The One Figure Thornton Residents Can't Check
The Phase 3 report's own text points readers to Figure 2 for property-level PFOA results. The figure itself is fully redacted in the public version, most likely for ordinary property-privacy reasons. But the report is not consistent about what it hides, and that inconsistency is worth asking about.
From the Environment Agency’s Phase 3 soil investigation of the Hillhouse site.
Every fact below comes from the public version of the WSP Phase 3 Factual Report, the investigation into PFOA and wider PFAS contamination in soil around the AGC Chemicals Europe site, the former ICI works at Hillhouse, Thornton-Cleveleys, published by Wyre Council: wyre.gov.uk/downloads/file/2452/phase-3-factual-report. Page numbers refer to that PDF, so the underlying page can be checked directly.
The report itself tells you where to look. “The average PFOA concentrations for each property are shown within Figure 2 in Appendix A” (p.30). Turn to Figure 2, and the page is solid black.
The one chart a resident could have checked
Figure 2 is captioned to show property-level average PFOA concentration, the number that would let a resident on the sampling grid find their own garden and compare it with the rest. In the public version of the report, the page it sits on (p.50) carries no chart, no key, no numbers. It is black from edge to edge.
That is very likely for an ordinary reason
Property-level contamination data plotted against individual addresses is personal information. Redacting a figure that could let one household be identified, or compared unfavourably with a named neighbour, is a standard and defensible reason to withhold it from a public release, whatever the underlying results turn out to be. We are not saying this figure was hidden because the numbers were bad. We are saying it was the one chart that would have let a reader check a result against their own home, and it is gone.
But the same report is not consistent about what it hides
A different appendix shows the inconsistency. The contents page lists every appendix by name, Appendix A through Appendix J, except one: Appendix I’s title is blank on the contents page itself (p.7), while every appendix around it, including the property-level Appendix H just before it, is fully labelled. Whatever is being withheld there was judged sensitive enough to redact even the title.
Except it was not withheld consistently. More than sixteen hundred pages later, the running header on that appendix’s own pages is left untouched: “APPENDIX I - GLOSSARY OF TERMS – PROPERTY SUMMARIES” (p.1653), printed at the top of the page in plain type. The same words that were blacked out on the contents page are legible a moment after the reader looks a little further.
Worth noting too: the report’s “About the Authors” page is also fully redacted (p.8 of the file), a solid black box with no name or qualification given for whoever wrote the document. Three separate redactions, in a report that otherwise reads as a careful, methodical document.
We are not saying the results were hidden. We are saying the report doesn’t hide things the same way twice.
None of this is a claim that any concentration result has been concealed, or that residents’ actual test outcomes are being kept from them through Figure 2’s redaction. Property privacy is a legitimate reason to withhold that one figure, and we say so plainly. Our point is narrower and squarely a quality question: a report that redacts a title on one page and prints the same words at the top of another, a few hundred pages later, has not applied a single, checkable standard for what gets blacked out and what doesn’t. For a document this consequential, that is worth explaining.
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
Everything above comes from one public document: the WSP Phase 3 Residential Soils Investigation, published by Wyre Council in March 2026 (link above). The pointer to Figure 2 is in the main findings text, page 30. The redacted figure itself is page 50. The blank appendix title is on the second contents page, page 7. The same appendix’s legible running header is page 1653. The redacted “About the Authors” page is page 8. We opened each page in the file Wyre published and looked at what is, and is not, on it.