“One teacher in particular showed no sense of understanding Charlie’s problems and would actually be sarcastic with him,” recalls his mother Michelle. “When I tried to explain what his problems were, the teacher wouldn’t have it. They just said he was naughty.”

There was nothing Michelle could do to persuade, cajole or bribe the boy out the door — and nine years old is far beyond the point of physical coercion. Besides, which parent would force their child to a place where they were screaming they didn’t feel safe?

Such tearful, exasperated negotiations are now part of the morning routine in hundreds of thousands of British homes. More than one in five children is now persistently absent from school, according to the Department for Education. In 2022-23, one in 50 pupils missed over half of the school year — the figure has grown by 150% since the Covid pandemic. This is a national crisis playing out in our overcrowded, over-regimented, under-resourced schools that no amount of blaming and shaming seems able to abate.

For this is not — as Charlie’s teacher told his mother — a case of children being “naughty”. The vast majority of the absent children (92% according to one study) have special educational needs or disabilities (SEND). For vast numbers of neurodivergent and autistic children in particular, school has become a hostile environment — a place they feel unable simply to be, let alone learn, let alone thrive. Research by the National Autistic Society has found that only one in four autistic students feels happy at school. Many SEND pupils share stories of being traumatised. “By the age of 16, I was self-harming just to get through the day,” is how the trustee of one autism charity put it. Charlie would go on to threaten suicide — describing in detail to his mother how he intended to go about it.

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The academic term for this is “school distress”. A recent Newcastle University study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, describes it as a symptom of a “systemic failure” of the education system to meet the needs of young people — in effect, a denial of their legal right to education. As the study makes clear, the effects on the entire family are catastrophic, with parents often sliding into debt as they are forced to give up careers to look after their distressed children. Meanwhile, they are threatened, shamed, disbelieved and gaslit by the authorities. “I had suspected the results might be bleak, but just how bleak was really shocking,’” says Dr Sinéad Mullalley, a lecturer in neuropsychology at Newcastle University, who led the recent study into the crisis. Asked to measure the mental health effects of school refusal in comparison with 17 other traumatic life events, such as serious personal injury or sexual assault, the parents ranked it as the second-most traumatic. Only the death of a child or spouse was worse.

It is compounded by a total lack of understanding from the authorities. As Charlie’s absenteeism worsened, Michelle was called into school for a meeting with his class teacher, an educational psychologist, a specialist autism teacher, the school’s deputy head, class teacher, a speech and language therapist and a pediatrician. It was the pediatrician who told Michelle that the fact that Charlie couldn’t cope in class was essentially her fault. “She said: ‘I find lots of parents just want a label for their children to cover the fact that they’re not good at parenting.’”

Michelle was, by this point, used to criticism. “When you have a child with autism and you have difficulties getting them to go to school — for all sorts of valid reasons — you are often disbelieved, blamed, shamed and made to feel guilty,” she tells me. But to have the careless comment come from a pediatrician was actually painful.

The broader picture is that Britain’s school children are not OK. Since 2010, mental health conditions have mushroomed among Britain’s young people to the point that it is no exaggeration to talk of a crisis. According to the Department for Education, more than 1.6 million pupils in England now have special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), an increase of 101,000 since 2023.

To some extent, these increases are explained by an increased willingness to share experiences as well as efforts to destigmatize mental health. But this has led to new problems: online questionnaires that diagnose just about everyone with a smartphone with ADHD; common adolescent issues pathologized as conditions needing labels and treatment; and an ever-greater number of parents and children competing over ever-diminishing resources.

It has also produced its own backlash: witness the current anxieties about “overdiagnosis” and fears of sharp-elbowed middle-class parents seeking to gain extra exam time for their darlings. None of which provides any succor to families with genuine needs — who now face the additional risk of being assumed to be somehow gaming the system. Meanwhile, the Government’s attempts to improve the woeful attendance figures have shown an almost comical level of misunderstanding. Last year, an advert featured a laughing schoolgirl and the caption “This morning, she was worried about school… but look at her now!” It was widely criticized by those involved. “I can’t begin to say how angry this makes me feel. It is making parents feel guilty. We would love our children to be able to attend school,” one parent told the BBC.

The Newcastle study makes for bleak reading. Based on extensive interviews with hundreds of parents suffering from school distress, it is the first investigation into the effects on parents as well as children. Over half of the parents developed new mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety and sleeplessness, following the onset of their child’s school distress. Almost 79% said they felt they had not been believed by school staff when raising concerns about their child, and a further 47% said they had felt “threatened or vulnerable” while trying to discuss problems with a member of school staff. “This isn’t trivial,” says Dr Mullaley “These parents are dealing with a very distressed child, but they’re also dealing with the impact of that on all aspects of their life. They’re struggling financially in an awful lot of cases, and their mental health is declining as a consequence.”

It is the dismissal of the issue that Mullalley feels is most concerning. “There is such a power imbalance,” she says. “They are threatened with fines and court action and disempowered by the actions of professionals surrounding their child.” The cases can quickly escalate: social services become involved; child protection assessments are undertaken; parents soon find their own motives questioned. “That is such a profound threat.”

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In Michelle and Charlie’s case, the situation became worse before it became better. “At the beginning, there is self-doubt and you think that the professionals must be right, and you question everything you do,” says Michelle. “But then there is frustration, because there are so many professionals involved in your child’s life, but they don’t talk to each other, and often you don’t get to find out about decisions made about your child.”

Covid, and then a transfer to a special school, only seemed to make matters more dire. Charlie became withdrawn and dysregulated, lost worrying amounts of weight and threatened suicide on several occasions. “I have a therapeutic background and I know that when a person is serious, they can tell you how they’re going to do it,” says Michelle. “That was really upsetting – that, and the fact that when he started to lose weight, I had no control over it. I couldn’t make him eat, and I couldn’t keep him safe… And all the time you feel people are judging you. Is he being difficult or are you being soft?”

The costs are not only borne by parents — who are in many cases thrust into full-time care roles. When a child is in difficulties, their parents may apply for an education, health and care plan (EHCP) assessment from their local authority. This can attract extra funding and practical support. However, the number of parents applying for an EHCP has doubled during the past eight years — and now half a million pupils have one in place. Councils’ budget deficits accrued on SEND spending are expected to rise from £2.4 billion to £6 billion by 2026, according to the County Council’s Network (CCN).

Such is the demand that only around half of the applications for care plans are processed within the regulated 20 weeks. When SEND support is not approved by local authorities, parents can appeal to a tribunal at a further cost to councils. Last year, 98 per cent of these appeals were upheld. The system is in a shocking mess, but rather than address the failure, the Government has instead floated proposals which would remove education, health and care plans (EHCPs) from children altogether.

Parents often end up in Kafkaesque nightmares as they negotiate this bureaucracy. Catriona Magee’s autistic son, Adam, 14, had been out of school for two and a half years when the local council wrote to insist that he actually was in “full-time education”. In reality, Catriona could not find a school that would take him. Adam was in his bedroom, retreating further into himself.

“It was institutional gaslighting and it blew my mind,” Catriona tells me. “I think it would break many people. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was a mother and I had to keep going, I can see why people would top themselves over this.”

By this point Adam had spent years trying to fit in at schools that couldn’t — or wouldn’t — accommodate his autism. “How he copes depends on the environment he’s in,” says Catriona. “If he’s in the right environment and he’s comfortable, you would think he’s fine. But if he’s in the wrong environment, he can’t function at all.”

In common with many students, Adam’s problems exacerbated after the second Covid lockdown in October 2021. She would manage to get him out of the door but he would be sweating and stressed by the time they reached school. “He just couldn’t get through the door, or he’d get towards the door and then he would just run or he’d hide under a bench or he’d start spinning round and round.”

He wouldn’t attend school regularly again until March 2024. During this time, Catriona engaged in a series of administrative and legal challenges with her local authority and meanwhile was forced to abandon a masters in social work and give up her regular job, meaning her household income effectively halved.

“The whole thing is so isolating,” she says. “No parent wants their child to have problems. No parent wants their child to be ‘the disruptor child’ stuck at home with no future. All I want is to get on with my life, to have a job, for my son to be happy, for him to be learning, to have friends, and to have a future. That’s all I want. And it shouldn’t be that much to ask, but apparently it’s impossible.”

As isolated as parents feel, the experience is common enough for it not to be a simple issue of individual failure. Something, clearly, has gone very wrong for many, many British children. The system is clearly no longer fit for purpose. Ellie Costello founded the group Square Peg, after her two children experienced school distress. Since 2019, she has seen the Facebook support groups for affected parents rise from 1,000 to 73,000 members, with many sharing similar stories. “We are seen either as  pointy-elbowed and entitled golden ticket seekers for our little emperors, or we’re feckless and ignorant people who don’t value education and keep our kids out of school,” she says.

She is one calling for an overarching change to the education system, with actual clinical supervision built into schools in order that teachers can get on with teaching. “Teaching and schooling is one of the only front-facing key worker services that doesn’t have clinical therapeutic supervision built into it,” she says. Under the current system, it is effectively left to the schools. Some are sympathetic and handle the problem well. Others make the matter far worse.” There is currently no overarching guidance on what best practice looks like and what the worse-performing schools can learn from the better ones.

This may sound like more resources. But as with so many of Britain’s problems, the failure to address it at source means that we waste billions further down the line. Meanwhile, we have hundreds of thousands of children spending time that they could be learning, playing, socializing — being children — isolated, miserable and traumatized in their bedrooms, and their parents slowly descending into debt, misery and quiet desperation. It’s a tragic waste. I have twice asked the Department for Education to respond to the study and to ask whether it would consider providing the training and support professionals so clearly want. Depressingly, it has failed to respond.

