. Sewage pollution flooding into rivers is all over the news, but there is also a tsunami of poo coming from intensive livestock which is less visible but probably more dangerous.
The Chair of the Wye’s Nutrient Management Board, Elissa Swinglehurst, once described trying to deal with nutrient pollution in the Wye as “like trying to empty a bath with the taps still running”. Will the Welsh Government turn off the taps?
]]>Positive action to improve soil quality and protect rivers is welcome, and individual efforts should be applauded, but aspects of the report are obfuscatory and misleading.
We need farmers to lead the way in cleaning up the river because the Environment Agency says that farming is responsible for over two-thirds of the phosphate pollution on the Wye. Unfortunately the NFU’s report doesn’t mention this, so the average reader might not realise that the farming sector is the river’s primary polluter. When will they acknowledge farming’s share of the pollution and take full responsibility for addressing it?
The NFU report includes six farm case studies and whilst it discloses some information about these farms, including how many cattle and sheep they keep and how many acres of arable land they farm, it’s strangely coy about one thing: the numbers of chickens and turkeys.
Three of the featured farms mention that they keep poultry, so I asked the NFU press office how many birds each kept. They wouldn’t tell me.
The NFU press officer argued that the report isn’t about numbers, it’s about “positive mitigation” of pollution. I contend that positive mitigation depends upon understanding the numbers. The problem on the Wye is a systemic one. As a key study by Professor Paul Withers and colleagues at Lancaster University has demonstrated, there is more livestock manure in the Wye catchment than the land can absorb and so the excess nutrient goes into rivers, feeding algal blooms. There are over 20 million chickens in the Wye catchment. The scientists at Lancaster recommend removing 80 per cent of the poultry manure, by reducing the overall number of chickens and by exporting the nutrients from the remaining manure out of the catchment. That’s the scale of the challenge.
Let’s take one case study in the NFU report as an example. It says that Sharon Hammond farms with her family near Builth Wells and has 1,600 ewes, some cattle and “produces over 40,000 poultry per year”. The NFU, remember, won’t tell me how many birds the Hammond farm actually stocks. Yet Wales Farmer recently published an interview with Hammond in which she says they keep 120,000 birds at any one time. So what are the NFU trying to hide? A permit for the farm also reveals that Hammond has “130,000 places designed for rearing chickens for meat production”. The birds live for around 6 weeks before being slaughtered for meat. Then after a week’s rest, the cycle starts again. So the Hammond family are likely processing around 800,000 birds a year on their farm. Quite a lot “over 40,000 per year”.
These numbers give a different picture of what farming in the Wye catchment looks like. Whilst the report is illustrated with nice photographs of trees, lush green fields, tractors, sheep and worms in the soil – it doesn’t show a single intensive poultry unit. The 20 million odd birds being factory-farmed are hidden from view. Greenwashing? It’s certainly misleading.
The NFU report says that farms are “heavily regulated, manure and soil management plans are in place”. Yet the Welsh regulator, Natural Resources Wales, recently admitted in their Core Management Plan for the River Wye that manure spreading from intensive poultry units is a problem but “other than through agricultural cross compliance, these operations are currently outside of regulatory control”. Who’s checking manure management plans are being followed? Nobody. Meanwhile the Environment Agency reports that the majority of farms breach pollution regulations. There is scarcely any enforcement action against polluters. DEFRA have instructed the agencies to take an ‘advice-led’ approach. Heavily regulated? If only.
]]>We discussed his latest book Sixty Harvests Left. Lymbery has travelled the world highlighting the horrors of factory farming and how it is driving habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and climate change, whilst perpetrating terrible animal cruelty. It seemed fitting to welcome him to the chicken capital of the UK, with the Wye Valley home to over 20 million chickens, the vast majority of which live miserable, cramped lives in warehouses, before being slaughtered at six weeks old. Lymbery believes, as he writes in his book, that this form of farming will come to be seen as the “cruelest folly of our time. Like the slave trade, we will wonder how we let it happen”.
I learned a lot from Lymbery’s travels and eye-witness reportage, including the fact that the vast majority of Italian parmesan and Gran Padarno cheese comes from dairy cows who have never been outside. They may be ‘grass-fed’, but that grass is hoovered up by machines and conveyed to them in warehouses.
