4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2018
⏱️ 28 minutes
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In the latest programme of the monthly series, Mishal Husain introduces dispatches from journalists and writers around the United Kingdom. This month we hear Sima Kotecha's triumphant tale of finally managing to pay off her student loans - except debt can prove a stubborn companion. Lesley Curwen visits a part of Lancashire she has long known which finds itself once more at the centre of media attention. The Fylde coastal plain is where the energy company Cuadrilla has just resumed fracking activities amidst much controversy. But away from the site itself what, she wonders, do local people make of all that's happening? From what claims to be the site of the solution to the UK's future energy needs to one that used to argue the same: Sellafield. On his visit, Theo Leggett sees plenty of rust and weeds at the Cumbrian nuclear plant but also discovers that in this part of northern England which has long struggled for economic take-off there are burgeoning hopes for the future... maybe. With BBC Children in Need's annual fundraising extravaganza just around the corner, Alison Holt tells the story of one teenager in Wales who is coping with an especially demanding medical diagnosis - growing up as HIV-positive - and how one organisation supported by listeners' and viewers' donations seeks to help him and his family. And we travel to Kent with Christine Finn as she unearths a coals-to-Newcastle story about how a lavender farming boom there has - quelle horreur! - managed to succeed in cornering the lucrative French perfume market. But for how long?
Producer: Simon Coates
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0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
0:04.6 | Hello, I'm Michelle Hussein and this is from our home correspondent on BBC Radio 4. |
0:10.8 | Our pieces this time include a visit to Sellafield where the nuclear decommissioning |
0:16.3 | process is underway and it's helping to kick-start other enterprises. We hear one family's experience of living with HIV. We have a |
0:26.4 | correspondent telling us how it feels to finally be able to say she has paid off her |
0:31.6 | student debts. and the French farmers whose lavender oil |
0:36.3 | is now coming not from provance but from Kent. We begin on the flat coastal |
0:41.9 | plain in Lancashire called the Filed, |
0:44.0 | which has again become the focus of media attention, |
0:47.0 | but not for its lush farmland or the attractions of seaside towns. |
0:51.0 | This is where hydraulic fracturing or fracking for shale gas has resumed |
0:56.7 | after long delays and amid much controversy. Leslie Kerwin, who knows the area well, has been exploring local attitudes. |
1:06.0 | The Filed is about to become the centre of fracking in Britain. |
1:10.3 | I grew up around here. |
1:12.1 | Whenever I come back to see family, |
1:13.8 | I drive past noisy protests at the site where the Energy Company Quadriller |
1:18.8 | is now blasting high-pressure jets of water and chemicals deep below the earth to release gas from the |
1:26.2 | shale rock. |
1:28.0 | The argument goes that this will supply the UK with homegrown energy to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of gas. |
1:36.0 | Added to that, fracking would create 74,000 jobs. |
1:41.0 | That was the prediction by then Prime Minister David Cameron five years ago. |
1:46.0 | In fact, every attempt to start drilling has been fought tooth and nail by environmentalists and local groups. Recently, for once, I didn't drive |
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