Emma Hester, another mother of a school-refuser, believes that the school advice she followed traumatised her six-year-old daughter, Grace, who has ADHD and autism. When Grace was in Year One, she wouldn’t get dressed. But Emma was told to bring her into school in her pyjamas and they would do the rest. “To my shame, I did just that,” she says. “I dragged her into the head’s office in her pyjamas where I was told ‘well done’ for getting her in. Basically, that’s what matters for the school: its attendance record. But there was my child, a gibbering wreck, and now I’m horrified at what we inflicted on her.”

These two children are not alone. One in five pupils is currently persistently absent from school — a number that has doubled since the pandemic — and the education system is panicking. While parents report distress, anxiety and stress, the Department for Education launched what has been described as an insensitive and patronising exercise in “parent shaming”, in an attempt to get these “ghost children” back in the classrooms. The “Moments matter, attendance counts” campaign features smiling children at school with strap-lines such as “This morning he had a runny nose…but look at him now!” and “This morning she was worried about school…but look at her now!”

“They are pitting parents against their children and against teachers,” says Niamh. “When you’re struggling with children who are unable to go to school for a variety of serious reasons, and then you see a poster telling you to get your kid into school and everything will be alright, it suggests it’s your fault.”

A huge number of parents are feeling similarly frustrated at the lack of support for their children, and the insensitivity of the DfE. The Facebook group “Not Fine in School”, set up to support parents of school refusers, now has 33,000 despairing members. One, Claire Gill, wrote: “My son has severe anxiety. We had a well-being person talk to him weekly, which helped him cope, and he looked forward to speaking to them as it was a release. Now, school has stopped the wellbeing person, saying what he has learnt is on his iPad and he can look at that if he gets anxious, [and that] talking is only a temporary fix and he needs to basically learn to manage it himself. He is 10.”

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Part of the problem, according to many members of this group, and a majority of the parents I spoke to, is that neither the Government nor the schools are properly addressing the youth mental health crisis. The official numbers are shocking — and that’s only the cases we know about. In the past five years, the number of children claiming disability allowance for anxiety has risen by 70%. And according to a recent survey by the mental health charity stem4, an alarming 28% of secondary school pupils have missed school because of anxiety in the past year. Those suffering the most tend to be children with neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD or autism.

Obviously, the pandemic must bear some of the blame. The clinical psychologist Dr Naomi Fisher puts it bluntly: “Their playgrounds were locked. Their opportunities to play were taken away. Normal life stopped. It was particularly earth-shattering for children, because they found it hard to hang on to what life had been like before.” When these kids went back to school, they were under pressure to catch up educationally, rather than focus on their psychological well-being. The news was full of horror stories about falling grades, not worsening mental health. But it didn’t take long for that damage to show itself.

The result is a system that can no longer cope with the numbers of children presenting with mental health complications. While it was hard enough for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) to get help before the pandemic, things are now far worse. More parents than ever are applying for assessment and treatment in the hope of accessing an education, health and care plan (EHCP). But according to the DfE, only 49.2% of applications are established within the requisite 20 weeks, down from 59.9% in 2021. Hundreds of children are waiting more than two years to be issued with the plan that details the support they need.

While requests for EHCPs have surged, funding for them has not. And this growing burden is crippling local authorities. According to the County Council’s Network, which represents 20 county councils and 17 unitary councils, they are not receiving enough financial support from central government. This year, councils’ budget deficits accrued on Send spending are expected to rise from £2.4 billion to £3.6 billion.

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It all points to a system in crisis. Emma tells me it took eight years for her daughter, Grace, now 11, to be diagnosed with autism. She still isn’t receiving the help she needs and hasn’t been in school since last October. Emma has taken matters into her own hands and is taking an MA in occupational therapy in order to provide support for Grace herself.

“It’s a two-year course, but that’s still faster than waiting for Grace to get help on the NHS,” she says. “The system is broken. We’ve got a cohort of neurotypical children who can just about manage in a school system. Then you’ve got a big cohort of autistic people with learning difficulties, and they naturally fit into specialist schools.” But, she tells me, it’s the in-betweeners — the cohort of autistic youngsters who don’t have learning difficulties, but really struggle in a large, noisy, overwhelming environment — who are being failed. These children are afraid of school, hate the scratchy uniforms — many children with autism have hypersensitive skin — and can’t cope with the chaos of the playground or dinner hall. “They simply can’t manage,” says Emma. “And the school is doing nothing to reduce the things that they don’t have to stress about.”

Emma is not alone in feeling that her child’s difficulties aren’t being taken seriously. Last year, in a paper entitled “School distress and the school attendance crisis: A story dominated by neurodivergence and unmet need”, psychology researchers at Newcastle University interviewed 947 parents of children who struggled to attend school because of what they termed “school distress”. The researchers found that 92% of these children were described as “neurodivergent” as opposed to “neurotypical”, with 83.4% being autistic — hardly the picture being painted by the DfE’s “it’s just a sniffle” campaign.

No wonder parents are desperate. “They feel their employers, their friends, social services, the local authority and their child’s teachers don’t believe them, aren’t listening and don’t want to hear,” says Dr Sinéad Mullally, one of the authors of the Newcastle paper. “The DfE campaign just feeds into that lack of societal understanding of the problem. Simply getting your child into school won’t solve the problem if the school is the problem.”

This disdain is borne out by what happened to nine-year-old Ellie Green. She has ADHD and autism, and though she loves school, she can suffer from debilitating bouts of anxiety and hypersensitivity. The experience of her mother, Nancy, is typical of so many parents I spoke to.

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“Ellie is academically very capable and has always been articulate, so at school they tend not to see how much she struggles in other areas,” Nancy tells me. Ellie often attends school wearing her PE kit, because it is more comfortable than the uniform. But this makes her feel different. “The need to obey the rules and be different at the same time can make her extremely anxious,” she says. “And when she struggles, as is often the case with autistic children, she may growl or make animal noises and the way a teacher responds to this could either calm the situation or send Ellie into a meltdown… A simple understanding of this would go a long way, but sometimes it can result in a teacher punishing or belittling a child.”

All too often, teachers are at a loss as to what to do. They simply aren’t equipped with the strategies to help. According to the 2023 annual education report from the National Autistic Society (NAS), only 14% of secondary school teachers had had more than half a day of autism training. Among primary teachers the figure was 39%. More money being spent on special needs provision probably wouldn’t make a significant difference to Ellie, but a change in the way children like her are treated would. As Tim Nicholls, at the National Autistic Society, told me: “School shouldn’t be a tick-box exercise in attendance. It should be about ensuring all children get the support they need to be able to thrive from well-trained staff who understand their needs. Instead of shaming parents and children for low attendance at school, the government should prioritise urgent reform of the education system.” And while it’s a little more complicated than blowing a runny nose, it wouldn’t actually cost that much.

The Government’s response to this growing catastrophe is to identify problems earlier, and to spend an extra £440 million in 2024-25. This will take spending on SEND to £10.5 billion — an increase of 60% in five years. The Labour Party hasn’t added much, which, as it prepares for government, doesn’t provide anxious parents with much solace. But as Catriona More from the Independent Provider of Education Advice says, just throwing money at the problem isn’t going to make much difference. Local authorities aren’t motivated to ensure that children are given the help to which they’re already entitled. “Following the law seems to be widely regarded as an optional activity, with very little requirement on local authorities to be accountable for this,” she says. “The existing SEND system doesn’t need fundamental reform: it needs to be made to work as it should.”

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Not everyone is so positive about the existing system. Others believe wholesale change is required, at least to find a way to understand why so many children need help. Dr Fisher believes that this means facing up to the effects and aftermath of the pandemic. “What is missing in government thinking is accepting that this generation has gone through a massive event in their lives, which undermined the sense of safety that many of them had in the world,” she says.

And right now, the Government doesn’t seem to grasp the extent of the problem. DfE sources insist that the attendance campaign was intended only to discourage absenteeism where children had coughs or mild anxiety rather than serious SEND issues  — though they didn’t define “mild” anxiety. But such is the rigidity of our education system, there seems to be little or no attempt to interrogate the reason for these high levels of absenteeism.

Such a careless attitude towards vulnerable children shames the system and consigns that cohort to a bleak future. A child’s needs must come first — not a school’s targets. And if a student is reluctant to go to school, it’s a sign of a greater problem. Perhaps we need to rethink the role of schools: increasingly, they are becoming more rigid in focus — more vocational and less creative. Throwing cash unthinkingly at this is neither going to help the anxious children nor regain the confidence of parents.

“The problem is that they aren’t listening to us, and don’t seem able to learn anything from what we’re trying to tell them,” says Ellie’s mother, Nancy. “Education should be the key to unlocking the world and a passport to freedom. By that measure, more and more of our children are becoming prisoners.”

*Some names and locations have been omitted or changed in order to protect the identities of children.

The self-proclaimed King of Toxic Masculinity, who converted to Islam in 2022, had previously claimed to have funded a number of charitable projects, from establishing a dog shelter in Romania to rebuilding an orphanage, but this was a whole new level of giving. “I donate $25 million a year to feeding children in war-torn countries, especially in the Islamic world, because that’s where war is,” he explained in a video posted to TatePledge.com, which compiles evidence of his alleged good works. “I’m going to be starting a foundation, the Tate Foundation, which is going to be dedicated to charitable acts. I will be spending millions and millions of dollars on charitable acts for the rest of my human life. God has blessed me with fantastic wealth. It’s more money than I will ever personally need.”

In case viewers didn’t get the message, the video then displayed a statement: “This is how the most famous man on earth exerts his influence. Despite all the attacks from his fiercest critics, he is the only one actively trying to change the world for the better.” So, nine months on, how is he doing?