Lymbery’s book has much in common with George Monbiot’s book Regenesis. Both authors highlight the extraordinary life-giving importance of soil and lament that too often we treat soil like dirt. They also largely share the same analysis of the problems posed by industrial farming, but diverge when it comes to solutions. Lymbery champions meat from organic, pasture-fed ruminants. Monbiot argues that such meat can’t feed the world without devouring the planet.
As a proponent of eating 'less but better’ meat, Lymbery said that the UK needs to reduce its meat consumption by 70 per cent. I asked how much meat and fish we could reasonably expect to eat whilst enabling any kind of nature recovery. He told me:
In the very near future, a couple of times a week. Two pieces of meat, probably each one being about the size of a pack of playing cards.
Both Lymbery and Monbiot agree that we need to see a huge dietary shift towards plant-based foods. They are also both hopeful about new technologies that can produce meat without the cruelty or land footprint.
We need a revolution in food labelling (so consumers know where their food comes from) and we need restaurants, cafes and public buildings to offer us a far greater variety of vegan food, so we’re enticed to make better choices.
]]>The data is published in the EA’s ‘Regulating for People, Environment and Growth, 2021’ report. It also states that 43% of inspected farms were found to be non-compliant with at least one of the Farming Rules for Water.
The dairy sector was identified as the main offender, responsible for half of all farming’s serious pollution incidents. The report notes particular concerns around slurry storage and management.
Supermarkets and milk buyers ought to be asking serious questions of their dairy producers and working with them to ensure compliance with all environmental standards. With farming the leading cause of river pollution, dirty dairy deserves to attract the same headlines as the sewage scandal.
]]>I was delighted that reporter Charlotte Smith continued to follow the story the next day, focussing on the fact that most of the farms were ‘Red Tractor Assured’. On the 28 October on BBC Farming Today, Charles Watson from River Action described the Red Tractor logo as a farce. What’s the point of an Assurance scheme that offers no assurance?
]]>When I was working on Rivercide, I spent a lot of time talking to people about a report which covered the Axe catchment in East Devon. Yet I never knew that there was another report with similar findings.
I have no idea why the North Devon Focus Area Report remained under the radar while the Axe report was published. Were the two reports taken together too embarrassing for the government, the dairy industry and the Red Tractor label? If any insider knows the rationale, I’d love to hear it.
Both reports tell the same story – under intense commercial pressure, dairy farms have expanded their herd sizes and pushed cows to produce more milk. More cows producing more milk produce more slurry, and yet farmers generally haven’t invested in increasing their storage capacity to safely hold the extra waste.
This raises serious questions for the large milk buyers and supermarkets. Why aren’t they insisting on basic environmental standards being met and paying farmers a fair price to deliver them?
The Red Tractor logo is meant to assure consumers that their products are ‘farmed with care’ and yet every farm visited in the Axe report and “nearly every farm” visited in the North Devon report was Red Tractor Assured. In other words, the Red Tractor logo doesn’t seem to offer any protection against river pollution.
I obtained the North Devon report through a Freedom of Information request to the Environment Agency and it was edited before release. I don’t know all the edits that were made, but I know one. They removed the line: ‘Red Tractor is not effective at assuring farms are meeting environmental regulations’.
Why did the EA or DEFRA take this line out? To protect Red Tractor by avoiding overtly criticising the scheme? The same line appears in the published Axe report, so it’s an odd omission. I asked the DEFRA press office why they made the edit and they told me:
]]>The report was reviewed and checked alongside FOI guidance before release.
The Red Tractor scheme is not a scheme that Defra or the Environment Agency have a duty to regulate. As such, comments on the scheme fall outside the scope of the report.
Whilst there has been lots of coverage of the childcare crisis in the UK, little of it asks: what’s best for the child?
I consulted a range of child development experts whilst researching this piece and one – Dona Matthews – wrote her own extensive response to my question and turned it into a piece for Psychology Today which is well worth reading. She acknowledges the complexity of the subject, saying:
I’m an ardent feminist, believing in women’s right to choose how to proceed with their own pregnancies, and in their career development opportunities, including the need to close the gender pay gap. It’s tricky, though, because I am also an advocate for children’s optimal development, and know that children do best with consistent, attentive, curious, and loving caregivers, especially in the early years.
I want us to be honest about the fact that there’s a tension between freeing parents to work and giving babies and toddlers the best start in life.
