This is the second part of Emily Whitehouse’s interview with Des Collins. Des is best known for leading the Corby toxic waste case, a legal battle which was the first time atmospheric pollution had been linked to birth defects.
In 2009, after 10 years, the council were found to be negligent in transporting toxic waste through the town in open lorries. A finding that delivered long-awaited justice to the families affected.
The story has been brought back into public consciousness through the Netflix drama Toxic Town, which premiered early in 2025. The first part of the interview can be read here.
Is there anything that happened in real life which wasn’t included in the series that you wish had been?
Good question. I don’t think there is, although I suspect if I were to think about it, there would have been parts which they didn’t have time to go into.
The series focuses a lot on the preparation for the trial, the only time you see the court and the judge is at the end, which is pretty much what you’d expect. But there were a number of times when we were in court on earlier occasions and there were a lot of court applications, possibly 10 or 15 over the period, some of which would have possibly made good television.
The production company did a great job in making sure the public weren’t bored stiff and led up to the final verdict brilliantly, which I guess was the part everyone wanted to watch.
You have recently called for a public apology. What do you think such an apology would mean to the families today, after all these years?
The apology would mean a huge amount to them, especially considering the reaction following the trial, where the council blamed the families for embarrassing them and making them run out of money.
I should say it was open to the council at all times to insure against this, in the same way I made sure the mothers were insured against losing, in case they had to pay a huge amount in fees.
Unfortunately, I think it’s even less likely now that the council will provide an apology. Even though there is a new local authority in place, they’re still taking the same resolute approach, which they’ve taken for 20 years, that they just won’t see reason.
And now we’re looking at an allegation by some of the residents that there’s an excess cluster of cancer cases in Corby as a result of where the reclamation was carried out. Of course, the council are being as obdurate as they always were, they just won’t respond fully or properly to the concerns of residents.
Can you tell us more about these new cases?
Yes. They’ve been floating around for several months and have been brought forward by mothers whose children have been born with cancer. We don’t know exactly what has caused this, but the concern is that it is related to toxic waste.
Toxic Town was based on toxic waste being dug up from an old steelworks site and transported across Corby, by doing this workers spread contaminated dust across the town and that was the problem. What Toxic Town did not look at, because it didn’t have to, is where the material ended up.
We know most of it was supposed to end up in a place called Dean Quarry, but not all of it did because it wasn’t big enough. The concern now is, where did the rest of it go and is that now causing problems. We’ve tried asking the council, “you dug the waste up – you don’t deny that because there’s a court judgement saying you moved it. Can you please now tell us where you put the excess?”
As we speak, the council is refusing to say where the excess is buried. In fact, the latest communication we’ve had with the local authority is that it’s not a matter of public interest, so they won’t tell anyone. If that’s not a matter of public interest, then I’m not sure what is.
If the government agreed to reopen the Corby case today, what questions would you want answered?
The first question is, where did this stuff go? And the second is what knowledge did the council have as to where it went and when it went there? One of the problems has always been that corruption was rife at the time; it was all backhanders for people who were involved in moving this material around.
Those allegations of corruption were investigated by the police, and the DPP took no action as a result. I would like to know why they didn’t. There is a get-out clause for the failure to prosecute. When the CPS say they don’t want to prosecute they just put a blanket on it and say it’s not sufficiently in the public interest to do it. So, I would want to see that investigated by a public enquiry, together with enough evidence to determine where the waste is now and that it’s not harmful.
This is not a mission to show things are wrong, it’s a mission to show that hopefully things are right and whether the concerns of the mothers of children with cancer are expressing are justifiable or not.
If they’re not, then I’m sure the mothers and the children will at least go away and say “well, okay, we’ve tried.” It’s not a question of having to attribute liability or fault, it’s just a question of making sure these mothers can say to their children when they turn 25, “I tried. I couldn’t get there, but I did try.”
But it’s that failure to try and the fact the council – a public authority – will stand in your way, which is a depressing comment on modern society.
Lauren Lyle played the role of Des’ colleague Dani Holliday
The Corby Case became a landmark in environmental justice. Do you think the law has evolved enough since then to stop another community from suffering in the same way?
In all probability, no. We’ve been involved in a number of pieces of litigation and the obduracy of the council to accept when things might have gone wrong…that’s a natural reaction of people, they will try and defend themselves, and I can see that – but councils are supposed to look at the land and determine whether it’s contaminated, and if so, what they can do about it. But they haven’t got the staff, they haven’t got the resources, and they haven’t got the experience.
Now, you may well say, why am I asking Corby to do it? I think Corby’s a one-off case, where it was shown to them in court that they got it wrong, so they should be able to tell us now whether it caused further problems.
But the Environmental Protection Act doesn’t provide the protection which people thought it would. Litigation is hugely expensive and legal aid has effectively, for all practical purposes, gone. So the only funding for what we call group actions or class actions, is funding which is provided by investors.
Investors will provide funding in some circumstances. For example, if 50,000 people wanted to sue because their car exhausts are not up to scratch despite being told they were, and each of those people will receive a compensation payment of £3,000, you can get investors interested, because it’s what we call a low-hanging fruit, it’s easy money.
However, if you said that you wanted to sue a local authority for a decontamination project that went wrong 20 or 15 years ago, no-one’s going to touch it. I was concerned that we were dealing with these issues from time to time, because it was so hard.
Presently, we’re dealing with a not dissimilar case in Motherwell where over 40 residents have launched legal action against a housing association that have allegedly built homes on toxic land. The case has been ongoing since 2012, which is over ten years, and we’re having huge difficulties again.
In December, we’re due back in court for the last time. We’ve had several trials previously, all of which we’ve lost. The actions, to begin with, were against the local authority and then against the contractor and then the person who designed the scheme. But each time we lose, it’s because the judge doesn’t understand the full problem of contaminated waste, unlike how the readers of your magazine might.
The last trial we lost was in 2024 and now we’re going to the Inner House, which is the Court of Appeal in Scotland. So, watch this space, it might make all the difference. If you ask me the same question at the beginning of next year, I might say something totally different.
Finally, are there any lessons other UK councils should take from what happened in Corby?
Yes, I think some lessons have been learned, and I think Corby was the worst or best example of amateurs trying to deal with a situation which should be left entirely to the professionals.
The problem with Corby was that the amateurs were in fact people who had been laid off by the steelworks, who’d formed their own millage companies and took the view that we’ve dealt with this material for 40 years and therefore this nanny state can’t tell us how to deal with it.
I think people have now realised that it is far more technical and far more potentially damaging to the public than was otherwise thought, so I think that’s good.
The result of that is, however, that very often the land is simply left there with nothing happening to it, apart from the fact that it starts leeching out problems all over the place in one form or another, which is not achieving the result we would all want. But I think if one thing was learned, it is that you can’t get a bunch of amateurs to do this work, it is entirely for professionals. The fact that the council don’t have the money available to them is political.
Rory Kinnear, playing the role of Des Collins
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