File on 4 Investigates

Can cash grants help end homelessness?

30 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Do you give homeless people cash? Many people fear any donation will be misspent but a ground-breaking study in the UK is currently recruiting 125 hom...

Firefighting's forever chemical legacy

16 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Industrial firefighting foams are an essential part of on-site safety in UK factories. But for decades some of these familiar canisters contained pote...

An unholy row over bishop accused of bullying

09 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Anne Dyer is a trailblazer - becoming the first female Bishop in the Scottish Episcopal Church when she was appointed more than seven years ago. But s...

Adoption: The Blame Game

28 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 Investigates discovers a world of lies and blame within adoption in the UK. The BBC has conducted the most extensive Freedom of Information ...

Multi-cancer testing - hype or hope?

25 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Multi-cancer detection tests or MCDs can detect many cancers through a simple blood test. Many detect fragments of cancerous DNA that have broken off ...

The IT bug that's caused chaos in the courts

11 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

An ambitious plan to digitalize the courts was meant to remove the need for hundreds of thousands of paper documents. But File on 4 Investigates has d...

Chemsex: Hidden Pleasures, Hidden Harms

04 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

File on Four explores the risks some gay men are taking by habitually mixing their sex lives with drug use. The practice, known as Chemsex has been on...

High Stakes: Gambling in the armed forces

28 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 Investigates examines the scale of problem gambling in the armed forces and the devastating impact on those serving, veterans and their fami...

Abused for Our Food

22 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When journalist Georgie Styles is sent unpublished videos of farm workers in Britain being ‘treated like animals’, she begins to investigate the d...

Youth Justice: The project keeping young offenders out of custody

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A van selling coffee and sandwiches from an office car park doesn’t sound like anything special, but there’s one in Swindon helping to keep young ...

Swiped. Inside London's phone theft epidemic

30 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Up to 80,000 phones were stolen in London’s streets and transport network in 2024, according to the Metropolitan Police. As File on 4 Investigates d...

Inside the Migrant Hotel

22 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's a familiar story from the outside. Around 32,000 people are housed in migrant hotels around the UK and protests outside them have been violent an...

A Prison Inspector Calls

16 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In a broadcasting first, the BBC has followed a team from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons as it investigates conditions in a prison near Rugb...

Sex Offenders: The Long Way Back

02 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Alison Holt, BBC social affairs editor, has been given exceptional access to the clients of a Nottingham charity that works to reintegrate men who hav...

Domestic Abuse: Beyond the Checklist

26 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Leila Nathoo investigates the risk assessment system for domestic abuse, and asks whether it is any longer fit for purpose.The DASH form is the gatewa...

Rivers of Lead

19 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There are over 6,000 abandoned lead mines across the UK leaking hundreds of tons of metals into our rivers each year. With climate change causing an i...

My Faulty Knee Replacement

12 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 Investigates reveals how surgeons had raised concerns about a faulty replacement knee eight years before its US manufacturer finally decided...

Trip Shocked

05 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Psychedelics are having a moment — hailed as miracle cures for depression, PTSD and addiction. But what happens when the trip doesn’t end?In Trip ...

We Are Not a Conspiracy School

29 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In We Are Not A Conspiracy School, Darryl Morris sets out to meet the people behind HOPE Sussex, a community of home educators founded during the pand...

Hospital abuse caught on camera

15 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When the parent of a patient in a psychiatric hospital questioned why he couldn’t see CCTV footage of an incident involving his son it led to a seri...

Car finance

08 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Nine in ten people in the UK who buy a car use finance. The sector is the second largest lender to consumers in the UK after mortgages. But the indust...

The Invincible TikTok Gurus

30 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A deep-dive into the new generation of get-rich-quick gurus and the social media smoke and mirrors some use to shield themselves from criticism. This ...

File on 4 Investigates: Stalker in the Church

29 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When a Church of England volunteer in Leicester rejected a proposal to go on a date, it started a (sinister) stalking campaign against him. His stalke...

Adult Gaming Centres

17 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

High street gambling venues, known as adult gaming centres, promise a safe and sociable experience; the chance to have a chat, a coffee and a flutter,...