I’ve been increasingly frustrated by media coverage which frames universal childcare as good for parents, good for the economy and good for children. Sorry, where’s the evidence that group childcare is developmentally beneficial for babies and toddlers? The needs of babies, toddlers and pre-school children are each quite distinct and shouldn’t be bundled together.
Penelope Leach says we have a ‘baby blindspot’ in policy-making and I think she’s dead right. I loved reading Penelope’s books and her introduction to ‘Who Cares?’ is a masterpiece. I could weep that she said all this in the 1970s and yet we still woefully undervalue the care of small children.
]]>On Saturday 17 September I’ll have the pleasure of interviewing Henry Mance about his book How to Love Animals. Mance is chief features writer for the Financial Times and I’ve long admired his writing and witty interventions on Twitter. I bought and read his book when it first came out and have returned to it many times since to find various references. I’ll be asking him about his journey from vegetarianism to veganism and the experiences and evidence which led him to change his diet.
On Sunday 18 September I’m part of a panel discussing the dismal state of our rivers (particularly the local Wye and Usk) and what we can do to clean them up. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last two years researching pollution to the Wye, particularly from agricultural sources, including the 20 million chickens in the catchment – so it will be interesting to share the stage with a representative from Avara, the company responsible for the majority of those chickens.
Off-stage, aside from sampling lots of delicious food and watching great chefs at work, I’m most excited about watching Saturday’s debate ‘Meat: Should we still be eating it?’ as I think it’s one of the biggest questions we face. Having read Mance’s book (and others, including Regenesis by George Monbiot and We Are The Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer), I’m pretty persuaded that the answer is ‘No’ – but I’m always interested in counter-arguments and this event has an excellent panel.
]]>I was really moved, earlier this year, watching Andrea Arnold’s documentary Cow, which followed a dairy cow called Luma on a farm in Kent, over the course of a few years. There was no commentary or explantation for the scenes presented, it was simply a filmic invitation to consider the life of this mammal. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had so many questions – was Luma’s life typical of a British dairy cow? How much did she get to be outside? How did she feel about being separated from her calfs at birth, year after year, so that humans could take her milk?
I set about finding out and spoke to lots of fascinating people in the process – including farmer George, from Park Farm in Kent, where Luma lived.
]]>1) I’m a big fan of reusable nappies – 20 cloth nappies have the potential to prevent thousands of disposables going to landfill
2) I now have a second child to test them on.
I don’t usually dabble in ‘consumer journalism’ (because I’m much more interested in our powers as citizens than consumers) but I consider this piece in the public interest.
Lots of consumer journalism feels like it’s recycling press releases. When I tested these nappies, I really tested them. Once again, as in 2019, I tried out loads more nappies than I ended up writing about (for example, I found that Aldi’s Mamia reusable is cheap for a reason, with fraying stitching which made me suspect it wouldn’t last as long as the others). I could also draw on the experience of using reusable nappies on my first child for nearly three years (until he outgrew them) and I consulted many friends who’ve used them too.
The reason I wrote my original piece for the Telegraph in 2019 was because I couldn’t find an independent reviewer who had tested loads of nappies and compared them. My rule as a journalist now is to write the pieces that I want to read, but can’t find written anywhere.
Whilst many of my favourite nappies from 2019 were still available, there had also been lots of changes. Brexit and global commodity prices have changed the market, meaning some companies had folded or were no longer able to sell their nappies in the UK at a competitive price. Meanwhile a few new players and products had taken their place.
The economics have also changed. In 2019 it was clear that using reusable nappies would categorically save you money and lots of it. Once you’d made the expensive up-front investment in buying a load of cloth nappies, you were reaping savings over the next few years, rather than shelling out constantly for disposables. However, with the steeply rising energy costs, some people are now frightened to put on their washing machines. The cost of washing reusable nappies is presently comparable to buying the cheapest disposables. I appreciate the economics are a fast-moving picture, and disposables may soon rise in price too, so I avoided financial comparisons and focussed on the environmental case for cloth nappies instead.
I’m extremely grateful to Wendy Richards, the guru behind The Nappy Lady, for all of her advice and assistance whilst I was researching. She rightly made me try terry squares this time because they’re the ultimate budget option and they absolutely do the job!
I’d also recommend parents ask for reusable nappies as presents – they last far longer than clothes (which are outgrown in weeks or months by babies and toddlers) and they can look just as cute.
