Exposing Britain’s Social Evils
Ria is a reporter for ITV News London. She aims to take people on a journey of deeper understanding regarding youth violence. Ria believes that capturing both the darkness and light within people’s experiences is a journalistic imperative. She feels solution-focused reporting is vital – that there must always be room for hope.
Her shortlisted pieces are:
The stories are the work of the Liberty Investigates team – Eleanor Rose, investigations editor, and Aaron Walawalkar, Jessica Purkiss and Mirren Gidda, investigative journalists – with Mark Townsend, home affairs editor of the Observer.
Liberty Investigates is an editorially independent journalism unit based at the human rights organisation Liberty. It aims to expose injustice through rigorous and collaborative investigative journalism. It launched in April 2020.
Their shortlisted pieces are:
Noel Titheradge is a senior investigative journalist for BBC News based in London. He focuses on uncovering failings in institutional care, abuses of power and social injustices. A former producer at Panorama, he writes long reads and produces and directs documentaries.
Rianna Croxford is an investigations correspondent for BBC News. Based in London, she specialises in investigating abuses of power in politics and minority communities. She became the corporation’s youngest national correspondent when she was just 25-years-old.
Their shortlisted pieces are:
David Conn is investigations correspondent at The Guardian and the author of several books. He has been writing for 25 years about the Hillsborough disaster, highlighting and exposing the injustices perpetrated afterwards by the police and English legal system, and covering the bereaved families’ and survivors’ relentless campaign for justice.
His shortlisted pieces are:
Samuel Lovett is a senior news correspondent at The Independent. He covers a range of beats, with a particular focus on health and science. As a former science correspondent, he extensively covered the pandemic and investigated various aspects of the UK’s response to Covid-19, as well as its wider impacts on society.
His shortlisted piece is:
Patrick Strudwick is a Special Correspondent for the i paper, a former LGBT editor of BuzzFeed News, and for 13 years has been exposing conversion therapy. His original undercover investigation, in which he subjected himself to the “treatment”, paved the way to the proposed ban, and more recently he’s revealed how corrective rape is taking place on British soil.
His shortlisted pieces are:
Hidden Homicides was reported by Louise Tickle, an award-winning journalist with expertise on domestic abuse and child protection. Additional reporting was by Claudia Williams and data journalist Patricia Clarke. The producer was Matt Russell, and original music was by Tom Kinsella. The editor and executive producer was Basia Cummings.
Their shortlisted entries are:
Their shortlisted entries are:
Yvonne Roberts is the former Chief leader writer of The Observer, and the first political writer in residence at Sussex University. She is a Fellow of the Young Foundation. She has written several non-fiction books and novels, worked in current affairs television and has written for most of the broadsheets as a feature writer, interviewer, investigative journalist and columnist.
Her shortlisted pieces are:
Ed Thomas is a Special Correspondent at BBC News. His reporting inside Wandsworth Prison and the inequality exposed by Covid won Royal Television Society awards in 2017 and 2022. His work often focuses on communities and people struggling to be heard in modern Britain and his extended reports feature on the BBC News at Ten and BBC online. Over the past 12 months Ed, with picture correspondent Phill Edwards and Senior Producer Lou Martin spent months in Burnley to witness the impact of the pandemic on the poorest, their reporting was an unflinching look at the lives of those in the most deprived areas of England.
His shortlisted pieces are:
Annabel Deas is an investigative journalist at BBC Radio 5 Live based in Salford. In 2018 she was awarded funding by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to travel to the US to research best practice for telling the stories of marginalised people.
Deas writes: “Hope High is a 7 part podcast documenting the year I spent with a community in Huddersfield where a number of children were being exploited by county lines drug dealers. I made the podcast after being frustrated by news reports describing children involved in drug or knife crime as being “in a gang”. Children are not ‘gangsters’ and I wanted to discover the real reason why some children were selling drugs and carrying weapons. I worked closely with a secondary school where I got to know a number of pupils who were being exploited by county lines gangs. I spent a long time in the community so I could witness events as they unfolded in real time and attempt to understand where the gaps were which led to a small number of children being excluded from school, shot at, selling drugs or in prison. As I was working with vulnerable young people, a podcast was the ideal way of providing anonymity as I could change names and voices. After its release thousands of people contacted the BBC and myself to express thanks for explaining why these issues take place.” (The project is now being taught at A Level and on degree courses and is used as a resource by police and social services across the UK.)
Richard Watson is a correspondent for BBC Newsnight, specialising in investigative work. At the start of his career, Richard covered the first Gulf war. After this he joined the BBC, working for The Money Programme, File on 4, Newsnight and Panorama. He has investigated organised crime, terrorism and miscarriages of justice.
Watson writes: “In December 2019 three black women were brutally attacked in London by a gang of white men. One of the women, a 37-year old from London, was kicked unconscious. The Metropolitan Police categorised the incident as a serious hate crime but failed to search for witnesses or recover CCTV and closed the case without even taking victim statements. She then approached me saying the police had racially profiled them, assuming it was a drugs deal gone wrong. I was reminded of the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and a police investigation hampered by institutional racism. I wondered if similar themes would emerge: she was determined to hold the police to account, and a Newsnight film would give her a powerful voice. I began a detailed investigation. Nearly 30 years on from Stephen Lawrence’s murder, the final film shone a harsh light on police attitudes and exposed multiple failures. The Met referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, apologised to the women and reopened the case. After seeing the Newsnight report, a witness came forward who had filmed the attack on his mobile phone. One of the alleged attackers was arrested and has been charged with racially aggravated assault.”
Tom Kelly is the Daily Mail’s Investigations Editor, Susie Coen is the Assistant Investigations Editor and Sophie Borland is the Health Editor.
