The Hillhouse Soil Report's Author Page Is Blacked Out
The Phase 3 report's own 'About the Authors' page is a solid black box in the public version. But the PDF's own file properties, generated automatically and never removed, name an author. That is a disclosure gap worth asking about, not an accusation against the person named.
From the Environment Agency’s Phase 3 soil investigation of the Hillhouse site.
There is no way to find out who wrote this report by reading it. We found a name only by opening the file’s own properties, a different place entirely. Every fact below comes from the public version of the WSP Phase 3 Factual Report, the soil investigation into PFOA and PFAS contamination around the AGC Chemicals Europe (formerly ICI) plant at Hillhouse, Thornton-Cleveleys, published by Wyre Council: wyre.gov.uk/downloads/file/2452/phase-3-factual-report, and from that same PDF file. Page numbers refer to the PDF, so the underlying page can be checked directly.
Open the Phase 3 report and turn to the page headed “About the Authors”. Underneath the heading is a solid black box. Nothing else. No name, no qualification, no role.
The report’s own author page is blank
The page sits eighth in the file Wyre published (its own footer labels it “Page 10 of 66”, the report’s internal count, which starts a little later than the PDF itself). Either way you count it, the content is the same: a heading, a horizontal rule, and then black. Whoever wrote this report, a reader working from the document alone cannot find out who they are, what their qualifications are, or what their relationship to WSP, AGC Chemicals Europe or the Environment Agency might be.
The file itself was never fully cleaned
Every PDF carries a set of properties most readers never open: title, author, the software used to create it. In this file, two of those fields were not redacted. The field labelled “Author” reads “Clayton, Richard”. The field labelled “Creator”, normally the name attached to the word-processing document before it became a PDF, reads the same. Two separate, automatically generated fields, and both landed on the same name. Nobody wrote that name into the visible report. It was left behind in the parts of the file most readers never look at.
We are not saying who wrote this report. We are saying the report will not tell you.
We are not asserting that this metadata identifies the report’s lead technical author, or that it proves anything about how the findings were reached. A file’s properties can reflect whoever last saved a document, not necessarily the person responsible for its content. What we are saying is narrower, and it stands regardless of who Richard Clayton is or was: the one page in this report built for the purpose of telling a reader who wrote it has been blacked out, and the file underneath still carries a name the report itself withheld.
There is no conflict-of-interest statement anywhere in the document
We searched the full report, all 1,762 pages as published, for any declaration of interest, any statement of the author’s professional role, or any note of a relationship to the site, its operator or the regulator commissioning the work. There is none. Not on the blacked-out page. Not anywhere else. A report used to inform a regulatory judgment about contamination on people’s own gardens carries no visible answer to a question readers are entitled to ask of any technical author: who are you, and do you have anything to declare?
We are asking this openly, and putting it directly to WSP and the Environment Agency. Any response will be published here.
How we know what we know
The blacked-out page: the public PDF itself, the eighth page of the file (labelled “Page 10 of 66” in the report’s own running footer). The name: the same PDF’s file properties, the Author and Creator fields, read directly from the document. The absence of a conflict-of-interest statement: a full-text search of the published report. Nothing here required us to open, alter or reconstruct anything. It is what is already in the file Wyre Council put online, read in two different places.