]]>Offering a systemic analysis of all the phosphorus inputs and outputs in the area, the RePhoKUs team found an excess of 3,000 tonnes of phosphorus accumulating every year. That’s 3,000 tonnes more phosphorus than the land can absorb, year after year. The soils are full of legacy phosphorus. Some are calling this problem ‘Phosmageddon’. As this excess nutrient leaches into rivers, it becomes an ingredient for algal blooms.
The scientists discovered that the vast majority (78%) of phosphorus imported into the catchment arrives in the form of animal feed. The vast majority of phosphorus applied to the soil comes from animal manure (82%). The largest livestock sector in the catchment is poultry, with over 20 million chickens. We have a problem caused by intensive farming which imports feed (including soya) grown on the other side of the world, feeds it to millions of chickens crammed into industrial sheds, and then spreads their waste on over-saturated land.
Systemic change is required to redress this imbalance. The study authors stress the need to tackle the ‘manure mountain’ and recommend a reduction in livestock numbers and new systems to process manure so that it can be exported out of the area. Their recommendations illustrate the scale of change required, for example suggesting a 75% reduction of fertiliser use, plus an 80% reduction in pig and poultry manure, plus cutting 50% of all cattle manure.
So how has the Nutrient Management Board reacted to this landmark study?
They don’t question the science. In fact, a representative from Natural England said it was the best scientific research they can expect on this subject. The Chair, Elissa Swinglehurst, praised its readability and contribution to overall understanding.
It fell to Merry Albright, a local housebuilder, to ask the board:
Why aren’t we using the recommendations? Do we need an action to say they need to be looked at, because they’re huge amounts?
3 thousand tonnes is 3 million kilogrammes. The Luston wetland [planned by Herefordshire Council in part for phosphorus-mitigation] will have an environmental benefit of 40kg – so the amount we need to save is way bigger than any action on the table.
No compelling answer was forthcoming.
All the pertinent questions were posed by members of the public.
Andrew McRobb from the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England asked:
The Environment Agency didn’t provide any answer to that question. McRobb wanted a frank admission that nobody is enforcing the rules.If in the Farming Rules for Water it says that no excess nutrient should be put on greater than the crop need or the soil need, I have a dilemma – we’re putting 3000 [excess] tonnes a year on, why isn’t that contrary to the Farming Rules for Water and why isn’t action being taken?
James Marsden then stressed the need to talk about ‘total poo’, as per the RePhoKUs report and its recommendations:
I haven’t heard that anybody is seriously contemplating or looking at that. Until we reduce total poo or the amount of P in the poo, we’re not going anywhere, are we? Why aren’t we talking about reducing livestock numbers across the catchment?
The Chair said, “that’s definitely a recommendation”.
You don’t get the sense that anybody wants to hear, let alone act upon, that recommendation.
Watching the Nutrient Management Board members at that point (2 hours and 28 minutes into the meeting) is telling. It looks like collective avoidance. To be fair, Ann Weedy from Natural Resources Wales says, “Watch this space”. But watching NRW often feels like precisely that, looking at a space where an effective body should be, so I’m not too hopeful of what action will follow.
Barrister Alex Goodman, who is representing Herefordshire residents fighting their council’s decision to grant planning permission to an intensive livestock unit, has elsewhere suggested that the area could:
Adopt a precautionary policy on planning permission for developments that load more phosphates and nitrates into the river.
Revoke or condition existing planning permissions for developments polluting the river (subject to compensation).
Provided poultry farmers and other intensive livestock farmers are properly compensated, it’s difficult to see a downside to this proposal.
Will the people with power consider enacting such a policy? When will they follow the science?
]]>The story is largely based on the brilliant work of Alison Caffyn, who crunched all the numbers and researched the history of Avara’s development in Herefordshire.
Will Tesco and Avara take responsibility for their pollution on the Wye and clean up their supply chain?
]]>I’ve previously reported on the appalling pollution of the Afon Llynfi which killed over 45,000 fish.
This film highlights how some local people responded to that crime (for which nobody has been caught) by volunteering to monitor the river. They hope their sustained attention will be a deterrent to any polluters.
While the environment agencies have cut back on statutory monitoring over the past decade due to government slashing their budgets, people have stepped forward as citizen scientists to fill the gap.
Whilst I despair at how the Wye is being colossally failed by politicians and the statutory bodies charged with protecting it, I find tremendous hope in the actions of ordinary people.
