File on 4 Investigates

Latest Episodes:

Anatomy of a Firetrap May 06, 2025

Show notes

Around the UK, a hidden crisis has been growing over the past eight years.

Since the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, something extraordinary has become clear about many of Britain's high-rise residential buildings. They are nothing like as safe as we had imagined.

In fact, the latest statistics show that more than 5,000 high-rise buildings have faults so serious they pose a risk to life. Clearing this up has quietly become one of the biggest infrastructure challenges of our generation, with a bill totalling £16.6 billion and rising, and a project which could continue for the next 20 years.

Author and housing journalist Peter Apps investigates the building safety crisis through the story of one building which has many of the problems afflicting places across the country.

What is the reality for people living there? Why was it built like this? And with the government's promise of 1.5 million new homes over the next five years, do we risk making the same mistakes again?

Presenter: Peter Apps Producer: Ant Adeane Assistant Producer: May Robson Executive Producer: Anishka Sharma Mix: Mike Woolley

A Reduced Listening production for Radio 4

Hell and High Water: Are we ready for the floods? Apr 29, 2025

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2024 experienced the wettest period since records began and extreme rainfall events are becoming more frequent because of climate change. So what's being done to protect us from flooding - and is it enough? The Government has said it will build 1.5 million new homes by the end of the current parliament - but File on 4 Investigates has discovered that hundreds of thousands of homes have already been built in areas at high risk of flooding. And a measure to protect new properties against flash floods caused by intense rainfall has never been made compulsory - despite being introduced 15 years ago.

Reporter: Adrian Goldberg Producer: Fergus Hewison Technical Producer: James Bradshaw Production co-ordinator: Tim Fernley Editor: Carl Johnston

What’s Happening to Your Vet Bills? Apr 15, 2025

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Pet ownership has rocketed since the covid pandemic, but so have vet prices. In fact, bills have increased by more than 60% in the last ten years. The Competition and Markets Authority is so concerned about the increases it has a launched an investigation into the industry and is due to reveal its findings this year. Datshiane Navanyagam investigates the pet industry and the corporate takeover of high street vets – talking to whistleblowers about how they feel they're being measured on the amount of money they bring in.

Reporter: Datshiane Navanayagam Producers: Jim Booth and Tom Wall Technical Producer: Richard Hannaford Production Coordinator: Tim Fernley Editor: Carl Johnston

The Tyre Scandal Mar 25, 2025

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Every year the UK produces around 50 million tyres for disposal. They’re supposed to be sent for recycling. Instead, big money is being made by diverting tyres to illegal and dangerous 'pyrolysis' plants they're melted down to extract oil and steel. File on 4 Investigates, together with a team of journalists from Source Material, a not-for-profit group specialising in climate and corruption, follow the tyres from the UK to India using tracking devices. The team discovers just how large scale this largely illicit business has become. Earlier this year, a makeshift pyrolysis plant exploded near Mumbai, killing four people. It had been processing tyres from abroad, almost certainly Europe and the UK. Reporter Paul Kenyon confronts a tyre trader in the north of England who admits to shipping his waste tyres to India for pyrolysis.

Reporter: Paul Kenyon Producer: Anna Meisel Technical producer: Craig Boardman Production coordinator: Tim Fernley Editor: Carl Johnston

Femicide Mar 11, 2025

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At least two women are murdered every week in the UK in a domestic abuse situation. Newspapers often call it a crime of passion. ‘He lost control’. But what if that’s not true? What if there was a blueprint that, if recognised, could save a woman’s life?

The Homicide Timeline contains eight stages that track the escalation of a controlling relationship from before a couple even meet right up to homicide. Families often say “I wish I’d known”. This programme will tell them the signs to look out for so that they do know, and can stop it.

Locked up: Woman held in mental health facility for 45 years Mar 04, 2025

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File on 4 Investigates tells the story of Kasibba – a woman locked up as a schoolgirl in a mental health hospital. She languished there for 45 years - despite not being mentally ill. She was finally freed two years ago after the intervention of a rookie psychologist. Reporter Carolyn Atkinson asks why so many autistic people and/or those with a learning disability, including children, are still locked up and why successive governments have failed to meet their promises to move people from hospital to home.

Reporter: Carolyn Atkinson Producer: Ben Robinson Technical Producer: Nicky Edwards Production Coordinator: Tim Fernley Editor: Carl Johnston

Generation K: Kids on Ketamine Feb 25, 2025

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File on 4 Investigates goes to Burnley in Lancashire to meet the young people and their families as they grapple with a ketamine epidemic. Used in human and veterinary medicine as an anaesthetic, experts say the drug is being used by increasing numbers of young people because it's cheap, easy to obtain and fashionable. But the health implications can be catastrophic - even fatal. It can cause mental health problems and irreversible bladder and kidney damage. Reporter Jane Deith hears from the Burnley vicar who has had to set up a support group for desperate parents; families whose children have experienced addiction, grooming, abuse and ill health and a young man who is being forced to undergo gruelling medical treatment for what’s known as “ketamine bladder”.

Reporter: Jane Deith Producers: Jill Collins and Nicola Dowling Technical producer: Richard Hannaford Production coordinator: Tim Fernley Editor: Carl Johnston

Abramovich, the Yachts and the Tax Dodge Jan 28, 2025

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With the billions he made at the expense of Russian taxpayers, Roman Abramovich bought six luxury superyachts over the years. Among them were the 162-metre-long Eclipse, with swimming pools, helipads and a missile defence system - and the Pelorus - sometimes lent to Chelsea footballers.

They could each cost up to one and a half million dollars just to re-fuel. If they’d been declared as being for his own personal use, VAT would have been payable on costs like that. Instead, for more than a decade, tax authorities were led to believe the superyachts were being rented out to commercial customers. Financial investigations correspondent Andy Verity working with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Guardian discovers that the firms renting the boats ultimately belonged to a trust held by - Roman Abramovich. Under the scheme devised for him, the sanctioned oligarch was hiring out his superyachts - to himself. Mr Abramovich has denied either directing or knowing of any deception.

Reporter: Andy Verity Producer: Paul Grant Editor: Richard Vadon

Cannabis Kids: The parents breaking the law to help their children with epilepsy Jan 14, 2025

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Tens of thousands of children and young people across the UK suffer from severe forms of epilepsy which are resistant to treatment. For those with intractable epilepsy the options for treatment are limited and the risk of a catastrophic seizure is very real. But a growing body of evidence has pointed to cannabis having a positive effect on preventing seizures even in people who don't respond to other drugs. In 2018, medicinal cannabis was legalised following a high profile campaign led by parents of children with intractable epilepsy. They hoped the change in the law would lead to the drug becoming widely available on the NHS. But more than six years later File on 4 Investigates has discovered families going to extreme lengths to access a drug they say is keeping their children alive. Reporter Alastair Fee meets families who claim they have been forced to give their children illegal cannabis sourced online and follows others who regularly break the law importing medicine from the Netherlands.

Bad Medicine: Inside the hospital trust at centre of a police investigation Jan 07, 2025

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Michael Buchanan examines why the University Hospitals Sussex NHS trust, once considered one of England’s best, has now got the largest number of patients waiting over 18 months for treatment. On top of this there is a growing police investigation into allegations of poor care.

Rporter: Michael Buchanan Producer: Charlotte Rowles Technical Producer: Richard Hannaford Production Coordinator: Tim Fernley Editor: Richard Vadon