Untold: Opus Dei - Toxic Legacy, Ep. 2: Painted Over

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

The UK has some of the oldest housing in the world. Although the use of lead paint is banned, what happens to the paint already on your walls? Laura Hughes speaks to families fighting for answers and the children poisoned by their own homes. She learns that it’s not only old homes that pose a serious risk.For more information on how to live safely with lead, please visit the LEAPP Alliance website.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I want you to imagine something for a moment. You just bought your dream home. Or at least it will be. It's a fixer-upper. But you have a vision. And you're going to do the work yourself. Some of it's structural, but some bits of the house just need TLC.

For example, the paint has seen better days. Some of it's chipping off, flaking into tiny particles. So you get to work repainting. But first, you sand down the walls. The old paint comes off like dust. You don't know it, but you're inhaling tiny particles of lead. After a while, you feel a little more tired than usual, perhaps a bit forgetful.

But you shrug it off stress. Then the symptoms start escalating. The fatigue becomes extreme. But you can't sleep. You have strange abdominal pains. Your mind feels foggy, but you don't know why. Inside your body, lead has been accumulating with every exposure. It's in your bloodstream, then your kidneys, your liver.

It settles in your brain. But your body doesn't know anything is wrong. It thinks the lead is a nutrient. your blood and bones absorb it and your body starts sending signals that it's getting what it needs when in reality the lead is starving your cells

it's like drinking salt water to quench your thirst if you're lucky maybe you catch the lead poisoning early enough if you're lucky maybe you're able to test your home for lead and find out where it's coming from Maybe you'll be lucky enough to remove it safely without further exposure.

But you're not the only house on your block. Lots of your neighbours are renovating their homes too. Generation renovation. They're sanding walls, redoing kitchens, the kinds of things homeowners do. Maybe they start feeling unwell too, bit by bit, exposing themselves to lead. There are millions of homes like this across the UK where the legacy of lead paint and pipes remains and all of them are potentially poisoning people.

For the Financial Times, this is untold. Toxic Legacy, Episode 2, Painted Over. What I found in Wales and Yorkshire took me by surprise. If you had asked me years ago what I knew about lead, I don't know if I could have given you an answer beyond, I don't know, it's an element on the periodic table. And if I hadn't chased this for it, I don't think I'd have ever known. People in the UK think it's a thing of the past. We think of lead as something our grandparents talked about.

But then it sort of faded into the background. I myself never gave lead any thought. That was before I knew it could kill horses and poison farmers on the ground. their own land and contaminate our food supply. The fact that this was happening at all was shocking to me. Wasn't someone responsible for this? Wasn't someone in charge of protecting the public from lead? I spent a lot of my evenings talking to experts and academics from all around the world,

trying to make up for my lack of understanding. And that's when I got a real education. Those experts told me that I was only seeing part of the picture, the tip of the iceberg. They said, if I really wanted to learn the full story of lead exposure in the UK, I needed to look into our houses. The UK has some of the oldest housing in the world, and those old homes were built with lead products. Lead pipes weren't banned until 1969,

and most domestic lead paint wasn't banned until 1992. We know there are at least 5 million houses in England alone that still have lead pipes. And there are no official estimates of how many properties still have lead paint. I started to find families whose DIY work turned into a much bigger undertaking. It was a real surprise. The lead toxicity thing, you know, you think it's a sort of Victorian thing. just don't believe it's something that can happen in this day and age. I spoke to people who bought their dream country home and got to work renovating,

like Lucinda, whose entire family was exposed to lead. And it suddenly dawned on me. Of course, we moved to an old house in the countryside. What was the first thing we did? We started sanding down woodwork and windows and, you know, and yes, we would have all been exposed. I found that, like me, the overall... The overwhelming majority of people living in these homes have no idea they should be thinking about lead,

until the impacts of lead poisoning become unavoidable. In her family, Lucinda's son was most affected. He developed a tick, and he just as if we were slightly losing him, as if, you know, it was like there was this sort of regression going on. I spoke to other families who hired out their home renovation work, but to tradesmen who also didn't know about the dangers of lead. They were dry sanding, big garage doors, and we would just be in the back garden, we'd be playing,

it just didn't feel a threat. And I feel incredibly sort of sad that I didn't have the education to know how dangerous it could be. I learned many parents, like Leila, become self-taught experts in lead, but only once their lives have been changed by it. Otherwise, people don't really get it. So Leila doesn't tend to talk about her three-year-old daughter's lead poisoning.

