Consumer Products (Control of Biocides) Bill [HL]

Baroness Anelay of St Johns Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on her success in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills and on bringing forward this Bill this Session. Her Bill gives the House the opportunity to consider the implications of the use of biocides in consumer products and reflect on the crucial importance of controlling and containing antimicrobial resistance—something to which the noble Lord, Lord Browne, just cogently referred.

My noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, when Prime Minister, was determined to tackle the threat to human health posed by AMR. Way back in 2014, he stated:

“Resistance to antibiotics is now a very real and worrying threat, as bacteria mutate to become immune to their effects … If we fail to act, we are looking at an almost unthinkable scenario where antibiotics no longer work and we are cast back into the dark ages of medicine where treatable infections and injuries will kill once again”.


I am therefore pleased that the Labour Government support the previous Conservative Government’s 20-year vision for tackling AMR, which aims to control and contain it by 2040. I hope the Government will work closely at an international level on these matters to continue to press forward with a coherent global response. That should mean working not only with nations and the World Health Organization but with business and the world of science.

The noble Baroness proposes in her Bill to constrain further the use of biocides in some consumer products. She is justifiably concerned about the impact on AMR that could result from biocide resistance. When legislation is brought forward to restrict the manufacture and sale of goods on the basis of perceived public health safety, it is right that one should examine whether measures are already in place that can protect the public. I therefore note that biocidal active substances and biocidal products are already regulated by the Health and Safety Executive under the GB Biocidal Products Regulations. Of course, many consumer products are regulated by the General Product Safety Regulations 2005. Defra, the Environment Agency and the UK Health Security Agency all have a locus in this matter.

It is always difficult to draft legislation that seeks to protect public health by banning something without also having a negative impact on innovation and imposing the requirement on business to comply with new, complex regulatory processes. Sometimes it is right to do so, but the devil is always in the detail.

I note that Clause 3 would create yet another quango: the biocidal consumer products advisory board. We need more information about that in the Bill. I note that the Government, in just over five months, have already established a raft of advisory bodies—quangos galore. I really had hoped not to see more.

It would be helpful to explore in Committee some of the interesting but vague terms used in the Bill. I think of the wording “real-world conditions” in Clause 2—I would love to find out how those can be legally defined. I look forward to the opportunity in Committee to have time to give more and better consideration to what can be an important Bill.