Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and this is a rather unusual episode.

This is the start of a mini-series that we do every year to showcase the journalists who are shortlisted for the Paul Foot Award.

For those of you who don't know, maybe those of you who are new to the podcast,

Paul Foot was an extraordinary campaigning and investigative journalist. He worked at the I for many years,

and he died much too young in 2004. For some years now, the Eye has run the Paul Foot Award in his memory,

and to celebrate the amazing campaigning and investigative journalism

that is still happening across the British media ecosystem, inspired of all the headwinds

against journalism. These brilliant stories are still coming out and they are being written by

some brilliant journalists. So for the next six days, we are going to be speaking once per day

to one of the journalists or teams of

journalists shortlisted for this year's award. Then a week from now, we're going to be having

the winner's announcement, which is going to be live from the award ceremony, and we'll be speaking

to last year's winner and, of course, to Ian, about the awards themselves. So let's dive straight

in and find out who is up for the award on day one.

I'm Laura Hughes and I'm a public policy correspondent at the Financial Times.

And what's the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot Awards this year?

It's about the legacy of lead in multiple forms and how everywhere I looked I found the government

wasn't looking for it, testing for it,

and uncovering the consequences of that, whether that's lead in our food chain,

which is incredibly toxic and poisonous, or in our children, in our houses.

...