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

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to expand the types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) regulated under environmental permitting, and whether they will consider tightening the limits on the amount of PFAS that can be in effluent.

The Environment Agency is developing options to increase the number of PFAS that are controlled through environmental permits issued under the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016. This is focused on those with the strongest evidence of harm, such as PFAS listed under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, and may include new statutory and non-statutory standards for water quality which can be used to set permit limits for discharges to rivers.

More widely, the Government is working with the Environment Agency to assess levels of PFAS occurring in the environment, their sources, and potential risks to inform policy and regulatory approaches. Action has already been taken to ban or highly restrict specific PFAS both domestically and internationally, including perfluoro-octane sulfonate (PFOS), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) as well as perfluorohexanesulphonic acid (PFHxS), a persistent organic pollutant, the use and production of which was prohibited in 2023.

In the Environmental Improvement Plan 2023, the Government also committed to consult on improvements to the regulatory framework for industrial emissions to better reflect our environmental priorities. This will include assessing whether any changes are required to ensure that industrial emissions of persistent chemicals such as PFAS are effectively controlled.