What Lancashire County Council's Thornton-Cleveleys Cancer Statement Left Out
On 15 June 2026, the Lancashire County Council Health Cell issued a public statement, published on Lancashire County Council's news site, 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 the Lancashire County Council Health Cell’s kidney-cancer report and public statement 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 Every passage is quoted directly; nothing here is our interpretation of unpublished data.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 Lancashire County Council Health Cell, the multi-agency group 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, published on Lancashire County Council’s news site. 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 areas with an excess it deemed statistically significant against England’s rates.
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 south-east of the site, E01025596 (described in the report as close to 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 second area, E01012665, 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. Against England’s rates, the report’s own test found these two areas statistically significant.
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, calculated against England’s rates, sit entirely above 100. Against other small areas, the report says the rate in E01025596 “was statistically similar to those in most other LSOAs, although it was higher than the England average”, and it describes its overall findings as “consistent with the level of random variation expected when undertaking multiple small analyses and multiple statistical comparisons”. 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”; alignment with soil and air-dispersion data; 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 from the site. The report also says there was “no clustering of cases close to the current AGCCE site” and “no pattern of decreasing incidence with distance”. 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 an excess against England’s rates, which it deemed statistically significant, in the one small area south-east of the site.
“No alignment” is in both. “Cannot be used to infer exposure” is only in the report.
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 the same, “no alignment with expected environmental air dispersion or soil contamination data”, and that the soil sampling data were “used descriptively”, alongside air-dispersion modelling supplied by the Environment Agency. It states that its visual comparison of soil data and case maps “does not provide evidence of a causal link between soil contamination and cancer incidence”. 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 significant against England’s rates at the level of those individual areas.
We are asking this openly. We are preparing to put it formally to Lancashire County Council and the Health Cell, and will publish any response here.
How we know what we know
Every passage above is quoted directly from one of two public documents. The statement is the Health Cell’s “Update on investigation: Hillhouse Technology Enterprise Zone - Thornton-Cleveleys”, issued 15 June 2026 and published on Lancashire County Council News (checked against the live page on 14 October 2026). 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. Both are public: the statement via Lancashire County Council News, and the report itself via Wyre Council.
Status, 28 September 2026: we have asked Lancashire County Council, by Freedom of Information request, for the figures behind this assessment: observed and expected cases, standardised incidence ratios and confidence intervals for every area and every cancer screened, and the comparison populations used in the report’s second stage, with the rates and ratios calculated against them, which the report gives as statements and charts (Technical Appendices 2 and 4) but not as figures. A reply is due by 26 October 2026. Open questions
Corrected 11 October 2026: the confidence-interval explanation. See the changelog.
Corrected 12 October 2026: the two areas in the county’s kidney cancer assessment are now identified by the codes the report uses (E01025596 and E01012665) in place of our own description of where the second one is. See the changelog.