Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when he plans to publish the brief for the IT system which is to be commissioned to replace the EU REACH regulation for chemicals.

I can confirm that we do not intend to run a specific tender for this system as we have recently run a competition for a Digital Development partner and we are about to commence Alpha build. As set out in the Secretary of State’s Ministerial Direction on 19 January, we are scheduled to commence building the new IT system in February 2018. The direction enables urgent spending in a small number of instances where delay would jeopardise our readiness for withdrawal from the EU. We do not intend to publish a brief for the IT system as it will be developed using an iterative agile software development approach where requirements are continuously refined as development progresses.