As of yesterday, according to Tate’s website, he and his brother Tristan have donated “$12m+” in “14+” countries in collaboration with “20+” non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and changed the lives of “1,165,340+” people. The site carries details of 43 of the projects they have donated to, the most recent being on December 18, when they helped to provide winter clothes for Yemeni children. Other programmes include the installation of water pumps in African villages, the provision of school meals at orphanages in Somalia, and the handing out of clothes and food parcels in Syria, Gaza and Yemen. Some of these are also supported financially by the War Room, Tate’s online network that charges $8,000 to join.

Looking at these various programmes, it certainly appears that his donations are enabling charity workers to do valuable and much-needed work. There is, however, a catch: there is very little evidence of more than a million lives being changed, or of tens of millions of dollars being spent.

Fewer than 10 charities feature in the videos, and at least one is now defunct. The Tates’ most regular collaborator is Muslim Global Relief, a Manchester-based charity with an income of £3.4 million and three employees. Its deputy managing director Mohammed Bashir told me that Muslim Global Relief had conducted “16 to 20” projects with Tate-donated money this financial year — but that the total amount spent was “£30K at most”. Asked whether the Tate-funded projects were long-term or one-off events, Mr Bashir said: “One project at a time in different places.” The charity, he added, had made a policy decision to carry on taking money from the Tates, regardless of the charges they faced. However, if they were found guilty, Global Muslim Relief would sever all ties.

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Oddly, when I asked how the funds were transferred, he said that the Tates’ donations, the choice of projects they fund, and the photo opportunities they presented were handled by a journalist, whom he declined to name. “We don’t have direct links with [the Tate brothers],” Mr Bashir said. “There’s a journalist based here in the UK who’s a representative and looks after the charitable arm for them. He’s the one who gives us the donations, and then we do the projects and give them the appropriate feedback. There’s no ongoing long-term funding for one particular project in one particular country.” (I invited the journalist to discuss his work with me via Mr Bashir, but he didn’t respond.)

In terms of “appropriate feedback” provided by the charities, this usually takes the form of a video in which donors can see how their money has been spent. The Tates then publish this footage on their website — a reputation-enhancing tactic that hasn’t been without criticism. Muslim Hands, a highly reputable charity based in Nottingham with an income of £33 million and a staff of 113, was involved in eight projects with the Tates before they were charged, and now regrets that involvement. “Muslim Hands is extremely concerned that a number of pictures and videos we provided privately to an individual donor to verify the delivery of aid projects by our staff have been used without our authorisation on a website promoting the charitable endeavours of Andrew and Tristan Tate,” the charity told me.

“Given the very serious offences with which the Tate brothers were charged in June, we requested the removal of all this material from the Tates’ website several months ago and made it clear that we would neither welcome nor accept any further donations on their behalf while current proceedings are active. The videos feature eight Muslim Hands projects: three in Niger, two in Mali, and three others in Syria, Yemen and Somalia. It is unacceptable, however, that this material has been used without our formal authorisation to support fundraising by the Tate brothers, to project a positive image of their charitable endeavours as individuals at a risk of damage to our reputation, and to insinuate a level of giving that is not reflected in the relatively modest donations we have received in this case.” Videos featuring Muslim Hands remain on the Tate Pledge website.

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Human Appeal, another international relief charity, has also received unwelcome exposure on the Tates’ pledge site. The organisation, which has 500 employees and an income of £43 million, is featured in a food distribution video in Lebanon with posters bearing the names of Andrew and Tristan Tate. Yet it claims it didn’t receive money from the brothers. The charity said: “Human Appeal has never received any donation from a Tristan or Andrew Tate. A member of the public in the UK donated in a legitimate manner and wished to dedicate his donation to the names Tristan and Andrew Tate. Like most charities, donors are permitted to dedicate their donations to third-party names of their own choosing.

“The humanitarian aid distribution photos from the website were taken a while ago at a charity food distribution in Lebanon in aid of vulnerable refugees. These were shared by us with the donor. There was no one in attendance at this aid distribution by the name of Tristan or Andrew Tate, nor would our policy have allowed it.” Nor is Human Appeal the only charity now attempting to distance itself from the Tates. Action For Humanity – International, an NGO based in Salford, launched an internal investigation after I passed details of a video posted to the Tate Pledge website that features an Action For Humanity employee thanking the Tate brothers, the Tate Foundation and the War Room for food and hygiene kits provided after the earthquake in Morocco on September 8. The Tates had been charged with their offences at the time of the donation.

The internal investigation established that the donation was made through the Canadian arm of the charity, and was for just £800. “‘Action For Humanity – Canada’ is a partner organisation of the UK-based ‘Action For Humanity – International’, but is in itself its own legal and operational entity,” a spokesman said. “‘Action For Humanity – International’ has never received funds from the Tates. We can confirm an £800 donation was made to ‘Action For Humanity – Canada’. ‘Action For Humanity – Canada’ has begun the process to return the donation in full.” The charity told me that its due diligence policy requires it to check the source of donations only over £3,000, and added: “As this was a donation of £800 to our Canada office and was made via a third-party charitable crowdsourcing platform [CanadaHelps] which has passed our due diligence process, regrettably the donation was not rejected. A second donation of £12,000 was attempted to be made by the Tate Foundation in November 2023 to ‘Action For Humanity – Canada’. As a result of our due diligence procedures, we did not accept this donation.”

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Meanwhile, other charities singled out by the Tates have simply disappeared. The first video posted on the Tate Pledge website was dated to April 13, and features hundreds of construction workers in Dubai receiving boxes of food, courtesy of a charity called Life Guided By Light. A similar Dubai-based food handout supported by the Tates, and executed by men wearing Life Guided by Light T-shirts, was carried out in a car park for Chinese National Chemical Engineering Corporation (CNCEC) vehicles. The workers wore high-vis vests bearing the letters CNCEC. Yet when I tried to ask Life Guided by Light why it felt it necessary to feed workers employed by a huge multinational corporation, I discovered that the charity’s three trustees had dissolved it last September following a year of zero income and zero expenditure.

Earlier this week, I showed the Tate Pledge page to two senior academics with expertise in the charity sector. While neither wanted to be named, one expressed concern over the use of “stereotypical images of victims in need that are now being heavily criticised by the NGO community”. The Tate videos, he pointed out, often feature young African children expressing delight at being given a plate of food. The other added: “It seems like a classic case of ‘charity washing’ — trying to bolster a hugely damaged reputation through good works. I suspect many charities wouldn’t touch the money.” And yet, the reality is that the Tate brothers and their War Room associates are funding some worthwhile projects in difficult areas, particularly one benefitting children and orphans in Irbil, Syria, run by the Little Hearts Foundation. The only issue in question is the scale of that funding — and on that, transparency is lacking.

In a June 4 video on the Tate Pledge site, Andrew Tate said: “I promise to provide full accounts and receipts to prove that the money goes directly to charity to feeding children in war-torn countries.” But when I asked Tina Glandian, Tate’s US-based lawyer, if I could see these accounts and receipts, I received no reply. I also emailed the Tates and their associates in Romania several times asking for details of charitable spending but, again, heard nothing back.

Finally, a UK intermediary contacted the Tate team on my behalf. “Unfortunately”, he said, “they have decided not to comment at this time.”

That a private American company should gain such a foothold in the NHS would normally cause concern among privacy and health service advocates. And that it could be Palantir — part-funded in its early days by the CIA and with Western armies among its clients — is causing high anxiety. “Is Palantir really the kind of company we want at the very heart of the National Health Service?” asks Cori Crider, director of Foxglove, a campaign group dedicated to challenging the excesses of tech giants. “This is a company who, at the start of the pandemic, had no track record of working with healthcare staff. They’re not a healthcare company. They weren’t a health data company. They were essentially a tech company who supported spies, police, the military and border forces.”

Palantir, in partnership with Accenture, is in the running with Quantexa, a British company partnered with IBM, and Oracle Cerner to build the “Federated Data Platform” (FDP), described by the NHS as a system “which will enable NHS organisations to bring together operational data – currently stored in separate systems – to support staff to access the information they need in one safe and secure environment”. NHS England says there are currently no plans to include GP records in the FDP, but privacy campaigners fear that that could change with mission creep, and if it did, Palantir could gain access to them. The winner of the FDP contract was supposed to have been named in September, an announcement then delayed to the middle of this month, and now said to be imminent — but few in the NHS believe it will be anyone but Palantir.

The NHS — budget this year £182 billion — has the largest repository of health data in the world. It services around a million GP appointments a day, and over a quarter of a million hospital appointments. According to consultants Ernst and Young, the information gleaned from NHS activities could be worth £9.6 billion a year. With the advent of AI, mining this treasure trove of data could mean the discovery of better medicines and treatments, improved patient care and vast savings. But in the wrong hands, it could see the NHS being used as a cash-cow, and it could mean a loss of privacy, the end of patient trust, and the slow death of the NHS as we know it.

So, how did Palantir get in the running — and why are they being hotly tipped as a shoo-in for the FDP contract, worth £480m over seven years? The company, named after the crystal “seeing stones” in J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, was founded by Thiel, a Stanford law graduate, in 2003 with the intention in his words of adapting PayPal’s anti-fraud software in order to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties” (he had sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002). Before the 9/11 attack on New York, the US intelligence agencies had been blind-sided; Thiel was convinced his seeing stones would give them better vision in the future.

An early investor in Palantir was the CIA, through a venture capital arm named In-Q-Tel. The first of four iterations of Thiel’s data systems — Palantir Gotham — is used by the US National Security Agency, the FBI, the Western military, police, US immigration services and fraud investigators. It is capable of pulling together vast amounts of data and making connections that could solve problems insoluble to mere humans. It is currently being used by the Ukrainian army in its war with Russia.

