Mining: Pollution

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich, to thank very sincerely the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for securing this important debate and essentially to say that I agree with pretty well everything that has been said. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, set out very clearly for us the absolute horror and tragedy of Kabwe. In preparing for this debate, I found out about the FCDO action mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hain. I would like to say that I was surprised, but I am afraid I was not. It is very concerning, and there are serious questions. I hope we will hear some answers from the Minister.

I am not going to repeat the tale so powerfully presented to us by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, about Kabwe, the world’s most toxic town, but we are primarily talking about the actions of Anglo American. It is, I am afraid, a company now notorious in history. It is facing calls for accountability in South Africa, Peru and Chile, as well as in Zambia. In Chile, its actions have led to the irreversible destruction of glaciers, and that has compounded water scarcity issues in Peru. Local agriculture and indigenous ways of life have been endangered.

Of course, it is not just one company; we are talking about a systemic problem with an industry with a terrible track record. I am going to make two arguments for why we need to see urgent action from the Government on cleaning up colonial legacies and looking towards the present and the future. There are normative arguments. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, spoke about doing the moral thing, the right thing, but I will make some practical arguments about why it is in the interests of our health and security to ensure that we have a clean-up and do not make further messes. This toxic legacy of colonialism has real impacts on our health and security today.

I note that that the UK has endorsed the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, but it has failed to ensure that British companies are complying with them. There has been great concern about the critical minerals strategy released in November, which has attracted criticism from communities around the world as well as from non-governmental organisations. We are talking about signing several critical mineral partnerships and agreements with nine countries, including Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and South Africa. There are real concerns attached to those agreements. Communities living on the front lines have warned that the actions associated with British government action will have destructive environmental and human health impacts.

Eric Mokuoa of the Bench Marks Foundation in South Africa said that the British action is going to

“fuel social and environmental injustices across global supply chains”.

That is why I am very happy to associate the Green Party, as I have before, with the call for a business, human rights and environment Act, as has been called for by the Corporate Justice Coalition of more than 40 organisations across the UK. We have to not keep making the same mistakes as we have made again and again over the centuries.

I also note a briefing that I received from Spotlight on Corruption, the London Mining Network and Culture Unstained about the Adani Group, which is the world’s largest private coal developer, associated with huge problems with pollution, particularly in India, violent displacement of indigenous communities and, in Australia, serious ecological harms to indigenous sites and delicate ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef. That, of course, is not a colonial company, but the British links are very large and very clear. UK banks Barclays and Standard Chartered arranged in March 2024 a $409 million bond issue for Adani Green Energy, which is a publicly traded company listed in India, but Adani Energy Holdings Ltd is registered in the UK. I note also that there are considerable questions about the financial arrangements of the Adani Group.

That brings me to a broader point about how mining pollution is often physical, but pollution is also often connected to corruption, in terms of theft from local communities and theft from nations, and these are all interrelated. Those are the moral arguments, but I come now to the practical arguments.

I am going to raise an issue that I am sure will surprise some noble Lords. No, I have not picked up the wrong page from another speech. I am going to raise the issue of antimicrobial resistance. There is definite evidence for mining activity and sites being associated with elevated levels of antimicrobial resistance. We come to the point that we learned during Covid that no one is safe until everyone is safe from infectious diseases. Public health is a global issue, and antimicrobial resistance essentially threatens the health of us all: it threatens the survival of modern medicine.

I go first to a study from the journal Environmental Pollution in 2022, about antibiotic-resistant bacteria and antibiotic-resistant genes in a uranium mine. This is a study from China. What you are looking at is heavy metals co-selecting for antibiotic resistance. Essentially, if you think about this, the organism gets a threat to its own health. It boosts up its own defences, and those defences can work both against heavy metals and against antibiotics. That was work in China, and that was also citing some work done with two iron ore mines and a lead/zinc mine in Iran, where they found elevated AMR.

If we want to look at our own colonial legacy, there is a very interesting paper put out by researchers from Newcastle University and IIT Delhi, looking at urban rivers in the UK and India. In our own River Tyne, there are elevated levels of AMR associated with historic mining and industrial activity, and the same thing was found in India. We do not know very much about this yet, but everywhere we look we find what we expect to find. Those AMR genes and AMR organisms do not stay in those places: they move.

Another study, not on heavy metals or on mining directly, came out last month on PFAS, the forever chemicals, which showed how the seafood trade is actually spreading PFAS around the world. From areas of hotspots of PFAS, the seafood is then exported to other places and eaten. I have no doubt that we are going to see the same sort of thing happening with heavy metal- and mining-related pollution.

To conclude, we need to think very hard about what we are doing now. We need to acknowledge that every form of mining is going to have a deleterious environmental impact. We need to minimise that, but we also need to think about what we are mining these materials for, and what they are being used for. This is a small plea for mindful mining: for not trashing more of this fragile planet and not causing damage that we do not need to cause.