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

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Monday 27th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, I do not have sympathy with the amendment, and the Minister is right to set out two main aims for her planned statutory instrument. It is right that we should allow certain products to continue which are necessary for wider health and safety issues while alternatives are found, or while we further research the known risks of these products. It is also right that the United Kingdom can have an independent strong body of health and safety and other chemical regulation which is also a bit more business-friendly and timely than that which the European Union produces.

I note that the Minister tells us that the system she is proposing for England, Wales and Scotland will be a little more flexible, and more helpful to innovation and to the products we currently have than the Northern Ireland system, which will be dynamically aligned with, or entirely dependent upon, the growing volume of regulation coming in Northern Ireland. So I have a lot of sympathy with her high-level aims. It would probably help the House if, when she comes to wind up the debate, we could have a little more information about whether Northern Ireland is going to be badly disadvantaged by losing access to the products that are currently used for important health and safety and chemical industry purposes, in a way that will not apply in England, Wales and Scotland.

That also poses the issue that when the Government get into even more detail in their SPS and other regulatory discussions with the European Union, they should dig in to avoid having to dynamically align with a known system of chemical regulation that the Government are quite rightly saying is less than perfect and which we need to differentiate the English, Welsh and Scottish system from to be more successful. The British chemical industry is in free fall at the moment, mainly because of the high costs of energy and the big retreat from petrochemicals. We have seen massive closures in the last year or so—it is really struggling. It is therefore incumbent on the Government to listen carefully to what it says about regulation.

I, like the Minister—and I am sure every noble Lord present in this place—would regard health and safety as the urgent priority. You do not compromise on safety. But we are talking here about being able to produce, make and sell—and then use—what are often intrinsically dangerous things, for a good purpose. You cannot ban them because they are in and of themselves dangerous, because they are not dangerous when they are used for a good purpose, as with a strong disinfectant killing germs—but, obviously, people must not drink it. We need rules, which the industry imposes, on handling and disposal, because there are obvious risks if people do not handle dangerous chemicals well or if they are not disposed of safely under controlled conditions. That requires a different kind of regulation.

I just hope that when we consider this, we can have a little more information about whether Northern Ireland is being disadvantaged, and whether there will be immediate problems either for its chemical industry or for the users of its chemicals, given that more things will be banned in Northern Ireland. I wonder whether we can have a little more reassurance that we will not sell out to an EU regulatory system that we think is far from perfect, when we could get some greater advantage out of better regulation but rather less of it. It would be good to set this into the broader context, that our chemical industry is in free fall. It is really struggling. We are losing factories and capacity, and it would be very important not to do anything in these regulations which made that more likely to occur.