Asked by: Owen Thompson (Scottish National Party - Midlothian)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what his Department’s process is for (a) recording and (b) keeping minutes of all meetings relating to Government business.
Answered by Victoria Prentis - Attorney General
Formal, structured meetings are usually minuted. However, not all meetings need to be minuted. It is expected that the general guidance that departments give to their staff will help officials make judgements as to what meetings need to be minuted, noting their Civil Service Code obligation to ‘keep accurate official records.’
Specific procedures are in place for external meetings involving Ministers. These are publicly available and can be found in the Guidance on the management of Private Office Papers.
Asked by: Owen Thompson (Scottish National Party - Midlothian)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what information his Department holds on the value of contracts given by (a) his Department and (b) the Food Standards Agency to Randox since 2010.
Answered by Victoria Prentis - Attorney General
Records of Government contracts above £10,000 in central government and £25,000 in the wider public sector are published on Contracts Finder:
https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Search
Asked by: Owen Thompson (Scottish National Party - Midlothian)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how much his Department spent on (a) communications, (b) advertising and (c) marketing in (i) the UK, (ii) England, (iii) Northern Ireland, (iv) Scotland and (v) Wales in each month from August 2020 to December 2020.
Answered by Victoria Prentis - Attorney General
The Cabinet Office publishes expenditure on COVID-19 and other national campaigns on a rolling monthly basis on GOV.UK as part of routine government transparency arrangements.
Asked by: Owen Thompson (Scottish National Party - Midlothian)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to ensure that all (a) sanitary and (b) toilet products are accurately labelled as flushable.
Answered by Rebecca Pow - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
Most sanitary products and many toilet products are not flushable. If disposed of by being flushed down a toilet, they can cause sewer blockages and harm to the environment. The water industry has conducted research into blockages, which suggests baby wipes are one of the main items causing them.
In November 2016, a Defra Ministerial roundtable meeting with the water industry and the wipe manufacturers’ representative body was held to address sewer blockages. It resulted in improved industry labelling to indicate more clearly those wipe products, particularly baby wipes, that should not be flushed.
Since then the water industry has also devised a new ‘fine to flush’ standard for wipe products, covering largely moist toilet tissue. If products pass strict industry standards, manufacturers of wipes can feature an official water industry ‘Fine to Flush’ symbol on their packaging. This symbol is starting to be seen on an increasing number of products.
This standard requires that these products do not contain plastic and break up upon entering a sewer, therefore entering the sewage system without causing blockages or harming the environment.
Asked by: Owen Thompson (Scottish National Party - Midlothian)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether the Government will require companies to buy letters of access to use data held by the European Chemicals Agency after the transition period.
Answered by Rebecca Pow - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
After the transition period we will establish our own independent chemical regime. Although both the UK and EU will operate REACH frameworks, the two systems will not be linked in any way. This means that companies wishing to retain access to the UK market will be required to notify and submit registration data to the Health and Safety Executive within given submission deadlines to confirm the registrations and ensure compliance with UK REACH.
The data that supports each substance’s registration in EU REACH is not owned by individual companies or the European Chemicals Agency, but by a commercial consortium of companies. Although there will be some UK companies that already own that data, others will need to negotiate access to fulfil the UK requirements.
That is why, in our published approach to negotiations, the Government has set out that to enable businesses to meet the separate requirements of the two markets, the UK and EU could, as part of a Chemicals Annex, agree data and information sharing mechanisms. We continue to pursue a negotiated deal on data sharing with the EU which we believe could mitigate the need for industry to provide full data packages and offer benefits to both UK and EU businesses. We believe that our proposal for a Chemicals Annex would be in the interests of UK and EU business.
We have also sought to minimise both the cost and burden to businesses through measures such as the grace period provisions relating to ‘Grandfathering’ and ‘Downstream User Import Notifications’ to minimise the disruption to industry. The aim of the transitional provisions we have put in place is to strike a balance which provides for a database to underpin robust, evidence-based regulation while placing achievable duties on business.
We said we would keep those provisions under review and have listened to concerns raised by a broad range of stakeholders about the current timelines for supplying data to the UK regulator. Therefore, we have recently announced our intention to extend the existing registration deadlines set in legislation (subject to parliamentary and devolved administration scrutiny). This will allow industry more time to reach agreement with commercial partners to access the registration data that they need and therefore reduce the risks of disruption to supply chains.
Information on these new deadlines can be found on the GOV.UK website at: www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-comply-with-reach-chemical-regulations.
Asked by: Owen Thompson (Scottish National Party - Midlothian)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what is the estimated (a) cost and (b) timescale of the Government’s plan to create a UK equivalent to the European Chemicals Agency’s Reach registration database.
Answered by Rebecca Pow - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
The preparations the Government made for the possibility of a no deal exit mean that we are well placed to be ready with our own independent regulatory regime for 1 January 2021. Our focus is now to build on what we have delivered already, taking the opportunity to develop and refine the systems and processes we are putting in place in preparation for UK REACH coming into force. This includes the Comply with UK REACH IT system for registrations that we have built, which will replicate key functions of the European Chemicals Agency’s REACH registration database to provide continuity for UK business.
The Government is increasing resource in the Health and Safety Executive, the Environment Agency and Defra to enable delivery of UK REACH. Once we have staffed up to full operating capability, we expect to spend about £13 million per year on the UK’s new REACH regulatory system. This figure covers the costs of operation and maintenance of the REACH IT system and staff resource in the three organisations, for example to ensure technical specialist input into risk and socio-economic assessment of chemicals for the UK.