The Council Says No Cancer Cluster and No Link to the Site. Its Own Statement Says It Never Assessed the Cause.

From Lancashire’s Health Cell public update on the Hillhouse kidney-cancer investigation.

Every quotation below is from the Council’s own statement of 15 June 2026, published on news.lancashire.gov.uk.

On 15 June 2026, Lancashire’s multi-agency Health Cell issued a public update on kidney cancer around the AGC (formerly ICI) chemical plant at Hillhouse, Thornton-Cleveleys. It gives two reassurances. Read to the end, and the statement itself tells you it did not do the work behind them.

The two conclusions

The statement says there is “no evidence of a kidney cancer cluster and no indication of a link to environmental contamination,” and “no alignment between cancer cases and environmental data such as soil contamination or air dispersion patterns.”

To an ordinary reader, that is a clean bill on both counts: no cluster, and nothing to do with the site.

The method, in the same statement

But the statement also says what the environmental data was actually used for. It was used “for contextual comparison only and not to assess individual exposure or causation.”

So the study did not assess the cause. It says so itself. A comparison was made; the causal question was not asked. Yet “no indication of a link” is a causal answer. You cannot rule out a cause you did not investigate. “We looked for a cause and found none” and “we did not look for a cause” are different statements. Only the second is the one this study supports.

And “no cluster” is a conclusion, not a raw finding

The other reassurance, “no evidence of a cluster,” is not a plain count either. A cancer cluster has a settled definition, used by cancer agencies everywhere: more cases of one cancer than expected, in one area, over a set period. In the small area beside the site, the Council’s own figures show 14 kidney cancers where 6 were expected, an excess large enough to be statistically significant. By the definition, that is a cluster. The Council set it aside chiefly because the cases did not fall away with distance from the plant. We set out in full, in a separate piece, why that reasoning does not hold when the contamination itself does not fall away with distance.

The alignment it rules out is there

The statement also says there is “no alignment” between the cancer cases and the soil contamination. On the Environment Agency’s own soil data, there is. The one small area with the significant excess sits to the south-east of the site. The highest soil PFOA reading, 181 micrograms per kilo, is also to the south-east, 700 metres out, higher than the reading nearer the fence. The two point the same way. A comparison that expected the cancers to fade with distance, rather than to line up by direction, would miss it.

We are not saying the site caused these cancers

We are not, and no one has shown it did. What we are saying is narrower. The Council’s public statement claims more than its own method allows: a causal all-clear, “no link to environmental contamination,” from a study that in its own words did “not assess… causation.” And the one alignment it rules out, the cancer excess and the soil contamination both to the south-east, is visible in the Environment Agency’s own figures.

What we are asking

If the question is whether the contamination is linked to the cancer, the honest answer is that no one has assessed it. We are asking the Health Cell to say so plainly, and to carry out, or commission, the causation assessment its own statement says it did not do. We will publish whatever comes back.

How we know: all quotations are from the Multi-Agency Health Cell’s public update, “Update on investigation: Hillhouse Technology Enterprise Zone,” news.lancashire.gov.uk, 15 June 2026. The soil readings and their directions are the WSP Phase 2 and Phase 3 reports for the Environment Agency. The kidney-cancer excess, 14 cases against 6 expected in the area beside the site, is the Health Cell’s own kidney-cancer assessment.