What the Council Left Out of Its Thornton-Cleveleys Cancer Statement
On 15 June 2026, the multi-agency Health Cell issued a public statement summarising its kidney cancer assessment. This piece sets the statement's wording alongside the underlying report's own findings, sentence by sentence, using only what each document says.
From Lancashire’s Health Cell kidney-cancer report on the Hillhouse area.
Both documents referenced below are public. Every passage is quoted directly; nothing here is our interpretation of unpublished data.
On 15 June 2026, the multi-agency Health Cell that assessed kidney cancer rates around the AGC Chemicals Europe (formerly ICI) plant at Hillhouse, Thornton-Cleveleys, contaminated with PFOA and other PFAS chemicals, issued a public statement summarising its findings. Read the statement on its own and it sounds settled. Read it next to the report it summarises, and a few things are missing.
The statement says there is no cluster. The report names two statistically significant areas.
The statement says: “further detailed assessment found no evidence of a disease cluster,” and concludes “there is no evidence of a kidney cancer cluster and no indication of a link to environmental contamination, and that no further investigation is required at this stage.”
The report says: two neighbourhood areas showed a higher than expected number of kidney cancer cases, and “these two LSOA were deemed to be statistically significant by the Health Cell.” The area immediately south-east of the site recorded 14 observed cases against 6 expected (SIR 218, a standardised incidence ratio where 100 would mean exactly as many cases as expected, so 218 is more than double; 95% CI 119 to 367, the range the true figure most likely falls within); north Blackpool recorded 17 against 9 expected (SIR 181, 95% CI 106 to 290).
The statement’s Notes to Editors do state that “kidney cancer incidence was observed to be higher than expected in two areas, one south east of the site in Thornton and one situated in the north of Blackpool.” The existence of the two elevated areas is not absent from the statement. What does not appear, in either the main text or the Notes to Editors, are the observed and expected case counts, the standardised incidence ratios, the confidence intervals, or the word the report uses for these two results: “statistically significant.”
The statement calls it chance. The report’s own test says the opposite, for these two areas specifically.
The statement says: “This type of variation is not unusual when analysing rare conditions in small populations, and further analysis confirmed it was consistent with chance rather than a true cluster.” It also says the overall findings “indicate that the variation in cases is consistent with what would be expected by chance when analysing rare conditions in small populations.”
The report says, of the same two areas: “The Health Cell used confidence intervals to judge whether differences from the expected level (100) are likely to be real or due to chance. If the range stays entirely above or below 100, the difference is considered meaningful.” Both areas’ confidence intervals sit entirely above 100. The report’s own conclusion, “no evidence of a statistically significant kidney cancer cluster,” follows a specific cluster-investigation test (a trend with distance, or “gradient”; geographic spread, or “spatial pattern”; tumour type, or “morphology”; and comparison against a reference group, or “comparator population”), separate from the statistical significance of the individual small-area SIRs, which the report affirms elsewhere in the same document.
The statement drops one word: “gradient.”
The statement says: “The analysis showed that cases were geographically dispersed, with no consistent patterns over time or location, and no evidence of increased risk linked to proximity to the site.”
The report says: “there was no evidence of an increasing gradient of risk in relation to proximity to the site.” The report’s own finding concerns the absence of a gradient, a smooth trend of rising or falling risk with distance, across the wider area. The statement’s wording, “no evidence of increased risk linked to proximity to the site,” drops the word “gradient,” and sits alongside, rather than in place of, the report’s separate finding of a statistically significant excess in the one small area closest to the site.
“No alignment” is the statement’s word. “Cannot be used to infer exposure” is the report’s.
The statement says: the assessment found “no alignment between cancer cases and environmental data such as soil contamination or air dispersion patterns.”
The report says this comparison was made “descriptively,” using soil sampling data and air-dispersion modelling supplied by the Environment Agency, and states plainly that this exercise “does not provide evidence of a causal link between soil contamination and cancer incidence” in either direction. The report’s Limitations section separately notes that environmental data of this kind “is limited in its ability to characterise historical exposures” and “cannot be used to infer exposure levels for individual cases.”
We are not saying the statement was written in bad faith. We are saying a reader of the statement alone would not know what the report itself found.
This is a comparison of wording, not an assessment of intent. The statement is shorter than the report and is explicitly framed as a summary; its Notes to Editors do disclose that two areas were elevated. What does not appear in the public statement are the figures themselves: the SIR values, the confidence intervals, and the report’s own use of “statistically significant” for these two results. A reader relying on the statement alone would know that two areas showed higher than expected numbers. They would not know the size of that difference, its confidence interval, or that the report’s own statistical test found it unlikely to be due to chance at the level of those individual areas.
We are asking this openly, and putting it directly to Lancashire County Council and the Health Cell. Any response will be published here.
How we know what we know
Every passage above is quoted directly from one of two public documents. The statement is Lancashire County Council Health Cell, “Update on investigation: Hillhouse Technology Enterprise Zone, Thornton-Cleveleys,” issued 15 June 2026 and published via Lancashire County Council News. The report is Lancashire County Council Health Cell, “Assessment of Kidney Cancer Patterns at the Hillhouse Technology Enterprise Zone, Thornton-Cleveleys,” v1.0 Final, last reviewed 12 May 2026. We have set passage against passage; the only thing added is the pairing.