The Ketamine Trail

10 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ketamine was designed as an anaesthetic but its use as a recreational drug is growing fast, particularly among young people. It can have life-changing...

The Carbon Offset Trap

03 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The market where carbon offsets are bought and sold has been projected to grow and grow, as big companies look to prove they can reach net zero. But w...

Abortion on Trial: The Nicola Packer Story

27 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Nicola Packer went to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for help after she delivered a 26-week-old foetus in her bathroom. But she was reported to the ...

Chemical Control: Drugged and Raped by My Husband

13 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The story of Gisele Pelicot shocked the world. For almost a decade, the 72-year-old French grandmother’s husband Dominique secretly sedated her with...

Anatomy of a Firetrap

06 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Around the UK, a hidden crisis has been growing over the past eight years.Since the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, something extraordinary has become cl...

Hell and High Water: Are we ready for the floods?

29 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

2024 experienced the wettest period since records began and extreme rainfall events are becoming more frequent because of climate change. So what's be...

What’s Happening to Your Vet Bills?

15 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Pet ownership has rocketed since the covid pandemic, but so have vet prices. In fact, bills have increased by more than 60% in the last ten years. The...

The Tyre Scandal

25 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every year the UK produces around 50 million tyres for disposal. They’re supposed to be sent for recycling. Instead, big money is being made by dive...

Femicide

11 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At least two women are murdered every week in the UK in a domestic abuse situation. Newspapers often call it a crime of passion. ‘He lost control’...

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

04 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 Investigates tells the story of Kasibba – a woman locked up as a schoolgirl in a mental health hospital. She languished there for 45 years...

Generation K: Kids on Ketamine

25 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 Investigates goes to Burnley in Lancashire to meet the young people and their families as they grapple with a ketamine epidemic. Used in hum...

Abramovich, the Yachts and the Tax Dodge

28 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

With the billions he made at the expense of Russian taxpayers, Roman Abramovich bought six luxury superyachts over the years. Among them were the 162-...

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

14 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tens of thousands of children and young people across the UK suffer from severe forms of epilepsy which are resistant to treatment. For those with int...

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

07 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Michael Buchanan examines why the University Hospitals Sussex NHS trust, once considered one of England’s best, has now got the largest number of pa...

The abuse survivors calling on archbishop of York to resign

16 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The BBC's religion editor Aleem Maqbool hears from sexual abuse victims who say they were let down by senior church leaders for decades. Priest David ...

The International Student Scandal

03 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Universities in the UK are facing a financial crisis, and with fears some may become bankrupt many institutions are making savings by cutting courses ...

The Asylum Business

26 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The government has pledged to stop using hotels to house asylum seekers. But in early November nearly three hundred people were moved into a hotel in ...

The Labour Market: Women who have babies outside the NHS

19 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A series of scandals involving babies and mothers being harmed in hospital have shaken some people’s confidence in NHS maternity care. As a result, ...

The dangers within the cosmetic beauty industry

05 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 investigates the cosmetic beauty trade after the first death in the UK following a liquid BBL procedure. Jane Deith meets women who have b...

Gig Economy: The Ticketing Business

28 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When the rock band Oasis announced they were reuniting, 10 million fans from all over the world joined the queue for tickets. It was the UK’s bigges...

The rise in prison recalls

22 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The number of people being recalled to prison after they’ve been released has nearly doubled in recent years. It has come at a significant cost to t...

Lucy Letby: The Killer Questions

01 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 examines some of the most contentious statistical, scientific and medical evidence in the Lucy Letby trial. The programme reveals new concer...

After the Riots

27 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers came under attack during the riots that swept across the country earlier this month. The courts have been to...

Invisible Souls

18 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Fishermen from the Philippines, Ghana and Sri Lanka speak out about how badly, they say, they were treated by a Scottish fishing company that hired th...

The Priest and the Pay-off

13 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over three decades, a priest assessed as posing a risk of “significant harm” to children and vulnerable people worked in the Church of England. Bu...

Something in the Water: The Secrets of Camp Lejeune

30 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Camp Lejeune is a vast US Marine Corps base in North Carolina. It’s been in operation since the 1940s and covers a massive 240 square miles. But for...

