HTV Wales’ Wales This Week programme was shortlisted as a finalist in the current affairs category of this year's Celtic Film and TV Festival, in Belfast.

The reporting team, which included James Stewart and Paddy French, had won the Current Affairs Award last year in Brittany, with an investigation of who had made a financial killing out of the foot and mouth crisis.

Producer James Stewart describes the 2003 entry.


The programme shook Wales by revealing the scale of the environmental scandal surrounding a rubbish tip in the Rhondda Valley. The site had been controversial for years and had been blamed for causing serious health problems in the surrounding communities.

In 1995, Wales This Week had broadcast the first evidence that serious environmental problems were likely to erupt at the massive tip, which had been built on top of a mountain with European funding. That programme revealed that industrial waste was being tipped along with household rubbish – creating a toxic timebomb.

The new programme showed how the warnings of six years earlier had been ignored – with disastrous consequences. The National Assembly had appointed its first-ever Special Investigator to discover what had gone wrong. Wales This Week obtained a copy of his draft report and revealed his damning indictments of the process, which had allowed the tip to be established – and to continue operating.

The programme revealed allegations of a mass clear out of files at the previous council, which had built and operated the tip. It asked serious questions about the use of EU money and reported the Investigator’s belief that a fraud investigation might be needed into the finances of the company involved.

But Wales This Week also told the story of a community fighting against bureaucracy in defence of its health – and of the lonely whistle-blower whose warnings were ignored and who lost his job for speaking out on television.