Chemicals (Health and Safety) (Amendment, Consequential and Transitional Provision) Regulations 2026

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Monday 27th April 2026 Lords Chamber

The HSE’s capacity and will to fulfil that role have been seriously questioned. After Brexit, it did not just have to fund a 40% increase in its chemicals workforce; it also had to become the regulator for building safety and dangerous goods, such as explosives, on an organisation-wide budget that was down by £122 million—43%—between 2010 and 2020. In 2025, the HSE had nearly 3,000 staff and 900 inspectors. That was well below the more than 4,000 staff and 1,500 inspectors it had in the 2000s. Will the Government be boosting the clearly inadequate resources of the HSE?

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is making some very serious points. However, in respect of the responsibilities of the HSE, surely she recognises that it is not just restricted to workplace activities? Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act explicitly mandates the HSE to take account of any harm produced by workplace activities to the public.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the noble Baroness for raising what is essentially my next point. Yes, the HSE has these responsibilities included, but its whole raison d’être is workplace safety. There have been many concerns that it does not have the regulatory or conceptual framework to truly consider environmental safety either for humans exposed through consumption, for example, or for the natural world.

This Government have added a growth duty for the HSE. Janet Newsham, a trustee of the Workers Policy Project, has noted how this compromises the independence of the HSE. If it has a duty to economic growth—that great God—it has got to balance that against health and environmental risks. Will the Government reconsider the growth duty, given that it is clearly hampering the HSE’s work?

Returning to the detail of the SI, I note that the environmental charity Fidra concluded that the draft regulations were

“not fit for purpose due to lack of specificity and lack of statutory timelines which could result in inaction or slow progress on critical chemical regulatory controls”.

On other recent concerning official pronouncements, I will start with the CLP elements of the SI. The Minister in the other place supported aligning with the UN’s Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals, known as GHS, rather than aligning with the six new hazard classes introduced by the EU.

The Minister in the other place repeated the claim from the HSE that there is a question around what the EU will do if these classes are not adopted globally. That prompted the European Commission to formally put on the record that it had not expressed any such commitment. Can the Minister confirm that the Government understand that the EU’s position on the CLP, as it is so clearly stated, is not to change to the UN model but to keep to its own, reflecting its better understanding of the growing risks?

I turn to the detail of the SI, to which the Minister also referred, and the powers about foreign jurisdictions. I note what she said, that the EU is the only regime that fits within the Government’s classification. I welcome that assurance, but I wonder whether the Minister will consider what might happen if we had in future a different Government who might interpret those regulations in a different way.

I rather suspected we would have some more Northern Ireland people here. I am running out of time, but I raise the issue of what problems this raises for Northern Ireland.

The final element of my concern is around making it easier for UK exporters of some of the most harmful chemicals to bypass controls. These are the products we have decided are too dangerous to use in the UK. Can the Minister assure me that removing the need for a special reference identification number from the HSE is in line with our commitments under the Rotterdam convention on prior informed consent? Is this not just a reflection of an ideological attachment to this idea of cutting red tape, which has done so much damage across so many areas of our safety?

I note that, as campaigners often highlight with UK exports, last year we exported 8,500 tonnes of pesticides that are banned on British farms because of the dangers they pose to human health and nature. Some 98% of these are produced by the Swiss-headquartered, Chinese-owned agrochemical giant, Syngenta, and include huge quantities of diquat, which is reported to have caused symptoms in Brazilian farmers including tremors, temporary paralysis and permanent eye damage.

There has been enough exported of the notorious bee-killing insecticide thiamethoxam, banned here in the UK, to spray an area bigger than England. This is going to countries including Côte d’Ivoire and Morocco. A broader question than this SI is: are the Government planning to act on this clearly morally untenable and environmentally dangerous situation, which is a risk to people around the world? Ultimately, it is about the health of everybody: no one is safe until everyone is safe, and there may well be products coming back to the UK from those countries on which those products have been used.

I have one further specific question that I was asked to put to the Minister, because there is considerable concern about this. We have seen disbanded a regular Defra event, the UK Chemicals Stakeholder Forum, which had offered media, NGOs and other stakeholders some degree of access to chemical updates from the HSE. Are the Government planning to restore or replace that forum so that the public are able to scrutinise our chemical regulations?

I am aware that I have said a lot of very technical stuff and a lot of very large words, but this is stuff to which your Lordships’ House really needs to pay attention. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has a very long report with many expressions of concern in it. I have not yet decided whether to put this to the vote—I am well aware of the situation with fatal amendments—but there is real concern across many different NGOs and people concerned with public health, and it is really important that we have a full debate on these issues. I beg to move.