The Child Rescue Con

16 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Project Rescue Children claims to save children from trafficking and abuse, but the BBC has uncovered evidence of false and misleading social media po...

Ghost Houses

09 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There are more empty homes than homeless households in this country. Why?Filled with cobwebs, windows broken, and rats scurrying about in their overgr...

On Trial: Protestors versus the Law

02 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

New laws aimed at preventing protestors causing disruption, more severe punishments and fewer defences in court have led some to question if the freed...

The Final Battle: Veterans fighting for compensation

25 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There are two compensation schemes for veterans who’ve suffered injury or illness as a result of service - the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme - or...

Sick of Waiting: The children struggling to get operations on the NHS

18 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the headlines about NHS waiting lists, children don’t often get a mention. Yet hundreds of thousands are waiting to start hospital for treatment....

Detained and Restrained: Britain's Vulnerable Kids

22 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The most senior family court judge in England has described the growing use of Deprivation of Liberty orders for vulnerable children as a 'crisis.' F...

Long Covid: Mind Over Matter?

21 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There are some two million people with long Covid in the UK - and most of them - around one and a half million - have symptoms that interfere with day...

Teams and Regimes: Sportswashing in Football

14 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Manchester City are dominating English football, with a trophy cabinet full of silverware. The club’s success has been bankrolled by money from Abu ...

Caught on Camera: The special school staff who abused kids

30 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Three years ago, dozens of memory sticks were discovered in a sealed box at a school for children with special educational needs. There was 500 hours ...

Lasting Legacy: What went wrong at a Hull funeral home?

16 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The discovery of 35 bodies and an unknown quantity of unidentified human ashes at a Hull funeral home has become one of the most harrowing investigati...

Slimming Groups and Eating Disorders

09 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Slimming World is the leading diet organisation in the UK. It has 700,000 members and, at a time when obesity is spiralling in the UK, it has helped m...

Degraded by Deepfakes

02 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Jodie had everything - a good job, great friends and a busy social life. But her world was turned upside down when she was targeted by an online abuse...

No Place to Call Home

19 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As the cost of living crisis continues to increase the strain on families, a record 142,000 children in England are homeless and living in what should...

Investigating Employee Assistance Programmes

12 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

‘Employee Assistance Programmes’ - almost 25 million workers in the UK have access to one through their employer. They’re designed to help peopl...

The Trouble with Parenting

05 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"Maria" ended up in A and E after being assaulted by her 11-year-old child. There’s nothing unusual about children being rude or sometimes abusive t...

A Coal Town Mystery

27 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It’s a scandal that went uncovered for 30 years. Body parts and organs from former workers in the nuclear industry were systematically removed for r...

When Abortion is a Crime

20 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The case of Carla Foster made headlines last year after the mother-of-three was initially sentenced to two years in prison for taking abortion pills a...

A Plan to Kill - The Murder of Brianna Ghey

02 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 tells the story behind the brutal killing of schoolgirl Brianna Ghey. She was attacked in a park near Warrington in Cheshire on a Saturday a...

Ireland's Far Right Riot

30 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When three young children and their carer were stabbed outside a school in Dublin, protests against immigration began, fuelled by rumours on social me...

Bailiffs Behaving Badly

22 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Councils in England and Wales are owed half a billion pounds - mainly in uncollected taxes and fines; money that's needed for essential services. Now,...

Lethal Weapons: The Blank-Firing Guns Converted to Kill

15 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Handguns which fire blanks are being converted into deadly weapons by criminals. File on 4 has discovered they're now being used more often than real ...

Escaping Anna

11 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A group of women turned to a private specialist eating disorder clinic in Bath hoping they would receive life-changing treatment. They say their menta...

Second Class Citizens: The Post Office IT Scandal

09 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The story of the Post Office IT scandal has gained new momentum in the wake of an ITV dramatisation about how dozens of subpostmasters were falsely ac...

Doctor of Deception

03 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For more than twenty years, Zholia Alemi worked as a psychiatrist for the NHS. She practiced the length and breadth of the country, treating vulnerabl...

The Murder of Brianna Ghey - A File On 4 special

20 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 tells the story behind the brutal killing of 16-year-old transgender schoolgirl Brianna Ghey. She was attacked in a park near Warrington in ...