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There have been reports — neither confirmed nor denied by Palantir — that its software helped to locate Osama bin Laden. Former CIA director George Tenet once said he wished the agency had had Gotham before 9/11, the suggestion being that it might have pulled together disparate dots into one large picture of terror plot planning. Another iteration, called Metropolis, is a finance analytics platform widely used by hedge funds and banks. In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, executives from major tech companies, including Palantir, Google, Meta and Amazon, were asked by the UK government whether they could help with the planning and implementation of its responses to Covid-19. Palantir immediately stepped in, offering the use of another of its systems, Foundry… for just £1. Its offer was accepted by beleaguered health officials.

Palantir advisers were embedded in the NHS while Foundry was used in planning to effectively distribute medicines, ventilators and vaccines, monitor staff levels and intensive care bed availability — creating the kind of joined-up health response that would not have been previously possible with the UK’s fragmented network of trusts and care providers. Once a vaccine became available, it was involved in its rollout. By the end of the pandemic, Palantir’s £1 punt had paid off.

“A £1 contract seemed odd at the time, but it obviously gave them a foot in the door,” says Dr David Wrigley, digital lead on the BMA’s GP Committee, which has expressed concerns over the use of patients’ data on the FDP. “They will have learned about NHS systems and contracts, seen how the system operates and how best to bid for other contracts going forward.” Palantir’s next move to curry favour with the UK government was to offer its services again, for six months, to help with the logistics of housing Ukrainian refugees following the Russian invasion. But this time it charged nothing whatsoever. The company says it is proud of the role that it played at a time of great suffering for Ukrainian families. But this move did its relationship with the UK, and its long-term income, no harm at all.

Since then, Palantir has been awarded several other NHS contracts worth £60 million, with none going out to tender. Last month, it was awarded £5.5million to continue running Homes for Ukraine over the next 12 months for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) — again with no tendering process. The probity of this deal was questioned by the National Audit Office (NAO) in a report published last week. It pointed out that: “In February 2023, the Government’s Chief Commercial Officer, wrote to Palantir noting his concern about the practice of offering services to public sector customers for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold, contrary to the principles of public procurement which usually require open competition.” Asked about this criticism, Palantir said there was: “nothing unusual in a business offering a prospective customer the opportunity to trial before purchase. Indeed the Government’s own guidance states that ‘where a service is being outsourced for the first time, a pilot should be run’ and that ‘if you’re buying a product, consider asking for a demonstration or trial on a smaller scale’.”

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But a more polemical vision of how Thiel sees British people’s relationship with the NHS was revealed in January when he made some unguarded comments during a Q&A session at the Oxford Union debating society. He said they were suffering from “Stockholm syndrome”, held ideologically captive by their healthcare system, and that the NHS needed “market mechanisms” to improve, adding that: “In theory, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over… In practice, you have to somehow make it all backwards compatible in all these ridiculous British ways.” He said British people needed to stop thinking the NHS was “the most wonderful thing in the world” and accept that it is an “iatrogenic” institution. An iatrogenic illness is a malady caused by the treatment itself. “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb, and the NHS makes people sick,” he said.

Palantir quickly distanced itself from his comments. Joanna Peller, the company’s UK health lead, said: “Peter Thiel made these comments as a private individual and our CEO [Alex Karp, at Palantir since 2004] has made it clear he firmly disagrees with them and that he wishes ‘we had a health care system in the US that served the poor and underserved as well as I perceive the British system does’.” Few people in the NHS would argue that its countrywide IT systems couldn’t be improved, but many billions of pounds have been wasted in previous unsuccessful attempts to merge them. At the moment, there are 42 administered by “Integrated Care Systems” comprising hospital trusts, local authorities and care providers.

The first attempt at digitising and uniting records held by GPs and hospital trusts was launched in 2002 and called the National Programme for IT. It began with a budget of £6.2 billion but was mired in technical difficulties and a lack of trust among health staff. It was scrapped in 2011 after racking up £12 billion in costs. One of the private contractors who pulled out of the scheme before it was junked was Accenture, Palantir’s current bidding partner. In 2021 the government launched the General Practice Data for Planning and Research system, designed to enable records to be used for more than simple personal care. Advances in technology meant that the data in them could be used for the same purposes envisaged for the FDP — better care, medicines and healthcare planning.

However, patients were advised that where their data was to be shared for anything beyond care — for research or planning — they had the right to withhold their data under an NHS “National Data Opt-Out”, and they did in their droves. “More than a million people opted out because there was a lack of trust in the system,” says Foxglove’s Crider. “And each time someone opts out, the data set gets smaller and so its usefulness for research is diminished.” Sam Smith, policy lead at medConfidential, which campaigns for patient privacy, says he believes even more people will want to opt-out if Palantir wins the FDP contract. But there is confusion over whether they will be able to. Smith explains:

“The NHS England website says people will not be able to opt out, but this is contradictory because we all have the right to opt out of sharing our personal data if it is to be used for anything other than patient care, for purposes such as research and planning — but that is exactly what FDP is supposed to be used for… Last month, Sir Chris Whitty [chief medical officer for England] urged people not to opt out precisely because their information could help with research and planning. So what is it to be? Can people opt out, or can’t they?”

In a letter to the Health and Social Care Committee in August, Lord Markham, under-secretary of state for health, said the government was considering reforming the National Data Opt-Out. I asked NHS England whether these reforms would make it easier or harder for patients to opt out, but it did not answer the question. On the subject of Palantir and the FDP, a spokesperson said:

“The NHS is conducting a fair and transparent procurement process for a supplier of the federated data platform, in line with public contracts regulations, and this process has not yet concluded… Better use of data brings huge benefits for patients — a federated data platform will ensure more joined-up care and better use of resources, connecting existing NHS data in one secure environment to help speed up diagnosis and reduce waiting times and hospital stays.”

Palantir’s Peller emphasises that patients’ data is safe with the company. “Unlike many other technology companies, we’re not in the business of collecting, mining or selling data,” she says. “What we do is provide tools that help customers understand and organise the information that they hold, along with training and support in using those tools. We are legally defined as the ‘data processor’ while the customer is the ‘data controller’. Customers retain full ownership of their data. Palantir is granted no rights to such data and can only carry out that processing which it is instructed to do by the customer, while UK government customer data is only hosted in the UK.” She says Palantir is “now helping to reduce the care backlog and ensure patients receive vital treatment sooner in 36 NHS Trusts across England”. These are trusts invited (some say pressured) by NHS England to run trials of Foundry, and this is the reason Palantir is considered a shoo-in for the FDP contract — it is too embedded to get out.

However, in response to a written Parliamentary question in March, health minister Will Quince said nine of these had been “paused” while two had been suspended. A variety of reasons were later given, ranging from a lack of funds to administrative delays, and assurances were made in August that some of the paused pilots were up and running again. But at least two — Liverpool Heart & Chest Hospital, and Milton Keynes University Hospital — have indicated that the system wasn’t right for them. I asked NHS England how many of the 36 pilots were currently operational, but received no answer. This only confuses the picture, as Palantir insists they all are.

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Whichever company is announced as the provider of the FDP, its success will not only be judged on whether the NHS is finally blessed with the joined-up digital wizardry it so badly needs, but also on whether it manages to provide that and retain the trust of patients. “If a person goes to see their GP and holds back important or embarrassing information because they’re afraid it will be shared with a private company, then that is not only dangerous for the patient, but also very sad,” says the BMA’s Wrigley. “Because that could mean the end of the doctor-patient relationship as we know it.”

“When they’re dried and ground into powder, it smells like a mixture of mushroom, soil and macadamia nut,” says Keiran Olivares Whitaker, 39, founder and CEO of Entocycle, the leading British tech company farming these larvae. “And when you taste it, it’s like pork scratchings.”

But you can’t taste Entocycle’s end product yet, because the sale of farmed insects for human consumption isn’t allowed in the UK (though several applications to the Food Standards Agency for black soldier fly protein to be allowed on sale, as a “novel” food, are expected to be approved soon). Instead, it is intended as a high-protein, low-carbon replacement for animal feeds currently based mainly on soya or fish meal, the sourcing of which is causing rampant deforestation and declining seafood populations.

The race to embrace insect farming has never seemed so urgent. According to the World Economic Forum and its post-Covid “Great Reset” initiative, insects are an overlooked source of protein whose consumption will help limit climate change. Last year, the global market for insect protein was worth around $1.5 billion — and, according to “Food Revolution”, a report by Barclays Research, it will grow to $8 billion by 2030.

Certainly, the environmental drivers for insect farming are powerful. Producing insect protein requires one-tenth of the feed, water and land needed for beef production, and it results in only 1% of the greenhouse gas emissions. This is because the food needed to produce all this sustainable insect protein could come largely from waste — the black soldier fly can live off almost anything — and we’ve never wasted more food.

So why not let insects use that waste and bring it back into the food chain? Well, because some scientists and animal welfare groups argue that farming insects could be cruel. And if it is, the sheer numbers of creatures affected by it would be enormous.

According to a paper authored by some of the world’s most prominent biologists and bioethicists published last year and entitled “Can insects feel pain?”, evidence is growing that some insect species (only a tiny fraction has yet been researched) are sentient, to a greater or lesser degree, and so can experience some feelings, including pain. And if they can, the argument goes that they should be brought into line with other farmed animals when it comes to welfare regulations governing the way they are reared and killed. At present, there is none.

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“All of the cows, chickens, turkeys, pigs and sheep slaughtered each year amount to about 80 billion animals, whereas there’s already well over a trillion insects being slaughtered every year,” says Dr Andrew Crump, one of the paper’s authors and a lecturer in animal cognition and welfare at the Royal Veterinary College. “There are 300 million beef cows slaughtered every year, but 300 billion mealworms. The numbers are huge, so the issue is that if we get it wrong with welfare, we’re leading to suffering on this absolutely gigantic scale. The problem is that the basic kind of welfare knowledge just isn’t there. With insect farming, we’re basically where we were with conventional farming more than 50 years ago.”

