Anyone in the chemical business might be very interested in this piece HERE. It's about how the government intends to go about handling the UK leaving the EU's REACH regime for chemicals. This is the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals and it covers thousands of chemicals used in Europe. According to George Peretz QC this is going to cause huge problems if we leave the EU.
The EU say we can only remain in the REACH system if we stay in the single market. If we exit the market as planned we will need to create our own standalone regulator. Peretz says:
"But planning for a standalone chemicals regime faces a major stumbling block: it could be hard to replicate the EU’s vast database of testing and safety data, which underpins the registration of 21,000 substances used in cosmetics, food and cars.
"Plans to grandfather these registrations through secondary legislation, without obtaining the underlying dossiers with analyses, might offer some short-term stability for industry. But it will leave the UK regulator effectively blind, and lays the ground for future legal challenges that could be hard to defend".
I notice in the leaked cross Whitehall briefing (HERE - page 20) the impact of leaving the single market will mean the transfer of registration of 9000 chemicals to importers inside the EU so they can continue to be used. New chemicals would need to registered twice at a cost of between 1700 and 34,000 Euros. And data gathering could cost 100,000 Euros.
The point Peretz makes is that we could simply replicate the database, but we would not have access to the dossier on each chemical so that if a problem arises with a UK "authorised" chemical the regulator would have no evidence to prove it's safe. It would be open to judicial review that it would be unable to defend.
At the moment I do not see anything like the car or farming industry lobbying being done by chemical companies. Perhaps they don't have a strong trade body but there must be some concerns not just by the manufacturers of the 9000 chemicals but also the users. It seems to me this is a problem that is very serious but so far down the list of priorities that nobody has even thought about it.
Another unforeseen consequence of May's crazy decision to leave the single market.