It's something that people don't understand. And I think a lot of people's first reaction is, oh, but is she better now? And then you have to explain, well, actually this is an ongoing thing. We don't know. We don't know how she'll be in years to come. I spoke to people in cities who are renting property, or living in subsidised housing, at the mercy of how they're. their landlord or housing association deals with lead.

It was agreed by the housing that they would remove everything. So I was like, oh, okay, but this was three years ago. Three years. Did anyone, the housing association, at any point, when they confirm the presence of lead, did they give you any advice on how to mitigate the risks while living in them? No, nothing. No, they just treat me like I'm an irritation. Like I've raised something that they have to look at,

and they have to tick their boxes, but really they don't care. I mean, there's no sense that they care. As I gained a clearer and clearer understanding of the presence of lead, I had this stubborn belief that if people were better educated, they would care. But it's as if we've all just forgotten about lead. You feel like a conspiracy theorist if you talk to people, like neighbours are interested, kind of,

and they're like, oh, you're going on about that, okay. because, you know, something else that will kill you. That's what people have got the attitude of. It's just another thing in our world that's killing us. These mother's stories were a warning. Taking care of your old home might poison you. I thought this was an old problem that we just somehow inherited and never fixed.

But then I met another woman. We're calling her Sophie. We just had had a really bad winter. Both of my children were really poorly and it just felt like we couldn't catch a break. As soon as they got over one thing, another thing came along and we were like, what is going on? Sophie is a young mother.

She and her family live in a classic English village in a newly built home. They still live in that house today. But that first winter after they moved in, well, they just seemed to be sick all the time. It was just a very desperate time for us. My eldest son who's at school was having loads of time off school. My daughter, who was a baby at the time, was having to be on antibiotics. And it was just a gut feeling that something was off balance.

So we started to look at how we could, investigate if anything else was going on. She felt she was running into dead ends with the family's general practitioner, and she was starting to become especially worried about the baby. So Sophie decided to look beyond the National Health Service, to private testing. She turned to alternative medicine. So we sought the help of a naturopath because that was somebody that we thought would look into blood test results, mineral analysis.

The naturopath recommended tests that Sophie's GP hadn't. And by this point, Sophie was prepared to pay whatever it cost to help her children get better. We just thought, let's just do a broad, overall blanket, cover everything, and see if anything comes back. A sheer number of these tests and their unconventional nature, things like a hair mineral analysis. It felt a little overboard.

But then the baby's test results came back. And we were just really shocked when the results came back, to be honest. Her levels were off the scale, so high. We knew that we had a serious problem. The naturopath tests found high lead levels. in the children's hair. And that's where we first discovered, lead was a problem in the children's systems,

but was significantly higher in my daughters than my sons. We are so grateful that we caught this early on. It was just a fluke, to be honest. It was just a little niggle, and we just spoke to the right person who gave us the right advice and the right tests at the time. For Sophie, these test results were proof that something serious was going on with her children. But she still didn't know where the lead exposure was coming from,

and her daughter really needed treatment. So she went back to Square One, the general practitioner. I knew I needed to get my daughter tested with the GP. So straightaway booked an appointment, went that day. Armed with the results from the hair test, she was sure she'd be able to get some sort of advice on her daughter's lead levels and said to the GP that this is what I found and she'd never heard of lead in a child's system being a problem

and she said to me well just go home give her some bottled water and I'm sure in a few weeks it'll be out of her system I knew that wasn't the case and you just feel desperate and you know from researching it the dangers of it, but nobody else seems to be aware of it. Nobody seemed to understand, even the GP didn't understand,

what our concerns were. The GP dismissed the lead levels, as if they weren't worth treating, as if they weren't worth looking into. It's one thing that the doctor hadn't even bothered to test the baby for lead in the first place, but now the baby needed regular screening,

The hair test was only the start. Sophie needed to monitor the baby's lead levels to make sure they were going down. And for that, the baby needed blood testing. So in desperation to get somebody to listen to me to get these correct blood tests done, I rang Public Health England. Sophie went over the GP's head. She started calling the people responsible for all of the UK's public health. The only way I could speak to anybody, there's a button.