This premiered at Hay Castle on 10 July, as part of Lift The River.
]]>Whilst the event was live-streamed, it’s still available on YouTube.
]]>On Monday 30th May I will be in conversation with Candice Brathwaite, Joeli Brearley and Anna Kent to explore how we can have better births. Kent has written an extraordinarily moving memoir, Frontline Midwife, about her experiences in South Sudan, Bangladesh and the NHS. Brathwaite addresses the higher maternal mortality rates for black women in Britain. Brearley highlights the traumatic and isolated experiences of women on maternity wards throughout the Covid pandemic.
On Saturday 4th June, I’ll be interviewing George Monbiot and Feargal Sharkey about the shameful state of our polluted rivers and what needs to be done to clean them up.
]]>I was interviewed by Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour – and they shared a video clip of my interview on their Twitter and Instagram.
I also penned an article for Grazia about the campaign and why it matters.
Charlotte has shared her story in the Metro and the period-tracker app Flo have also run a piece by Chloe Lovell on why we need to stop saying morning sickness, including some quotes from me.
]]>I’m grateful that the Independent commissioned this and gave me a platform to make my argument. I’m even more thrilled that over the weekend the powerhouse that is Joeli Brearley shared my article on her Pregnant Then Screwed Instagram account – and it was met with widespread support.
I know that there are a lot of problems in the world but this one has an easy fix: just change the language! It’s time to ditch ‘morning sickness’ for good. I feel galvanised by the support and energy of other women so hopefully we can work this up into a proper campaign to make real and lasting change.
]]>There’s so much to discuss, the challenge will be deciding what questions to prioritise for the hour we have. You can join us in person or online and tickets are on sale now.
]]>The stars of our programme were Christine Hugh-Jones, an activist with the Brecon and Radnor branch of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales, and Alison Caffyn, who wrote her PhD thesis at Cardiff University about the intensive poultry industry.
Christine and Alison have been keeping a tally of chicken numbers in the counties of Powys in Wales and Herefordshire in England by trawling through all the planning applications on the councils’ websites and records – and doing further research, including by Google satellite, to check on whether older units are still in operation or not.
They undertook this forensic and painstaking work because they couldn’t see that anybody else was doing it. They believe that the cumulative impact of all these birds in a concentrated area matters – for ammonia impacts, for risks of avian flu, for its effect on the environment and local residents and for the levels of chicken manure that contribute to the overload of phosphorous in the Wye and its tributaries.
Christine and Alison estimate that there are around 20 million chickens in the Wye catchment.
Christine counted over 10 million birds in Powys, with over 4 million of them residing in the Wye catchment area.
Alison totted up the total number of birds in Herefordshire and estimates that there are over 17 million, with just under 16 million in the Wye catchment’s area of the county.
They turned their data into a very helpful map showing the locations of the intensive poultry units with information about how many buildings and birds were registered at each spot.
I wanted to know whether the authorities had any comparable records or official data.
Natural Resources Wales told me that they don’t monitor the total number of chickens in the Wye catchment. Nor do they have a map of the poultry units. However, units with more than 40,000 birds require a permit to operate and NRW have records for those. They told me that their 30 units with permits in the Welsh Wye catchment have a total of 4.5 million places, though pointed out that not all these units will be fully stocked at all times. That said, they stressed, “it’s important to note that poultry units which house over 40,000 chickens make up a small proportion of the total number of poultry units in the catchment. The overall number of chickens housed in the catchment is therefore significantly higher than the 4.5m housed in permitted units. We don’t hold information on the number of chickens in the unpermitted units as we don’t have a direct role in monitoring those units under current regulations.”
Did you get that? NRW say that there are ‘significantly’ more than 4.5 million chickens on the Welsh side of the Wye catchment. So their estimate exceeds Christine’s!
Powys County Council simply said that they don’t hold the data I requested and suggested that I could search for poultry on their log of planning applications. This would entail doing the laborious work that Christine and her comrades have already done. Clearly nobody at Powys County Council is even attempting to keep count, which begs the question, how on earth can they assess the cumulative impact of poultry developments? The answer is that they can’t.
Meanwhile on the English side of the border, I recently received some rather illuminating responses.