Determining whether an insect feels pain is not as easy as it may sound, because behaviour that might look as if a creature is experiencing it could be put down to a physiological reaction called nociception. The paper on insect pain, published last October in Advances in Insect Physiology, explains: “Nociception does not require pain: hand withdrawal from a hot stove is a nociceptive reflex controlled by neurons relaying signals from the nociceptors in the hand, to the spinal cord, and back again. All this happens before nerve impulses reach the brain (where pain is experienced). Thus, when animals display nociception, this does not necessarily demonstrate that they can feel pain.”

One experiment conducted by Dr Crump and his colleagues found clear evidence that bumblebees can feel pain. (There is no likelihood that bees will be farmed for food other than honey, but that doesn’t make the experiment any the less significant.) Describing the findings, the academics wrote: “We gave bumblebees four feeders: two heated and two unheated. Each feeder dispensed sugar water, which bumblebees love. When every feeder had the same concentration of sugar water, bees avoided the two heated feeders. But when the heated feeders dispensed sweeter sugar water than the unheated feeders, bumblebees often chose the heated feeders. Their love of sugar outweighed their hatred of heat. This suggests bees feel pain, because (like humans) their responses are more than just reflexes.”

They also concluded that flies could experience pain, again because of their reaction to heat. “Hungry flies are less likely to jump away from extreme heat than satiated flies,” they wrote. “Decapitated flies can still jump, but they do not display this difference, demonstrating their brain’s involvement in heat avoidance. Communication between the brain and the responsive body part is also consistent with pain.”

Last year, the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act included the first invertebrates to be given farming protections: decapod crustaceans, including crabs, lobsters and prawns, and cephalopods, including squid and octopuses. Their inclusion came largely as a result of a sentience framework drawn up by a team of researchers led by Dr Jonathan Birch, associate professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and principal investigator on the university’s Foundations of Animal Sentience project.

The framework has eight criteria ranging from whether an animal has nociceptors and integrative brain regions to whether it can trade off threat of injury against opportunity for reward, or whether it responds to local anaesthetics or analgesics. No single criterion is proof that it can feel pain, but combinations of some of them may suggest that it can. Octopuses satisfied seven out of the eight criteria; squid and cuttlefish satisfied four; crabs five; and lobster three.

The “Can insects feel pain?” paper, of which Dr Birch was a co-author, concluded that flies and cockroaches satisfied six of the criteria, which amounts to “strong evidence” for pain. Other insects met fewer of the criteria, yet the researchers concluded that there was “substantial evidence” they could experience pain. Ants, wasps and bees met four criteria, and crickets, grasshoppers, butterflies and moths met three.

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Perhaps surprisingly, not all environmentally conscious and animal-friendly groups support insect farming, in spite of its many obvious advantages. When I asked People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) what they thought of it, they simply replied that we could get all the protein we needed from plants. Elsewhere, Phil Brooke, Compassion in World Farming’s research and education manager, argues that feeding animals protein from insects makes the food chain less efficient: “Less than 40% of the protein you feed to a chicken ends up in the meat you eat. If you feed a salmon, it’s only 28%. If you feed a pig or a trout, it’s just over 20%. And it can be lower for other species. It’s the simple law of ecology that at each stage in a food chain, you lose energy. So if you’re feeding flies on waste food, we think it would be better to simply feed that waste food directly to animals, like pigs, and miss out a layer.”

Back at Entocycle, tucked away in a railway arch a stone’s throw from London Bridge, I put all of these points to Olivares Whitaker, who has a degree in environmental design and conservation. He seems unfazed: “The phrase ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ is a complete fallacy. The latest data says we have exhausted more than 51% of all fish. We have destroyed the coral reefs, the nurseries of the ocean. By messing up the coral reefs, you mess up the juvenile fish populations, and if you mess up the juvenile fish populations, you mess up all the seabirds, you mess up the seabirds, you mess up the ecosystem.

“Our rainforests are being cut down for large monoculture crops. What most people don’t realise is that 90% of all soy that’s brought to the UK doesn’t go into your soy burger or your soy milk. It goes straight in to feed the cow, straight in to feed the pig, straight in to feed the chicken. And it’s really unhealthy for most animals to be eating this stuff. They’re being force-fed rations which are the lowest cost to the highest value.

“I couldn’t sit back and just watch that, so I began looking at insects. How do insects currently act in the food web? Because the rotting apple falls from the tree, the insect eats the apple, the bird eats the worm, and off we go up the food web. It’s just normal. Every single animal on this planet, including humans, has been eating insects for millions of years.”

While Entocycle used to farm larvae for the pet-food industry, its focus today is on designing insect farms that ensure the greatest ratio of “protein in” to “protein out” – and, yes, to achieve the highest levels of welfare based on the company’s own research. And, so far, this mission is selling well. It has, for instance, recently attracted £4.2 million in funding from US investors and £3.3 million from Innovate UK, a government-backed body that provides money and support to industry. Meanwhile, Olivares Whitaker’s team of 35 engineers, designers, computer specialists and entomologists have contracts to design facilities in the Middle East and the UK that will produce thousands of tonnes of protein each year. And, as a welcome by-product, almost half of each farmed larvae contains excrement that can be used as a rich fertiliser.

“We are now facing a fertiliser crunch,” Olivares Whitaker says. “People don’t realise that the fertiliser industry is screwed since the war in Ukraine, and prices have quadrupled. Here, we have a perfect, organic and sustainable way of producing high-quality fertiliser using black soldier flies feeding on waste.”

But what about welfare concerns, and the claim that farming insects is inefficient? “Waste isn’t perfect,” he says. “You can’t just feed any waste to animals — for example, we saw with cows and BSE what happened when we fed them waste derived from other animals. Farmers need to know exactly what is in the protein they are feeding their animals. You can’t just feed anything to, say, pigs. But black soldier flies could feed off anything and turn it into high-quality protein.”

At present, however, UK rules don’t allow flies to be farmed that have been fed on excrement, but they could be — and the end product would be perfectly safe for animals and even humans. In developing countries with sewage disposal and protein security problems, governments are already looking at the possibilities of farming with insects.

So, what about the welfare side of the argument? I direct Olivares Whitaker to a paper written by Dr Meghan Barrett, another co-author of “Can insects feel pain?”, entitled “Challenges in farmed insect welfare”, in which she argues that farmed black soldier flies are susceptible to five welfare issues: nutritional inadequacies, larval overcrowding and overheating, unmet needs for mating behaviour, starvation, and inhumane slaughter.

But he’s having none of it. “If you get any of those five requirements wrong, your farm simply won’t work. If you starve your flies, they’re not going to breed your next generation of larvae. If you don’t meet their needs for mating behaviour, you’ll have nothing to farm. The welfare of the insects goes hand in hand with how successful and productive your operation will be.”

What if the government legislated to include insects in farming welfare regulations — would the industry comply? “I personally would welcome welfare regulations,” says Olivares Whitaker. “If you didn’t care for every aspect of their needs, your farming system simply wouldn’t work and you’d be out of business.”

I asked the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs if it had any plans to bring insect farming into line with other types of animal farming welfare, but it didn’t reply. Perhaps ministers are concerned that the public isn’t ready for insects to be deserving of concern. That might be true, but it’s hard to argue in a protein-insecure world that Olivares Whitaker is wrong. And one day soon, it won’t just be animals being fed on insects — we’ll be eating them, too.

“The knock” is the term given by families to the day the police came for their father, partner, husband, son or brother after being caught downloading indecent — and often violent — images or videos of children or babies. It is a moment when lives change forever, when women realise that the man with whom they have shared their life is actually a stranger, and, in some cases, a monster.

“In an instant, the life you had disappears, and you realise that nothing will ever be the same,” says Katie, a 43-year-old mother of two boys, aged six and eight. “The person you thought you knew, you didn’t know at all. Then the suspicion starts among your neighbours and extended family, because surely you must have known what was going on? Your friends melt away, and your kids’ play dates stop, and the police tell you to be careful of vigilantes attacking your house, and your children ask awkward questions. So, you give up your job and pack up and move, and you end up with nothing.…  You lose your home and your friends and your job, and you have damaged children who will grow up without a father. And even though none of it is your fault, you constantly carry round this irrational sense of guilt.”

What happened to Katie happens to scores of families every month. According to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, 35% of homes raided because of online paedophilic activity include children. In 2021/22, there were 10,181 arrests for downloading indecent images of children (IIoC) — an average of 848 each month. That figure has risen from 417 a decade ago. This means that an average of 298 families with children experience the knock each month — almost 10 families a day.

This is a massive, and growing, problem in the UK. The viewing and downloading of child porn is increasing all the time. According to the Internet Watch Foundation, the number of child sex sites found by its experts increased by 1,420% between 2011 and 2020. In 2021, it found 252,000 images of child sexual abuse — up 21% on the year before. The Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which campaigns and provides help to encourage offenders to stop viewing child abuse content, found that “isolation, unemployment and escalating pornography habits” during the pandemic resulted in more than 165,000 people seeking help via its advisory website in 2021. That was a 107% increase on the year before.

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But while the victims of abuse in online images are rightly given help when they can be found, the women and children left behind after the knock receive no special support from the state, whether financial, emotional, educational, psychological or practical. Because even though they become victims of the crime committed by the man in their life, the government doesn’t recognise them as such.

The knock came to the home of Carly Peters, a 59-year-old nurse, at 11am on a winter’s day in 2019. “You never forget it,” she says. “It’s like when people ask where you were when Diana died. For me, it came the day after a lovely evening which my then husband, Matthew, and I had had with my two sons and my daughter from my first marriage, and his daughter from his. We had been together for 11 years and had the perfect life, a great family, no money worries, a beautiful home, all of it.