I pressed that button and I then went through to the person on the end of the line and explained this is the situation. And then they then put us in contact with our local, I suppose, branch. But we didn't get any support. It was just endless phone calls of have you got this sorted, but no suggestions of how they would help. Sophie found herself passed from person to person. It was a bureaucratic nightmare. It was a big fight through public health, through right into the GP practice, just to try and get her lead levels checked through a blood test. And I just felt like there was nobody to help.

And even Public Health England kept ringing us and saying, have you resolved this problem now? And we kept saying, no, we've not resolved it. We're desperate. But they didn't offer any solutions or any help. They just kept ringing to check, oh, is it dealt with now? It wasn't dealt with. Because Sophie still didn't know how her children were being exposed. She didn't have old lead pipes or paint in her new build home.

And her children's health was dependent on her finding whatever was making them sick and removing it. I had heard stories like Sophie's before, time and time again, about the limitations of our public health system to help people suffering from lead poisoning. But it's this part of Sophie's story that changed the course of my reporting when she found the source of the lead. Remember, Sophie and her family

were living in a regular English village in a modern home, not a Victorian fixer-upper. And they weren't downstream of an old lead mine. Yeah, so the site that our house is on. There was a house here previously, which was quite old, but it burnt down in the 1980s.

So the whole house was completely rebuilt. All the pipework, everything brand new. The source of the lead was a mystery. And given what they'd already been through, it's no surprise that the family ended up having to solve it alone. It was then a process of elimination. It was a huge... a financial burden at the time and it took forever.

It wasn't until the family tested their water, but things started to make sense. So the external water was fine internally in the house. The lead levels were so dangerously high. We knew it had to be coming from inside the house itself. It essentially was the kitchen tap, which was tested, which had been bought brand new from a really well-known plumbing store.

The lead wasn't in the pipes or the plumbing. It was in the physical kitchen tap itself. It was a brand new kitchen product, bought from a local store and installed just recently. And when it had been installed, the plumber had also used lead soldering to fuse it in place. And how long had she been drinking? drinking water from that tap.

Was she born in that house? Yeah. So she was drinking water in bottles, probably from like three months old, if not before. She was drinking the water from the tap, yeah. So a long time, really. First thing in the morning, Sophie filled her baby's bottles from this tap. She didn't know that the water had been sitting in the tap overnight,

absorbing lead. It could have gone on and on and we wouldn't have had a clue to test the tap water and that there were high lead levels. It was just a fluke, to be honest. And I think all of these other families that have got this tap in their house

that are using it to give their children water will not know of the dangers. So that is something that makes me very angry and I wish I could make more people aware of it really. The only thing that stopped things from getting worse for her family is that Sophie wouldn't give up. She knew something was wrong. But over and over again,

she was forced to find the problem and solve it herself. Sophie helped me realise that as a country, we aren't doing enough to prevent lead poisoning. If we can't get proper medical attention, if we can't trust the products sold on our shelves, if we can't take the safety of our homes for granted, whether they're old or new. This is not just a legacy problem.

We are creating a new-led crisis. We are actively making the problem worse. And Sophie's story made it clear is the people who are left with the consequences. After speaking with Sophie, I was ready to turn to UK government officials and find out what they had to. say about all of this. Hello, hi, good afternoon. It's Laura Hughes here from the Financial Times.

I just wanted to see if there was anybody I could speak to, even on background. It's about lead and lead please. Hi, good afternoon. It's Laura Hughes here from the FT. I'm conducting just some research. Hi there, sorry, it's me again. I've just got two follow-up questions off the back of your email. Sorry, it's me again. Hi. Just wondering if you'd had a chance to look at my latest email. It's the one about lead. But I wasn't really good. getting anywhere. By now, I was sure that the majority of people were clearly not aware of the lingering risks of lead in their homes, or the likelihood of their exposure. But the government had to know. There was a paper trail, academic reports, laws on banning lead past decades ago,

and I dug up policy papers about lead from various government agencies. So who was taking responsibility for it. I've never found anybody disagree and say, oh no, that's not a problem. What I find is they say, yes, that's a problem, but it's not our problem. It's somebody else's job. This is Tim Pai. He's one of our country's best resources on lead exposure prevention. But unlike the other experts at the forefront of this issue, he's not an academic.

I came into this area because I was, doing DIY work in my house and I realized what I was doing was quite dangerous. The more I learnt about lead exposure, the worse it seemed. And I so took it on board to try and tell other people. Tim was shocked by how few official resources there were. So he decided to make his own. He co-founded an organisation with other self-made activists who raise awareness about the UK's lead problem.