Uninsurable Planet

19 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Felicity Hannah explores how climate change is leaving communities 'uninsurable' because of the rising risk of them being hit by extreme weather event...

Shoplifting and organised crime

12 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 reveals how hundreds of vulnerable women and children are being trafficked to the UK by organised crime gangs to work as shoplifters. The vi...

Whistling in the Wind: The NHS doctors sacked after raising concerns

05 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Lucy Letby was allowed to continue working with new-born babies despite her colleagues raising concerns about her for months. Her conviction highlight...

Artificial Intelligence: The Criminal Threat

28 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Artificial intelligence, or AI, makes it possible for machines to learn - and in the future it will perform many tasks now done by humans. But are cri...

Lost in Translation

21 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

When people who don't speak English, including refugees arriving in the UK after fleeing war, they are entitled to receive the support of interpreters...

Disability and the Adult Industry

07 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

As a young person, Ellen Macleod wasn’t sure whether her disabilities would mean she could never have sex so she turned to the internet. There she f...

The Anatomy of a Fraud

24 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 highlights one fraud phone call, in order to shine a light on how scammers work. A man rings a company pretending to be from the bank. How...

Wilko Town

17 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The collapse of retail giant Wilko in September left 12,500 people out of work across the UK. No area has been harder hit by the redundancies than the...

Bankrupt Birmingham

10 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

A perfect storm of equal pay claims and a huge overspend on an IT project has brought Europe’s largest local authority to its knees. But how did Bir...

Security Threat: Sham training courses risk public safety

02 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Manchester Arena terrorist attack in 2017 left 22 people dead and more than a thousand injured. The subsequent inquiry found security arrangements...

The Dark Side of Ballet

11 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Hayley Hassall investigates accusations of bullying and body-shaming at some of the UK’s elite ballet schools. File on 4 and Panorama have spoken to...

The Crooked House

08 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Crooked House: One summer’s night the Crooked House, known as Britain’s wonkiest pub, caught fire. Less than 48 hours later the ruins were kno...

A Different Class: Excluded kids lured into crime

29 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

After an inevitable decline during the pandemic, school exclusions are again on the increase. There are concerns that behaviour is worse because, post...

The Wolf of Crypto

01 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Set in the belly of rural England, the small village of Winchmore Hill is a far cry from the world of privileged tech bros and slick silicon valley in...

Modern Slavery in the Care Sector

25 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

With the number of potential modern slavery cases in England and Wales at a record level, File on 4 investigates how vulnerable people are being targe...

The Epilepsy Drug Scandal

18 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

It’s been called a bigger scandal than Thalidomide. The drug sodium valproate is estimated to have harmed 20,000 children in the UK. It’s mainly u...

The GP Crisis

11 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The morning rush in a doctor’s surgery usually begins around 8am, before the doors even open, as patients ring up to try and get a precious appointm...

The Organ Harvesters

26 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 tells the story of a young street trader from Lagos who revealed a conspiracy that took down one of Nigeria’s most powerful politicians. T...

Scout's Honour?

13 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Nearly half a million young people in the UK are members of the Scout Association. The organisation employs 143,000 adult volunteers and leads the way...

Living with Antisocial Behaviour

06 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Earlier this year, the government announced their new plan to stamp out antisocial behaviour across England and Wales. Hot spot policing and what they...

Sex Attacks in Hospitals

23 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

When you go to hospital you expect to be safe. But File on 4 has discovered that many patients and staff who are victims of sex attacks say not enough...

Affirmative Action on Trial

16 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

For 40 years, affirmative action policies were created in the United States to address a lack of women and people of colour in the workplace and at un...

Sex education: Too much too young?

09 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 investigates claims that children are being taught graphic and age-inappropriate material as part of their Relationship and Sex Education.Th...

Oiling Putin’s War?

02 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

File on 4 investigates the secretive world of oil shipping, dark fleets and camouflaged cargos. Sanctions were supposed to hit President Putin in the...

Police Complaints: A Crisis of Confidence

11 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Britain’s biggest police force says there are hundreds of rogue officers amongst its ranks. It’s now The Met’s job to root them out, with dozens...