“In a string of investigations, we revealed the devastating scale of COVID-19 in care homes – and the government failings that had enabled it to thrive. We exposed how the dire shortages of PPE meant carers were too terrified to work, how major chains ravaged by the disease had been denied tests – despite government claims these had started – and how care homes were being forced to play ‘Russian roulette’ with helpless residents’ lives after the Government ordered them to accept hospital patients with suspected coronavirus. Early in the outbreak we discovered that industry experts calculated the ‘hidden epidemic’ of the virus in care homes had already claimed 4,000 lives, even as government figures said the figure was just 217. Piers Morgan used our splash to confront Care Minister Helen Whately live on TV about the scandal. Our exposes had an immediate impact. Matt Hancock pledged all care home residents and patients released into them from hospitals would be tested if they showed symptoms and launched a new supply network to help get PPE to care home staff. We later revealed how care homes were were still waiting 15 days for the test, putting residents at new risk.”
Simon Akam (@simonakam) is a contributing writer for 1843 magazine, sister magazine to The Economist. Alongside his work for The Economist, he writes for publications including GQ, Outside and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of The Changing of the Guard: the British Army since 9/11 and co-hosts a writing podcast Always Take Notes.
In his features for 1843 Magazine, Simon Akam has tackled complex stories about Britain’s handling of the pandemic, ranging from the NHS’s battle against the virus, to contact-tracers in Yorkshire. The inside story of Britain’s fight against covid-19 is the result of three months following doctors, nurses and paramedics in London as they fought the most devastating pandemic for a century. This is the untold story of what it felt like to be on the front-line: the chaos, the fear, even the exhilaration of health-care workers as they struggled to manage this most unpredictable disease. In ‘On the hunt with Yorkshire’s virus-detectives’, Simon travelled to northern England to embed with a team of local coronavirus contact-tracers. As the UK’s national system buckled under the resurgence of coronavirus, Simon investigated the system’s shortcomings, and explored whether local track-and-trace schemes offered a fix.
In March 2020, The New York Times began the first comprehensive investigation into the UK government’s flawed response to the surge in domestic abuse under lockdown, interviewing more than 50 government and police officials, experts, support workers and abuse survivors. The investigation revealed how ministers never prioritised domestic abuse in lockdown planning and failed to deliver promised support to vulnerable people. Through a powerful interactive visualisation, the feature memorialised all 26 women and girls killed by male partners or relatives during the first few months of lockdown and ensured they were remembered as more than a statistic. The team compiled the list of suspected domestic homicides using data from the Counting Dead Women Project and painstakingly verified each case through police and court records, press reports and interviews because the authorities do not centrally collate detailed information on domestic homicides.
Jane Bradley is the UK investigative correspondent for The New York Times. She is based in London where she focuses on uncovering abuses of power, social injustices and financial crime and corruption. Amanda Taub is a London-based news columnist and reporter for The New York Times, focusing on how gender, race and identity shape global events.
Haroon Siddique is a senior reporter at the Guardian, where he has worked since 2007. Before joining the Guardian, he worked at the Ham&High series of local papers in north London, where he began his journalistic in 2004.
Siddique writes: “Across a series of stories, my intention was to highlight the negative outcomes of black people at the hands of the Met police, but also the reasons for it, at a time when it was one of the key issues driving Black Lives Matter protests. My first submission made use of innovative interactive modelling to call into doubt the findings of the police watchdog (IOPC) inquiry – and inquest – into the death of Mark Duggan. The police shooting of Duggan is one of the most contentious cases of recent years – it triggered riots and was highlighted by BLM protesters last year. The innovative spatial reconstruction tools invited the reader to examine the shooting from different perspectives to enable them to fully understand the doubts which have been cast on the official version of events. In showing how the Met has been using software, which its own creator has said can aid racial profiling, the second article in my submission sought to examine how discrimination may have become embedded in the force. Finally, my third article showed how this criminalisation of black people can mentally scar them and affect their perception of police, which then gets passed down from generation to generation.”
“The story of how poor policy helped coronavirus rip through some of England’s poorest Northern communities did not begin with the discovery of Covid-19. Its prologue was written during decades of central failures to properly serve, fund or listen to those places. From Manchester we predicted the consequences even as policies were landing, heavily, from hundreds of miles away: from the perversity of hollow, monolithic central systems to the hoarding of vital information within them and the prioritising of rhetoric over experience. We were the first to query local lockdown policies that failed to define either ‘local’ or ‘lockdown’. Through a long Covid summer, we tried to explain how life in Greater Manchester was meant to be lived, as Parliament lapsed into recess, ministers changed our rules day by day and the virus bubbled endemically in our poorest populations, outside of the national spotlight. Autumn’s showdown may have shocked government but it didn’t surprise us. A year on, the North West has recorded the highest death rates in the country. But behind those numbers sit older, deeper inequality and neglect that will take far longer to address than Covid-19 itself.”
For a year, Emma Youle carried out interviews with two families living in temporary homeless housing for her special two-part investigation for HuffPost UK. Her reporting focuses on the experience of living in one room, with access to shared kitchens and bathrooms. Because these families are housed, and not in public view like rough sleepers, conditions in this type of homeless accommodation are often hidden. The reporting spotlights the severe overcrowding they face and the toll it takes on mental health. Their stories are also documented through the pandemic, to track its impact on some of the UK’s most vulnerable households. In the second part of the investigation, Emma explored the wider housing crisis and analysed government data to reveal how it deepened sharply in the early months of the pandemic.
Emma Youle is an award-winning investigative journalist who worked for regional newspapers before joining HuffPost UK as special correspondent. She has covered stories including the contaminated blood scandal, the housing crisis, historic child abuse, and won the Private Eye Paul Foot Award 2017 for her reporting exposing conditions inside homeless hostels.