They're called the LeapenLund. That's the Lead Exposure and Poisoning Prevention Alliance. Throughout my reporting, I frequently turn to the Leap Alliance to fill gaps in my own understanding. And Leap doesn't just inform the public. They're trying to influence the government. They're the ones writing letters and reports to urge officials to face our lead problem. To start, Tim says there just aren't enough public resources. We have NHS 1-1-1, but I've been through that.

There's nothing there about lead poisoning. So you can't go and get help that way. Your doctor may be very dismissive. That's the anecdotal stories we get. So yeah, well, so we could be the source. Yep, it's... Go on. I'm just amateur.

I'm not... I don't have any qualifications. I can only base on what I've learnt and what I've learnt myself. Go on. There's no national hotline for people worried about lead. Instead, they contact Tim. He says the UK has just a few pages on its website, gov.uk, which provides some information on the sources of lead,

but they don't give people full guidance on how to protect themselves. So to be able to provide advice, Tim has to import resources and information from other countries. I try to follow the American standard. In America, they've got a number of programs that make things much better. They're very much more aware. They have a national lead poisoning prevention campaign

run by the centres for disease control and that it seems every city and state have their own local programs. The UK is not the only country that has used lead for generations. We're not the only. country with lead mines and lead paint. And we're not the only country that has needed to eradicate lead exposure on a massive scale.

But we are a country where the problem may be actively getting worse. In America, there is a helpline and a website, so a dedicated phone line. They have a network of laboratories who are accredited for testing for lead, either paint flakes or lead in dust. and if you identify the source, then you can do something about it. And that's what they say in America, the Centre for Disease Control says lead poisoning is 100% preventative. It's almost a broken record at this point,

but it's what's so frustrating for people like Tim. You can prevent lead poisoning. Other countries have figured out ways to do this. But here in the UK, we just don't. don't really talk about it. Not at a local level or the government level. The NHS long-term plan doesn't mention lead exposure at all. The mission statement of the healthy homes and buildings or party parliamentary group, that doesn't mention lead at all. It's not brought to the fore. It's almost like there's an inertia because nobody knows, so nobody

mentions it, so it doesn't get included. So Tim's taken on the difficult position of trying to make people understand. The people who contact the Leap Alliance, they're eager to listen to his advice. They're already concerned for their health. They see lead as a problem they can solve with Tim's help. But when Tim tries to sound the alarm more broadly, he says he receives a mixed response. It's what I call the whisper and scream. That if you say some people, some hear a whisper and go, well,

That's nothing. And other people hear a scream and say, oh my God, that's going to be terrible. It applies to me. I've got to do something. The whisper and scream. I experienced this phenomenon in the hundreds of emails and calls I've had with government officials over the past few years. No one is denying that lead is a risk. But they're whispering about it. It's as if they don't want to cause panic. But the problem won't solve it.

unless we know about it. And with each passing day, it grows. People are being poisoned now. In fact, I've had two inquiries today, both the one with a child who's got an elevated blood lead level and somebody else who's being put into a facility where there is lead paint and the people are very worried about it. As a country, we've created a system that is more centred on avoiding a problem.

than stopping it. My question is, what's the price of doing nothing? That's next episode on Untold. Toxic Legacy. Toxic Legacy is season three of Untold, a Financial Times investigative podcast. It is produced with Goat Rodeo.

The series lead producer is Jay Venables. Our Financial Times audio producer is Purses Love. Reporting by me, Laura Hughes. Writing by me and Jay Venables. Story editing from Megan Ndolski, Ian Enright, Tofer Forges, Persis Love and Rebecca Seidel. Executive producer for the Financial Times is Tofer Forges. Special thanks to Laura Clark.

Executive producers for Goat Rodeo are Ian Enright and Megan Nadolsky. Mixing, editing and sound design by Jay Venables, Ian Enright and Rebecca Seidel. Editorial and production assistants from Rebecca Seidel, Persis Love, Max Johnston, Ethan Plotkin and Misha Frankel Duval. Fact-checking from Laura Hughes, Jay Venables, Simon Greaves and Lucy Baldwin. If you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast, please get in touch at laura.huees at ft.com. Thank you to the many sources who shared their stories with us for this series. For more information and resources talked about in this series, I've left you some links in the show notes.

Please check them out. Thanks for listening.