Campaigners call on UK not to weaken plans for chemical regulation

Environmental and health groups have urged the UK government not to surrender to chemical industry demands to weaken its planned post-Brexit regulatory regime, warning any such move would “significantly reduce” the ability to protect the environment and public health.

More than 20 leading UK organisations, including the CHEM Trust and Breast Cancer UK, said the government would be breaking its promise to enhance environmental regulations after Brexit if it accepted recent proposals by the chemical industry to ease UK regulation.

The chemical industry wrote to ministers last month urging a radical rethink of plans to create a British version of the EU’s “Reach” regulatory regime, which it says will generate £1bn in unnecessary costs and make UK industry uncompetitive.

The industry called on the government to adopt “a more proportionate, effective and efficient” UK Reach model based around a more risk-based approach and the light-touch registration of existing chemicals that would not reduce safety standards.

However, the green groups said the industry’s proposals represented a “major weakening” of the envisaged UK Reach regime. 

“It would significantly reduce the ability of the regulator to take action to protect the environment and public and workers’ health from hazardous chemicals,” they wrote in a joint letter to ministers, including the business and environment secretaries, seen by the Financial Times.

The move leaves the government caught in a position trade experts said was an inevitable consequence of taking back control of regulatory powers from Brussels.

“This is the new normal. But it is not just about balancing domestic political constituencies, it also requires detailed research about implications for international trade,” said David Henig, of the European Centre for International Political Economy.

The environmentalists’ letter emerged as the agriculture department, Defra, and the business department, Beis, began consultations with the chemical industry this week over how to implement the UK Reach plan.

Under EU rules all chemicals must be registered with the Reach database in Helsinki, including full health and safety test data, before they enter the market. The UK wants to create its own Reach database, but UK companies who have already spent £500m registering with EU Reach estimate that it will cost £1bn to populate a UK-equivalent database because test data must often be purchased from third party owners.

Instead, the UK chemical industry has proposed that chemicals already registered with the EU database should only require a simple registration in the UK, with regulators only asking for full data sets on chemicals it considers a particular risk.

However, the environmental groups warned that accepting the industry’s plans to reduce registration requirements for chemicals would contravene the government’s own flagship environment bill. This commits to retain the “no data, no market [access]” principle on which EU Reach is based.

“Reducing requirements for safety data would therefore not only set chemicals regulation back decades but represent a clear deregulation of chemical governance, breaking a key environmental promise,” they said.

Leading signatories warned that the failure to demand full data on each and every chemical would leave the UK regulator, the Health and Safety Executive, “working in the dark” and at risk of legal challenge.

“It’s not enough to know that chemical data is out there somewhere,” said Libby Peake, head of policy at the Green Alliance think-tank. “Good regulation is a process, and it relies on access to high quality, up to date data.”

Thalie Martini, chief executive of Breast Cancer UK, said it was “extremely concerning” to see the industry calling on the government to relax requirements for providing safety data on chemicals. 

“Reduced requirements for the provision of safety data on chemicals weakens the Health and Safety Executive’s ability to protect public health and risks harmful chemicals entering the UK market,” she said.

Gareth Morgan, the head of farming and land use policy at the Soil Association, said the group understood industry concerns about the costs of government proposals but added that “the answer is not deregulation”.

The government confirmed it had received the letter and was “engaging closely” with all parties. “We are committed to maintaining our exceptional track record on regulatory enforcement which safeguards human health and the environment,” a spokesperson added.