Netflix’s Toxic Town Is a Battle Cry in Support of Experts and So-Called ‘Red Tape’

Warning: contains finale spoilers for Netflix’s Toxic Town.

“Certain places get inside you, you know?” says Aimee Lou Wood’s character Tracey Taylor in Netflix’s Toxic Town. If Jack Thorne were a less sensitive screenwriter, that line might be seen as a gag in a drama about a group of mothers whose infants were poisoned in utero by dust from a mismanaged industrial waste site. Toxins from the former Corby Steelworks clearly did get inside the women whose babies were born with limb differences as a result.

Toxic Town is a dramatised version of a landmark real-life court case brought against Corby Borough Council for negligence that led to a cluster of birth abnormalities. Starring Wood, Jodie Whittaker, Claudia Jessie and more as the women affected, the four-parter follows them through 14 years from pregnancy to court. There, the women were subjected to humiliating cross-examination that insinuated their own deep-held fear – that they were the ones to blame for what had happened to their kids. Instead, thanks to their work and that of solicitor Des Collins and co., negligence was proven and Corby Borough Council issued a long-awaited apology and financial compensation.

Before that though, the council tried to prove that the toxic dust couldn’t have spread so far as to reach the Corby mothers. They had an equation from a graph in a research paper on the coal industry on their side, but according to the drama (which is based on real events but contains fictional elements – and states as much, as any post-Baby Reindeer Netflix show must), there was a mistake in their maths. A missed-off digit in the council’s equation crumpled their defence. 

That wasn’t the only mismanaged statistic. Earlier, an expert in the children’s legal team spots that an official report denying the existence of a cluster of babies born with limb differences in Corby has made an error. The report’s birth stats had been double-counted, first counting birth abnormalities in North Northamptonshire including Corby, and then comparing that figure to abnormalities in Corby alone. It threw off the statistical field. Counted correctly, the rate of births with limb differences in Corby is shown to be three times higher than the national average. That, in addition to witness testimony, leads to the case being found in the children’s favour.

One of the witnesses on whom much rests in the TV drama is a former council engineer and whistleblower. In episode one, we see his concerns dismissed about uncovered lorries transporting toxic soil and not using the required wheel washing equipment. He leaks tender paperwork showing a value of £0 next to the sections for “Health and Safety” and “PPE”. It’s the way it has to work, he’s told by a colleague. If you want to move forward, you have to cut red tape.

That’s a popular sentiment, judging by its repeated use by the UK’s current government, during the Brexit debate, and before. ‘It’s health and safety gone mad.’ “People in this country have had enough of experts”. Red tape stands in the way of progress…

Progress, or profits? Toxic Town knows which, and tells its urgent story through empathy-machine actors like Jodie Whittaker and Aimee-Lou Wood, to make sure its audience notices the difference. Stats are mishandled and misapplied. An expert is ignored and mocked. Councillors are shown in cahoots with business owners to whom they grant expensive contracts. Public money lines private pockets and the dire human cost of corner cutting is shown as a result. It all starts to feel depressingly familiar. 

It’s no coincidence that Toxic Town writer Jack Thorne was also behind 2021 Covid drama Help, starring Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham – more actors who breathe empathy in and out like it’s their own planetary atmosphere. The two dramas tell very different true stories about the same things: profits being put before responsibility, experts urging caution being dismissed as killjoy nerds, and lies being told at the highest level, to the detriment of vulnerable people. 

Sky’s Chernobyl did the same. So did the BBC’s The Salisbury Poisonings and ITV’s Mr Bates Vs the Post Office. And so, inevitably, will Peter Kosminsky’s forthcoming BBC three-part drama on the Grenfell Tower fire. These dramas exist to counter the perfidious narrative that so-called ‘red tape’ and health and safety regulations only exist to spoil everybody’s good time. They’re here to show that without it, and without experts – the epidemiologists and mathematicians who fact-checked the distorted arguments used to deny the people of Corby the truth – there’s nothing to protect us from venal profiteers willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and wellbeing for the sake of a paycheque. 

All episodes of Toxic Town are available to stream now on Netflix.

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