“The kids — who are all grown up — had stayed over. The last time I saw the man that I thought I knew was at 8:50am that morning. I kissed him goodbye because I was taking one of my sons on an errand. When we got back, Matthew had gone into work — he owns a furniture business — and suddenly there was a knock on the door.

“Two men told me they were police officers and asked if they could come in. They said Matthew had been arrested on suspicion of ‘illegal downloading’. I had no idea what that was. Then they said he had admitted the offence at the showroom — because that’s where the downloading had taken place — and he had told them there was a computer and a hard drive in a bag under our bed. They asked whether I knew anything about that and I said no. My head was spinning.”

The police asked if there was anyone else in the house and Carly said her children were there. Visibly concerned, the officers asked how old the “children” were and she told them: in their late twenties and early thirties. The police relaxed — there were no young children at risk. The siblings were asked to gather in one room and to surrender all their storage devices, laptops, iPads, telephones, memory sticks and so on. So was Carly.

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“I asked them what Matthew was supposed to have done, but they said they couldn’t tell me under GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]. More officers came in and they took my home apart. They searched everywhere and put all our devices into black bags and took them out to unmarked police cars. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but it must have been obvious to the neighbours that something strange was going on.

“Then the most senior officer took me into our bedroom and pulled a bag from under the bed. Matthew had hidden it there. But I still didn’t know what he was supposed to have done… After two hours, they were gone, and we were none the wiser. They said Matthew would be home later, and he would explain everything, but Matthew didn’t come home.” Over the next couple of days, Matthew avoided contact with Carly, her children and his daughter. He went to the home of Carly’s father, where he tried to overdose on the father’s insulin. When that failed, he took an overdose of paracetamol and ended up in hospital.

Carly had no right to be given details of their partner’s alleged crimes unless the partner gave permission. “We had Googled ‘illegal downloading’ and seen that it could be for pirated music or indecent images of children or something else,” says Carly. This is a common problem for families in this situation, and it creates a vacuum in which offenders can lie about, or minimise, their illegal activities. These periods of deception — during which women are sometimes tricked into staying with the offender — can last for up to two years because of unprecedented backlogs in court cases post-pandemic and the time it takes to have devices examined by digital forensics experts.

“A couple of days after his arrest, Matthew told me he had a problem with pornography and it involved children,” says Carly. “I asked him how old, and he said: ‘Between three and 12.’ I’ve been a nurse for many years and so I have a strong constitution, but when he told me about the poor victims in these images, I vomited.” But it took two years for Matthew’s case to be heard at Crown Court. Only then did Carly learn the full extent of his crimes. He pleaded guilty to possessing or making more than 4,000 indecent images of children.

“The ‘making’ of indecent images charge was brought because of the way he had downloaded them and organised them into folders,” she says. “They were in age groups: three to five; six to eight; nine to 12. Most of them were ‘Category A’ images, the most serious, which means full penetrative sex. We’re talking about people having sex with toddlers.”

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Matthew was given a two-year suspended prison sentence, and put on the sex offenders register for 10 years. Carly stopped living with Matthew after he told her the bare basics of what he had done, and she has since divorced him. She sold their house, changed her name, gave up her job and moved to a new town. After months of counselling — which she paid for herself because she wasn’t entitled to any special help — she says she is making progress.

Families of online child abuse offenders suffer mentally, physically, socially and financially, according to research conducted by Professor Rachel Armitage and her colleagues at Huddersfield’s Department of Criminology. In 2021, they interviewed 126 family members and friends of offenders. They found that all but 17.5% of interviewees had symptoms consistent with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); 70% had symptoms that suggested they ought to have been diagnosed with PTSD, yet only 22 had received formal diagnoses and treatment for it.

The researchers also found that 65% reported symptom levels that were sufficient to suppress their body’s immune system. According to the Impact of Events Scale they used, a score of 35 would merit a diagnosis of PTSD and more than 37 would be high enough to put immune system function at risk. The mean score for offenders’ children was 55.6 and for their wives or partners it was 44.8. One of the women I interviewed said she developed rheumatoid arthritis after her husband was arrested, while her daughter’s hair fell out.

“Some of the respondents referred to experiencing relapses of disorders that were thought to have been resolved in the past — for example, eating disorders — and several also noted that the stress of the discovery had led to them developing physical illnesses such as autoimmune system disorders and irritable bowel syndrome,” the researchers wrote in their findings.

“Participants described how the psychological impacts were exacerbated by the loneliness and isolation of being in this situation where you have little or no access to agency support, where you are unable to disclose the truth to your own family and friends, where you have lost somebody that you love.”

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None of the partners and professionals I spoke to was demonstrably critical of police officers who carry out the knock, but they did wonder whether it could be handled more sensitively — in ways that could protect children from the trauma of seeing their father taken away, their homes ripped apart in searches. The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead on child protection and abuse, Deputy Chief Constable Ian Critchley, says: “The NPCC are aware of and understand the impact policing can have on families where someone has been subject to an arrest involving online child sexual abuse and exploitation. Often there are restrictions on the amount of information which can be provided due to several factors including GDPR, which we acknowledge can be frustrating and upsetting for innocent family members trying to understand why this is happening.” He says the NPCC is working with police forces, researchers and academics to find ways to make the knock and its aftermath less distressing.

During the period between arrest and trial, wives and partners (who, remember, usually don’t know the minutiae of what their man is supposed to have done) must decide whether to allow their children to see their father — usually under the supervision of a responsible adult — or whether to cut ties completely. If they suddenly remove the father, they risk damaging their children’s mental health; if they don’t, they risk being judged negatively by friends and family. Whatever they choose to do, they can’t win.

Katie White discovered this after agreeing that her husband, Bob, a 40-year-old civil servant, could see their two boys under the supervision of Bob’s mother. Within days of the knock, the Children’s Services department of her local authority had turned up, but “once they assess that your children aren’t at risk – because the offender is no longer living in the household – that’s it; they disappear from your life,” says Katie. “You get no help from them. The only time social services get involved is if your husband applies for more access rights or if you want to change the person who supervises his visits.”

Bob was convicted of possessing more than 1,000 indecent images of girls, some aged under eight. “At first, he had told me he might have accidentally clicked on a few images of girls aged 16 or 17,” says Katie. “It wasn’t until his hearing a year later that I found out the truth. I felt sick — lied to, cheated, and utterly disgusted.”

During that time, however, she had agreed to let Bob see their children once a week, supervised by his mother. The children were missing their father – to remove him completely did not seem like the right option. Not everyone agreed. One of her closest friends cut ties with her for allowing Bob to see the boys. After that, Katie, who had already given up her job, sold the family home and moved to a new town. Life was even harder there.

“I made a real effort at the school gates to get to know the other mothers, and fairly quickly I made a lot of acquaintances, but it was hard to make proper friends because I couldn’t afford to let anyone get too close,” she says. “I told them about getting divorced and said I’d moved there for a fresh start. There would be invitations to spa weekends away, or for late nights out and they would say: ‘Why can’t the kids stay with their dad?’. And I would say things like ‘It’s complicated’ or ‘That’s a long story’ but you can only keep batting away questions for so long.”

Eventually, she told three of her new friends about Bob’s offending, but they, too, judged her negatively for allowing her boys to have him in their lives. “One by one, they told me that if this had happened to them, they wouldn’t have allowed their children’s father to see them,” she says. “They didn’t drop me straight away, but they slowly melted away and don’t call any more. Now there’s nobody. I’m isolated in the community, and I feel very lonely.”

Bob re-offended last year. One of the boys wants to cut all ties with him; the other doesn’t. For Katie, this is just the latest in a long line of agonising quandaries that will inevitably see her cast her as villain, either in the eyes of one of her boys, or Bob’s family, or the so-called friends watching from the shadows.

“Every image contains a real child — an innocent victim — being abused, and that heart-breaking fact is never far from my mind,” says Katie. “All I can do is hope that they are identified and given the support they need. But our children need some professional help as well, because this crime has life-long emotional ramifications for them. They are victims of their fathers’ crimes, and they are more vulnerable as a result.”

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The Ministry of Justice decides who can legally be described as a victim of crime. Under its “Code of Practice for Victims of Crime in England and Wales”, also known as the Victim’s Code, the definition is: “A person who has suffered harm, including physical, mental or emotional harm or economic loss which was directly caused by a criminal offence; or a close relative (or a nominated family spokesperson) of a person whose death was directly caused by a criminal offence”.

Being described as a victim is important as it confers statutory rights. Among these are the right to be kept updated with the investigation and the offender’s court appearances and, crucially, “the right to be referred to services that support victims, which includes the right to contact them directly, and to have your needs assessed so services and support can be tailored to meet your needs”.

Victims also have the right to claim compensation — something that might concern ministers — yet none of the women I interviewed mentioned compensation. Instead, their priority was getting practical and psychological support for their children, at home and at school. Neither they nor their children are currently offered counselling or any other kind of help.

Natalie Smith, a 39-year-old partner in an accountancy firm, says she is struggling with the difficult questions that her daughters, Jane, seven, and Sarah, four, are starting to ask, but she has no access to professional help or advice as to how she should answer them. She got the knock two years ago after a tip-off to the police that her husband, Brad, a 45-year-old businessman, had been sharing images of girls aged under 10 with followers on Twitter.

“After his arrest, I began to feel guilty because maybe I should have noticed something,” Natalie says. “Then you feel guilty for the children your husband was looking at, his first victims. You feel guilty for choosing this man to be the father of your girls, because now they are also his victims. And you feel guilty that this is going to affect them for years to come because they will grow up without a father.”

Natalie immediately moved out of the family home and in with her parents. She is still there, and her husband has no contact with their children. When the girls ask where he is, Natalie wants to answer honestly, but in ways that will not adversely affect them in the long term – she just isn’t sure how to do that. All she has to work with are suggestions from other mothers in an online forum set up by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation.

