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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment she has made of the adequacy of the Environment Agency's implementation timeline for the waste registration and accreditation system.

The packaging regulations provide the Environment Agency (EA) with a statutory 12-week period to determine applications for reprocessor & exporter registration and accreditation applications.

In a small number of cases the determination period is going beyond this 12-week period for applications under the new 2026 packaging regulations. This is due to increased application queries and embedding the new requirements to ensure all applications are consistently assessed. The EA will back date registrations and accreditations to 1 January 2026. The EA does not anticipate that these delays will continue and has a plan to determine all applications as promptly as possible.