A Cancer Excess Beside the Hillhouse Site, and 'No Concern'
The Lancashire Health Cell's kidney cancer assessment describes its own task, twice, as deciding whether the data indicated 'a population level health concern.' Its answer to that specific question was no. The same report also names a statistically significant excess of kidney cancer cases in the neighbourhood immediately south-east of the Hillhouse site. This piece sets out what the population-level framing covers, and what it doesn't, using the report's own numbers.
From Lancashire’s Health Cell kidney-cancer report on the Hillhouse area.
This is not a claim that PFOA caused any cancer recorded in this data. The report does not make that claim, and neither do we. It is a description of what the report’s own chosen framing includes and excludes, set against the figures the same report publishes, on kidney cancer rates around the AGC Chemicals Europe (formerly ICI) plant at Hillhouse, Thornton-Cleveleys.
The Lancashire Health Cell was asked one specific question, and it answered that question, in its own words, twice. It also published a second finding, elsewhere in the same document, that the first answer does not cover.
The Health Cell set its own remit, and answered exactly what it was asked.
The Lancashire County Council Health Cell’s kidney cancer assessment states its own remit in a specific way. In its executive summary, it says the Director of Public Health convened the Health Cell “to consider whether there were any population level health concerns requiring further assessment.” In its conclusion, it repeats the same frame: the assessment “was undertaken to consider whether available NDRS data indicated a population level health concern requiring further investigation.”
That is a population-level question, asked and answered in the report’s own words. It is worth being precise about what that means, and what it does not automatically settle.
What “population level” covers
A population-level question looks at the pattern across the whole study population, the area within 5km of the site, taken as a whole, over 2003 to 2022. Answering it means comparing overall rates, looking for a consistent gradient (a trend that rises or falls smoothly with distance from the site) across the wider area, and checking whether small-area results, taken together, add up to a pattern at that wider scale.
The report’s own screening did exactly this, across a wide area and multiple cancer types, and concluded there was “no consistent spatial or temporal patterns” across the area as a whole, and “no evidence of an increasing gradient of risk in relation to proximity to the site.”
The same report also names one neighbourhood, and one number.
The same report, in the same assessment, also reports a specific, named result for one small area. LSOA E01025596 (a small statistical area, similar to a neighbourhood), immediately south-east of the site, recorded 14 kidney cancer cases against 6 expected, over 2003 to 2022. The standardised incidence ratio (SIR), where 100 would mean exactly as many cases as expected, was 218, more than double the expected number, with a 95% confidence interval (the range the true figure most likely falls within) of 119 to 367. A second area, in north Blackpool, recorded 17 cases against 9 expected, SIR 181, CI 106 to 290.
The report itself calls both of these results statistically significant, meaning more cases than chance alone would easily explain. It states plainly: “these two LSOA were deemed to be statistically significant by the Health Cell.” Confidence intervals are the report’s own test for whether a difference from the expected rate is likely to be real or down to chance: if the range stays entirely above or below 100, meaning even at its least extreme point the difference stays above the expected level, the report says, the difference is considered meaningful. Both intervals here sit entirely above 100.
We are not saying the wider “no” is wrong. We are saying it isn’t the same question as the “yes” a page later.
A population-level question, is there a pattern across the whole area, and a small-area question, is the rate in this specific neighbourhood higher than expected by more than chance would predict, are not the same question. A “no” to the first does not automatically supply an answer to the second. This report answers both, in the same pages: no consistent pattern across the wider population, and a statistically significant excess in the one small area closest to the site.
The report gives its own reasons for not treating the small-area result as a confirmed cluster: the numbers are small and therefore unstable, the screening tested many cancers and areas at once so some significant results are expected by chance alone, and there is no gradient of decreasing incidence with distance from the site. These are stated, disclosed reasons, set out in the report’s own Limitations section, and they are legitimate considerations in cluster epidemiology. Whether they are sufficient to close the specific, named, statistically significant result in E01025596 is a separate question from whether they answer the wider population-level one.
What this is not
This is not a claim that PFOA caused the cancers recorded in E01025596. The report itself did not attempt to establish that, and neither does this piece. It is a description of what the report’s own chosen framing, “a population level health concern,” includes and excludes, set against the numbers the same report published for one small area.
The question this leaves open is narrow. When a report frames its remit at population level and reaches a population-level conclusion, what happens to a specific, statistically significant, area-level result that the same document reports in full?
We are asking this openly, and putting it directly to the Health Cell. Any response will be published here.
How we know what we know
Everything above comes from one public document: 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, drawing on National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) cancer registration data for 2003 to 2022. The remit is stated in its Executive Summary and repeated in its Conclusion. The population-level screening result is in its Results section. The two named small-area figures, LSOA E01025596 and the north Blackpool comparator, including the “statistically significant” finding, are also in the report’s own Results section. We have quoted these directly; the only arithmetic is confirming that both confidence intervals sit above 100.