“Jane came home one day and said there was a boy in her class whose parents didn’t live together, but he still gets to see his daddy,” says Natalie. “She asked why Daddy didn’t come home to us, and so I told her he had looked at something he shouldn’t have looked at and that meant he wasn’t allowed home. Then she asked what he had looked at, and I told her she was too young for me to tell her, but I promised I would when she was old enough. Mothers on the forum say I should give ‘age-appropriate answers’, but I have nobody to ask what is appropriate. Recently, Jane has been asking me to get married again because she wants a daddy. She didn’t say her daddy, just a daddy.”

I asked the Ministry of Justice whether it might attribute victim status to partners and children of IIoC offenders. It replied: “The Victims’ Code stipulates that a victim for the purposes of the Code is ‘a person who has suffered harm, including physical, mental or emotional harm or economic loss, which was directly caused by a criminal offence’.  Therefore, families of offenders are not deemed victims of crime unless they were directly harmed by the offence. There are no plans to change this as it could inadvertently result in victims of crime receiving less support.”

It was a response that disappointed Professor Armitage. “At the very least, under this definition, children of online child sexual abuse offenders should be defined as victims,” she says. But Sarah Champion, the MP for Rotherham and a leading light in the fight against child sexual abuse and trafficking, not least as a result of grooming gangs in her own constituency, is the only Parliamentarian so far to back the calls to acknowledge them as “victims”. “Whenever a close relative is found to commit some of the most heinous crimes, the impact on their family is devastating, and of course they deserve our support,” she says. “But the children of online child abuse offenders become caught up in a complex and unique situation through no fault of their own. I will be doing all I can to get these children the protections and legal recognition they deserve.”

For now, this is where the story ends. This year, hundreds of families will experience the knock and its disastrous consequences — the broken homes, broken relationships and broken children — yet theirs is a dilemma borne of a despicable act that seems too difficult to talk about, too easy to ignore. “We’re a group of people that society would rather not recognise because of the horrible crime that has created us,” says Katie White. “And while I feel there is an acceptance that all of this horror is sure to have damaged my children, it seems that it hasn’t damaged them enough for anyone to care.”

Names have been changed and details withheld to protect children and families.

The natural extension of all of this euphoria has become the need to prove that you’ve been immunised. And so the concept of the “vaccine passport” has been born; a digital document or smart phone app, a magic ticket that will allow you to hop on a plane, go to the theatre or pop to the pub.

Only last week, after facing pressure from countries reliant on summer tourism – including Greece, Italy and Spain — European leaders confirmed their intention to create an EU-wide vaccine certification scheme that would record people who had received approved jabs. “Everyone agreed that we need a digital vaccination certificate,” Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said after a virtual summit. “This will make travelling within the EU possible and could pave the way for further travel from third countries into the EU.”

It’s hardly surprising, then, that an array of British start-up companies is now jostling to produce a bewildering collection of “travel passes”, “immunity certificates” and “health passports”. But what, exactly, are they? And how will they work?

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First, it is important to remember that proof-of-vaccination documents are nothing new. Seasoned travellers have long been required to have certain inoculations before being granted access to some countries. These have, however, never existed in the context of a pandemic; so, in the past, if you had not had a jab against yellow fever, then you would have been barred from only a handful of countries — if you haven’t had a Covid vaccination, the effect on your travel plans could be much more profound.

The vaccination passports currently being mooted are broadly divided into two types: those intended for international travel and those you might be required to show if you wanted to access an office or entertainment venue — though the best solution (if, indeed, you regard such passports as a “solution” at all) would be for a vaccine passport to be recognised both by national border officials and pub bouncers.

Whatever their purpose, all these documents and passports do have one thing in common: they provide verification of a person’s identity — usually through biometrics or facial recognition — as well as up-to-date access to medical records showing their vaccinations, boosters and so on. Some also record whether a person is positive for antibodies, indicating that they have already had Covid-19.

In the UK, it’s worth noting that this path was not always inevitable. In fact, a succession of ministers initially said vaccine passports were not being considered by the government. But, with the prospect of lockdown being lifted now on the horizon, they have rowed back in the past couple of weeks. Indeed, in spite of the government’s initial reticence, almost half a million pounds in grants had already been awarded to eight companies working on variations of vaccine passports before Johnson’s “roadmap” was announced.

Among them is Logifect, a “global digital health solutions provider” which has received £37,000 to help develop a smartphone app to confirm immunity. Before the pandemic, Logifect was already involved in what it described as “the next generation of digital health”, which would enable individuals to access their medical records, receive healthcare advice and manage medical devices from their smartphones.

Its immunity passport, says Commercial Director Sean Power, would be a spin-off of that. First you would download its app to your smartphone. Using your camera within the app, you would be asked for a scan of your passport or driving licence, and then to have your picture taken for comparison and verification. Then, when you needed to demonstrate that your vaccines were up to date, you would open the app and give permission for your vaccine record to be accessed and for a QR code to be produced. This could then be read by the checker’s smart device, which would display a message with your photo confirming your vaccine status.

“Your picture links you to that record — your name doesn’t even appear,” says Power. “The communication is fully encrypted at both ends for complete security and then everything is deleted in seconds.

“We see this as a way of making a positive contribution to the community, with our costs being covered by a small fee — probably pennies — to the venue or authority that requests the information. It would cost the user nothing.”

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Meanwhile, iProov, a biometrics ID company that lists the US Department of Homeland Security and the UK Home Office as clients, and cybersecurity firm Mvine, which has already worked on projects with the Cabinet Office and NHS, have been given a joint £75,000 grant to develop an app that would perform a similar task to Logifect’s.

iProov’s founder and CEO Andrew Bud tells me their system involves the creation of a certificate to demonstrate that you have been vaccinated. They have developed a number of options, some of which will need the involvement of the Department of Health.

Currently, vaccination records are held by the National Immunisation Management System, which is run by Public Health England, Scotland and Wales independently of the NHS, and within GP surgery patient records. The iProov/Mvine system proposes storing these vaccination records using cloud technology, so they are neither held on your phone nor within existing NHS record systems.

“One of the defining features of the Mvine/iProov system is that it is designed for privacy,” says Bud. “It doesn’t require a name or address or date of birth or National Insurance number or any other irrelevant data. Our system is designed to associate the existence of a valid vaccine certificate with a face.”

Other companies that have received grants include: EAS Technologies (£137,877), which is focusing on vaccine verification for sporting events; the Hub Company (£49,448), which features PayPal and IBM among its clients; Enduring Net (£49,678), which says it usually focuses on technology “in humanitarian work”; and Verifiable Credentials (£89,000), which is planning to create “Covid-19 certificates” that cannot be forged.

But they are not only runners in this race. In fact, the UK Government is undertaking a three-month review of “vaccine passport” technology and may even consider repurposing the pre-existing NHS app — separate to its track and trace app — which gives people access to their medical records.

However, according to Phil Booth, co-ordinator of medConfidential, a campaign group promoting best practice in safeguarding the confidentiality of medical records, this would likely be unpopular among NHS staff.

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“It would essentially turn the NHS into a clearing house for information requested by the private sector,” he says. “This would find great resistance among those responsible for NHS Login [the online portal that patients can use to access a host of services and see their GP medical records]. Being forced to be a certification authority in the midst of all their other pandemic work would be a massive drain on resources and, frankly, a distraction.”

Moreover, Booth says, it is unclear what the purpose of all this technology would be: “It would be impossible for the government to partner up with private companies to produce vaccine passports until everybody had had the offer of a vaccine — otherwise requiring a passport to get through everyday life would be discriminatory.

“But the vaccine take up is so great — about 90 per cent in the higher age groups — that by the time everybody has been offered one, we will probably have reached herd immunity. So, what’s the point of having a passport that will get you into a pub in those circumstances?”

Still, that hasn’t deterred countries across the world from investing in this technology. Israel was one of the first, followed by Greece, Malta, Portugal, Israel, Estonia, Sweden and Norway. None of these countries has said that foreign internationals without proof of vaccination would be refused entry, but instead would be subject to other — more laborious and time-consuming — testing or quarantine regimes.

Domestically, Israel is the only country to have vaccinated enough people to have a system that is already functioning. About half of its 9.3 million citizens have received the two jabs required to qualify for a “green pass” that they can display using a Health Ministry app on their phones — people with such passes are already being granted access to restaurants, shops and theatres.

Airlines, too, are getting in on the act, courtesy of the pre-existing International Air Transport Association (IATA) Travel Pass app. This provides information to travellers on the Covid requirements of the country they are travelling to, tells them where they can get tested if required, enables labs to send results directly to passengers, and, crucially, provides for the creation of a digital vaccination record once governments make them available.

Among those already trialling aspects of it are Singapore Airlines, Etihad, RwandAir, Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Air New Zealand. Moreover, on top of all these initiatives is a whole host of private sector travel and vaccination record schemes, among them IBM’s Digital Health Pass, Daon’s Verifly (currently being trialled by BA and American Airlines) and Microsoft’s Vaccination Credential Initiative.

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But with the creation of so many disparate apps and vaccination confirmation systems, surely we will need some kind of international co-ordination for them to be practicable. And there is currently only one body that has an internationally-recognised proof-of-vaccination scheme — the World Health Organisation’s Yellow Card. Indeed, it increasingly seems that the WHO will be called upon to provide a solution to all this apparent chaos.

Already it has teamed up with Estonia — arguably the country with the world’s most efficient joined-up governmental IT architecture — to come up with a system that would enable national “vaccine passport” solutions to work in an international setting.

At the forefront of this partnership is Marten Kaevats, National Digital Adviser to the Estonian government and a member of the WHO’s Digital Health Technical Advisory Group. He says no new technology would be needed for an international system to work. Instead, building up trust among nations, so that they can rely on the information provided by others, would be paramount.

