Resetting the UK-EU Relationship (European Affairs Committee Report)

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, and the committee, for the report and the noble Lord for his clear, calm introduction to it. As he said, and as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, agreed, President Trump has broken the bonds of trust and we can no longer depend on the US as our ally, over Greenland and many other matters. That has put the UK and the EU in a very different position compared with where we were in 2016. As a middle-ranking power in an uncertain world, we need to tighten the bonds that have been severed and frayed with the EU and, we must not forget, with the rest of the world, the majority of which is not the US, China or Russia. With the right approach of humility, generosity and realism, we can work in partnership to tackle the many crises we face.

I know that others will cover in detail the utter failure by successive Governments to deal with the critical, often career-threatening, impacts of Brexit on our creative community. That makes us all poorer, not just financially but culturally, with the huge loss to young people of Erasmus+ which now, happily, is to be restored. However, I will focus on an issue that is crucial to the reset and to the public and environmental health of the UK, to which the committee paid only glancing attention. That is not a criticism. As the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, said, there are many highly technical areas that will need to be sorted and Parliament will struggle to have proper oversight of them. This is one of those areas, fitting under the sanitary and phytosanitary standards label: the regulation of pharmaceuticals and chemicals.

The EU is prohibiting the import of animal products from countries that routinely use antibiotics for growth promotion. This will take effect in September. We banned these practices domestically in 2006, yet the UK has not committed to the same rule for imports. Last November, I asked the Government in a Written Question whether the UK would align with these EU import rules. They stopped short of committing to an import ban. Hopefully, this will come with the SPS negotiations, but we need it now. I am not expecting a Dispatch Box declaration, but please will the Government make this a priority?

The public and environmental health gap extends particularly to water. The EU’s 2024 urban wastewater treatment directive mandates advanced treatment of urban wastewater to remove pharmaceutical residues, microplastics and other pollutants, along with harmonised antimicrobial resistance monitoring and producer responsibility schemes. What a contrast to “Dirty Business”, a recent television programme on this issue which provided an account that has horrified so many. Here we have no legally binding requirements for water companies to monitor emerging pollutants, including microplastics, antimicrobial residues or resistant bacteria or genes in effluent. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, spoke about being a rule taker. If others consistently have better rules, why do we not take those rules?

On chemicals, the UK is also falling behind. Since we left EU REACH, the EU has adopted 13 new restrictions and initiated 24 more. The UK has begun only three. We are trailing EU protections on chemicals, including the planned restrictions covering the 10,000 PFAS, the forever chemicals. We are subject to a cocktail of chemicals, of particular concern to the health of our young. We have begun action on only one PFAS restriction, despite civil society calling for alignment with the EU. The EU is also ahead of us on pesticides. Brexit has left us in this area, as in so many others, worse off—left behind and less healthy, with our environment dirtier and without the precautionary principle that we so urgently need to restore.