The Environment Agency told me that, like Natural Resources Wales, they only have records for their permitted sites, which are those containing over 40,000 birds. They said they have 84 permitted sites in Herefordshire with an estimated total of 16,891,696 birds. Again, as this figure doesn’t include the smaller poultry units, the true total will be higher. They don’t have a breakdown for the Wye catchment but I note that their total for the county, just in the permitted units, is approaching 17 million making Alison’s estimate of over 17 million chickens for all sizes of units in the whole of Herefordshire look conservative.
Herefordshire Council have been working hard to find out how many chickens could be in the county – revealing, in the process, that they haven’t expressed much curiosity before and clearly haven’t been keeping count. A dereliction of their planning duty to assess cumulative impact. Still, last week they shared data which they obtained from Defra’s Animal and Plant Health Agency which keeps records for the purpose of assessing for animal disease outbreaks and the like. From this data, they’ve estimated that there are approximately 16 million chickens in Herefordshire, including small producers as well as large commercial units. This breaks down as: 14,543,420 meat rearing chickens; 606,931 egg laying chickens; and 1,088,372 breeding for egg laying.
So those figures are a little lower than the Environment Agency’s figures, but still in the same ballpark and add weight to Alison’s estimates. The most extraordinary part of all this is that the Nutrient Management Board – a body set up in 2014 to address the concentration of phosphorous in the river Wye – released a draft Nutrient Management Plan a few weeks ago which stated:
“There are 195 Intensive Poultry Units in the Wye catchment, with more than 9m birds generating 2040 tonnes of phosphate per year, most of which is spread on farmland as fertiliser”
I suppose “more than 9 million” could mean 20 million. But it seems rather disingenuous.
Where did that figure come from? Were the authors of the Nutrient Management Action Plan deliberately seeking to misrepresent the scale of the intensive poultry industry in the Wye catchment or are they that ignorant of the facts?
Either way, it’s a damning example of institutional failure.
PS – I’d really like to know the source for that 9 million. Where did it come from? Please contact me if you know!
UPDATE: I’ve since been informed that the 9 million figure in the NMB’s draft report was based on 2010 farm census data and has now been removed. It’s likely that their forthcoming report will confirm that there are an estimated 20 million birds in the Wye catchment.
]]>The first is a short piece promoting Rivercide, the live investigative documentary I’m making with George Monbiot and Franny Armstrong – and that’s free to read online at this link.
The second is a feature about the groundbreaking citizens science project run by the Ilkley Clean River campaign, telling the story of how they meticulously gathered evidence about the levels of e-coli in the river Wharfe and used this information to lobby for designated bathing water status – and won! I was very inspired by my conversations with Karen Shackleton and Professor Rick Battarbee and they offer a template for action for other groups across the country.
]]>We’re planning a live investigative documentary for streaming broadcast in July 2021. We’re making it independently and crowdfunding production costs.
I’m researching all things rivers – so please get in touch if you have a story about pollution or are part of a group proposing solutions.
]]>Here’s my first article for Countryfile Magazine. My investigation continues.
]]>The piece examines using sails as a primary means of propulsion – after all, not so long ago all global trade used to travel by sail. It also explores using windpower as a form of wind-assistance to reduce fuel.
Unfortunately, being for a Journal, this paper is behind a paywall – but there are plans to convert this edition of the journal into a book published by Wiley.
]]>When I searched online for people aspiring to live ‘zero waste’ I found Instagram and YouTube ‘influencers’ monetising their content by promoting different products. I was uncomfortable with the commercialisation of low-impact living. It perpetuates a consumer mindset and suggests that you can buy your way into a more ethical life. It also looks very middle-class. Whereas, fundamentally, striving to live with less waste is really about buying less of everything and making do with what you have.
I wanted to know how on earth Cate hasn’t put her bin out in over 3 years and how Ander managed to create 99% less waste than the average household last year – and the resounding answer was that they just don’t buy stuff in non-recyclable packaging. Claudi told me that she hasn’t bought a box of cereal for over four years and makes her own muesli instead. They generally don’t buy biscuits or crisps or chocolate bars with wrappers that would end up in the trash. This discipline has become their way of life.
Avoiding packaging brings other benefits. I noticed that the ‘naughtiest’ aisles in the supermarkets are most full of packaging. If you avoid packaging, you’ll eat less processed food and probably eat more healthily. It also pushes you towards local and seasonal food, as that tends to be more available unpackaged.