“We currently see most of the different governments deploying various sorts of their own technologies,” he tells me. “In order for these technologies to be able to co-operate with each other, we need to agree upon common global standards and principles.”

The WHO has set up a Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group in order to achieve this. But, says Kaveats, “the WHO doesn’t currently have a mandate to become the global anchor of trust for cross-border health data services. It could be given that at the end of May when the World Health Assembly [the decision-making body of the WHO] next convenes.”

With the threat of other Coronavirus variants — or entirely new viruses and pandemics — continuing to loom over us, it certainly seems only a matter before an international solution such as the WHO’s is devised. In the meantime, the race for a vaccine may be over. But the race to create vaccine passports has only just begun.

The choice made by Green, the head of animal testing compliance for one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, is one increasingly being made by biomedical researchers across the world — but not because of financial constraints, ethical considerations or scientific limitations.

It is all because of a shortage of monkeys.

On almost every continent, pharmaceutical research is being undermined by a dearth of primates caused by an export ban introduced by China last year to restrict the spread of Covid-19. It’s a measure that was initially welcomed in the West, but which is now being seen as an existential threat to biomedical research in the UK, Europe and the US.

Scientists fear that unless this shortage is addressed, the West will become dangerously reliant on China to test new treatments for heart disease, cancers and neurological disorders. More worryingly, come the next global pandemic, the ability to affect which vaccines are approved — and how quickly — could lie firmly in the hands of the Communist Party of China.

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“It isn’t too dramatic to say that this could be the beginning of the end for biopharmaceutical research in the West,” says Green. “I believe China’s long-term aim is to become the world leader in the sector, the place you will have to go to if you want to test your products. But you have to ask yourself whether you want China to be in control of such an important part of our lives — and to have access to so much of our intellectual property.”

The past 12 months have well demonstrated China’s growing influence on the West. But while attention has been focused on Covid-19, Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s 5G rollout and the threat to democracy in Hong Kong, its impact on Britain’s research sector has slipped under the radar.

Despite protests from critics, the testing of drugs and treatments on “Non-Human Primates” (NHPs), as scientists call them, cannot be replaced by computer modelling. It remains a requirement for many new drugs — including the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines — before trials can be allowed in humans.

In 2019, 2,015 new NHPs were used in experiments in the UK. Only 220 of them were not imported; most being bred under licence at a government breeding facility at Porton Down in Wiltshire. Some 1,154 came from breeding centres in Africa, largely from the island of Mauritius. And 782 came from Asia — roughly 75% of which came from China.

So when, in January last year, China imposed a ban on the export of all animals, the flow of a sizeable number of NHPs — roughly a quarter of those needed in the UK — was suddenly switched off. But that was only the beginning. British researchers also carry out a significant portion of their research through companies in other, worse-hit countries. And as a result, they have been left scrambling around to find the animals they need to complete their research.

US biotech companies were especially hard-hit. The US relies on China for 60% of its monkeys — some 35,000 a year — and because most of the big pharma companies are multinational, shortages in one area have resulted in bottlenecks in others, including the UK. Desperately in demand, the average price of the animals most-often used — rhesus macaques, cynomolgus macaques and marmosets — has doubled to $10,000 in the past year.

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Kirk Leech, executive director of the UK-based European Animal Research Association, which represents contract research organisations (CROs) — private labs that conduct animal research on behalf of pharmaceutical companies — has seen rare cases of desperate firms paying $30,000 a-head for monkeys.

“As China is the primary source of NHPs purpose-bred for scientific purposes, this ban has had a dramatic impact on both the supply and the cost of NHPs around the world and the ability of researchers to access the animals essential for the development of new vaccines and medicines,” he says.

“This export ban is a clear and present danger to human health, creating obstacles to, and additional expenses for, the development of vaccines and therapeutics, including for Covid-19. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine relied on preclinical data generated by BioNTech in Germany, using rhesus macaques. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and the Janssen vaccine have also relied on preclinical testing with NHPs for safety and efficacy.”

In the event of another global health crisis like the one we are experiencing, he warns, the repercussions could be severe: “Imagine a new pandemic; we would need a global response, we would need vaccine research and we would need to use NHPs. If shortages grow worse due to China’s actions, UK researchers would not be able to respond as they have to the Covid-19 pandemic. That is a real fear.”

Surely, then, the answer is simply to breed more monkeys outside China? In the long-term, that certainly seems to be the solution. But for at least half a decade, numbers will remain finite. More important, decisions to increase breeding could, counter-intuitively, make matters worse.

“The problem is we can’t simply increase the numbers of monkeys we have for sale,” one major Mauritian breeder told me, on condition of anonymity. “For every 100 breeding females, only around 60 babies are produced, and they are usually sold at two years. In order to increase the numbers, we would have to hold back females for breeding instead of selling them, and that would add to the shortage.

“We would have to hold them back for a further three years until they were mature enough to breed, and a female will produce only one baby every 18 to 20 months. A monkey generation [the time it takes for an animal to be born, reach adulthood and procreate] is five years, so that’s a whole generation taken out until numbers can be increased.

“Since the Chinese export ban, we’ve been receiving calls from researchers all round the world begging for monkeys. Some people sound desperate, but there’s nothing we can do in the short term.”

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But if the situation is so potentially-damaging to the UK’s life sciences, why isn’t the research sector issuing dire warnings over its future ­— or lack of one?

According to senior industry insiders, there is a two-pronged reluctance to publicly debate the problem. First is the memory of violent demonstrations against the animal research sector at the turn of the century, when staff at Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) in Cambridgeshire were targeted by extremists. Brian Cass, managing director of HLS was beaten outside his home by three men; the company’s marketing director, Andrew Gay, was temporarily blinded in a chemical spray attack; and the homes of workers and contractors were firebombed.

Violent animal activism has since all but evaporated. Yet memories endure of its peak in 2006, when extremists dug up the body of Gladys Hammond, a member of the family which ran Darley Oaks in Staffordshire, a farm which bred guinea pigs for the research industry. Three people who “ransomed” the body in return for the farm halting its business were jailed for 12 years each, but the fear of attracting such levels of violence and hatred remain.

Second, and more significantly, there is concern among CROs that if it became public knowledge that they were being affected by primate shortages, their pharmaceutical clients might turn elsewhere — probably China.

Only one CRO in the UK was prepared to comment publicly, yet anonymously, saying the Chinese ban “will result in global demand exceeding supply and what initially began as a US issue will also negatively impact the European research sector. The lack of access to NHPs due to the China ban will create obstacles to the development of vaccines including for Covid-19 and therapeutics globally.”

Leech — who represents the CROs, as well as pharmaceutical companies, private researchers and some universities — has called upon the British government and the European Commission to demand China lifts the ban, arguing it is in breach of World Trade Organisation General Tariffs and Trade rules. He says importing countries had bio-safety arrangements in place within a month and that the ban could have been lifted by then. The UK and European Commission say they are conducting internal discussions but have not yet agreed to act.

As for why China would deliberately starve the US and Europe of such a vital resource, I twice asked the Chinese Embassy in London to address the accusation that its actions were designed to undermine research in the West, but it failed to reply.

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It is worth noting, however, that such allegations about China’s quest for pharmaceutical dominance are nothing new. In 2016, David Cyranoski, writing for the journal Nature, was granted access to the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research near Kunming in south west China. In his article “Monkey Kingdom”, he described a research nirvana where animal rights activism doesn’t exist and bureaucracy presents no obstacles.

“With support from central and local governments, high-tech primate facilities have sprung up in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Guangzhou over the past decade,” he wrote. “These centres can provide scientists with monkeys in large numbers, and offer high-quality animal care and cutting-edge equipment with little red tape.”

He described how “many [researchers] have since sought refuge for their experiments in China… Some of the Chinese centres are even advertising themselves as primate-research hubs where scientists can fly in to take advantage of the latest tools, such as gene editing and advanced imaging.”

Finally, and with estimable prescience, Cyranoski concluded: “With China fast becoming a global centre for primate research, some scientists fear that it could hasten the atrophy of such science in the West and lead to a near monopoly, in which researchers become over-reliant on one country for essential disease research and drug testing.”

Deborah Green agrees. “When you look at China’s stated intentions for their industry, there have been a number of moves that seem intended to drive research towards it,” she says. “That’s everything from their control over lab supplies, PPE, research animals and so on. You can look at what China is spending on pharmaceutical research and development. The US is the biggest investor in this sector but China is now very close, and that number has gone from a very low number to rivalling that of the US in a very short time.”

“This all adds up to a reason to believe that China is trying to take control of this sector,” says Green. “Between the moves to push research towards China, and the animal rights activity in Europe and the US, we are going to see a continuing diminishing of research in the western world and a shift of it towards China. There are already researchers from major academic institutions in the US, and Europe sending their primate work to China. It’s cheaper, there is less regulation and they have the capacity to do it.”

But if major institutions and drug companies start sending highly advanced and hugely sensitive research to be advanced in China, isn’t this a risk every bit as great as that posed by Huawei, whose role in Britain’s 5G infrastructure is now being blocked by the UK government?

“I think this all presents serious issues when you look at China’s attitudes to intellectual property (IP), in that it has a very poor record on respecting IP rights,” says Green. “There is a great risk in taking the products that we develop and sending them over there for testing”

One solution, she says, would be for Western governments to help to create the infrastructure to breed NHPs. “These animals can’t simply be bred anywhere,” she admits. “They need sub-tropical conditions because ideally from a welfare point of view, they should be raised outdoors in large spaces. But where this is possible in parts of the United States and southern Europe, a bit of government protection from animal rights activists would be welcome. In the meantime, we’re hanging on, but we’re losing by inches.”

And if the West does lose, it seems there will be only one winner: China.