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BBC Radio 4

News-making original journalism documentary series, investigating stories at home and abroad.

File on 4

The BBC's religion editor Aleem Maqbool hears from sexual abuse victims who say they were let down by senior church leaders for decades. Priest David Tudor was allowed to continue working within the Church of England - despite widespread concerns about his behaviour. Now there are calls for the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell to resign over his handling of the case. He is due to take temporary charge of the church in the New Year following the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. The Church of England says File on 4's investigation into the case of David Tudor has 'revealed a catalogue of past safeguarding decisions, that allowed someone who was considered a risk in the 1980s to return to ministry in the 1990s.' This, they say, should never have happened.

Reporter: Aleem Maqbool
Producers: Steve Swann and Hayley Mortimer
Technical producer: Craig Boardman
Production coordinator: Tim Fernley
Editor: Carl Johnston

The abuse survivors calling on archbishop of York to resign

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

Bad Medicine: Inside the hospital trust at centre of a police investigation

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.

Cannabis Kids: The parents breaking the law to help their children with epilepsy

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

Abramovich, the Yachts and the Tax Dodge

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

Generation K: Kids on Ketamine

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

Locked up: Woman held in mental health facility for 45 years

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.

Femicide

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

The Tyre Scandal

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

Anatomy of a Firetrap

The story of Gisele Pelicot shocked the world. For almost a decade, the 72-year-old French grandmother’s husband Dominique secretly sedated her with sleeping pills and anxiety medication and raped her. He invited fifty other men to rape her too - documenting the abuse in thousands of photographs and videos. Dominique Pelicot has been jailed for 20 years. But Gisele is not alone. 

One British woman, Kate (not her real name) has told File on 4 Investigates how she confronted the unthinkable – that the man she thought loved her, had been secretly drugging and sexually assaulting her for years. He laced her bedtime cup of tea with medication so he could commit his crimes in secret.
Kate talks to reporter Jane Deith about what it’s like to discover you’re married to a monster. Kate’s children describe the devastating impact on learning their father was a rapist. 

File on 4 investigates hears from the police detective who built the case against Kate’s now ex-husband, and how he almost avoided being brought to justice after the Crown Prosecution Service initially said there wasn’t enough evidence to put him on trial. It was left to Kate to fight the system to get justice – and keep herself safe.

File on 4 Investgates discovers domestic spiking is disturbingly common in cases of domestic abuse. One academic has coined the term ‘chemical control ’ to describe the administration of medication to physically subdue women. Unlike physical violence, spiking may leave no trace and hence go unnoticed by victims, the police, doctors, and social workers.

A new named offence of spiking is soon to be introduced. But with much of the focus still on spiking in settings like bars and clubs, will it address the threat behind closed doors?

Reporter: Jane Deith 
Producer: Emma Forde 
Technical Producer: Nicky Edwards
Production Coordinator: Tim Fernley
Editor: Carl Johnston

If you've been a victim of sexual abuse or violence, details of help and support are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline

Chemical Control: Drugged and Raped by My Husband

For more than twenty years, Zholia Alemi worked as a psychiatrist for the NHS. She practiced the length and breadth of the country, treating vulnerable patients with dementia, learning disabilities and mental illness. And then she was caught in a lie.
 
Alemi was found guilty of forging a dementia patient’s will. But this deception was only the beginning. From Crowd Network, Doctor of Deception investigates how one woman’s web of lies reveals historic flaws in the system designed to keep patients safe.
 
If you were treated by Zholia Alemi, or have concerns about her practice, there is a support page available on the General Medical Council’s website: https://www.gmc-uk.org/news/news-archive/zholia-alemi---information-for-patients

 
Presenter: Saleyha Ahsan
Producer: Louisa Adams
Technical Producer: Phill Brown
Executive Producer: Samantha Psyk

Doctor of Deception

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