I’m already lucky to shop largely package-free at my local farm shop. I get all my fresh fruit and veg loose, and can stock up on frozen treats with reusable bags too. I buy milk in returnable glass bottles. The outstanding waste repeat-offenders in my bin are biscuit and chocolate wrappers and cereal bags. It would do us good to reduce our biscuit consumption anyway and this week I made some delicious vegan cookies. The mixture only took a couple of minutes to put together and under 15 minutes in the oven, so perhaps if I really want biscuits, I should just make my own. Reducing waste means making more stuff from scratch but it’s also empowering to master new skills and I appreciate home-cooked food more.
I’ve now swapped my sponge for a loofah and it’s a joy to wash up with. I often felt guilty about all the old sponges I was chucking in the bin for landfill so am delighted to find a compostable option. I’ve started using the wild mint growing in the garden for herbal tea and it’s delicious, so no need to buy expensive herbal tea at this time of year.
I must confess that I haven’t yet mastered making my own oat milk. I had a go and enjoyed the sensation of squeezing it through the muslin cloth (oats make your hands feel so soft), but it tasted pretty disgusting on my cereal. It was slimy and miserably austere and needed sweetening for my taste. I might need to try making a blend with rice in too. I’ll persevere and have another go.
]]>After having my baby, I was dismayed by how many disposable nappies I was throwing away and haunted by the idea that this pile of waste would take hundreds of years to decompose, far outliving my child. I wanted to switch to reusables but didn’t know where to start. I couldn’t find any decent, reliable consumer journalism which had independently tried, tested and compared reusable nappies. Even Which hadn’t done that work. So I set about doing it myself. I spent months using a wide range of reusable nappies, in order to recommend the best nappies for different circumstances. I hope it’s of real use.
I learned so much along the way that I also added a long FAQ to help others get started with reusables. The truth is, they’re really easy to use and they're much cheaper than disposables in the long-run, but parents need the chance to try them out themselves to see this firsthand and have the confidence to make the upfront investment. Because reusable nappies aren’t generally sold in supermarkets they’re not very visible in society and therefore seem difficult and mysterious. My top tip to anyone interested in trying reusables (apart from reading my article) is to find your nearest nappy library (run by volunteers) and try some out. Alternatively (or additionally), fill out the Nappy Lady’s Questionnaire about your circumstances and receive tailored advice as to which nappies are likely to be best for your baby.
I also reviewed travel cots, high chairs, and baby monitors.
]]>One irony of the Syrian war is that while the Assad government flouts the most basic rules of international humanitarian law, it never openly admits doing so. It denies that it barrel bombs or gasses civilians. It pretends that it lets necessities reach people in besieged areas. And it bars independent access to the worst of its detention facilities where the bulk of the torture and execution takes place.
It is in that context of denial that the Caesar photos are so important. No one seeing the photographs of more than six thousand brutalized corpses can deny that something utterly inhumane has been taking place inside that closed prison system. Survivors can describe that hell on earth, but the photographs speak with an unimpeachable directness that compels us to understand the utter cruelty of the Syrian detention system.
Roth’s full remarks merit reading. I was honoured last week that my documentary, ‘Syria’s Disappeared: The Case Against Assad’ (which I co-produced with director Sara Afshar), was screened in Courtroom 600 in Nuremberg, where the Nuremberg Trials took place. The film played in the same spot where images from the Holocaust were presented to the courtroom over 70 years ago. This launched the programme leading up to the presentation of the award to Caesar for his courage in delivering essential evidence to the outside world. His courageous act deserves more than awards. It demands action to prevent the continuing deaths in detention and to bring the perpetrators to justice.
]]>The rightwing press threw everything it had at Jeremy Corbyn, and failed to knock him over. In doing so, it broke its own power. Its wild claims succeeded in destroying not Corbyn’s credibility but its own.
This is particularly significant because, as Monbiot notes, the rightwing press tends to set the news agenda for the broadcasters. I have written about this before, drawing on my own experience at the BBC.
I was interested to see George Osborne acknowledging the power of press, as he recently told Nick Robinson:
I do think newspapers in Britain in particular set the tone, if I may say so, partly because we have the BBC as a big, very impartial in its charter, state broadcaster and as a result I think quite often the BBC follows a newspaper agenda a bit because it doesn’t necessarily want to go out on a limb itself… So I do think newspapers create a climate in which the election takes place.
The BBC must consider how it can better represent the public and shake off the shackles of a skewed media field.
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