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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to circumstances where EU REACH applies, whether UK-based companies purchasing or supplying chemicals to (a) the UK and (b) the EU will be required to access the information on each chemical they use from the original company or carry out duplicate testing if that information is not available.

Under European Union Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (EU REACH), data is owned by individual businesses and industry consortia. Great Britain (GB) companies who do not own the data they need to support their REACH registration will need to negotiate access to it from existing data owners. Industry has some time to make these arrangements. This is because we have put in place provisions for the deadlines for the full submission of data to underpin registration dossiers to be staggered, according to the quantity and hazard profile of a substance, over a period of 2, 4 or 6 years from 28 October 2021.

The UK has been at the forefront of opposing animal tests where alternative approaches could be used. Under UK REACH, registrants will submit their testing proposals to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), who can reject them if they contain unnecessary tests on animals. We will encourage the HSE to accept duplicate submissions where possible, recognising the validity of any animal testing that has already been undertaken.

GB is now considered a third country for EU REACH purposes. GB-based EU REACH registrants wanting to maintain access to the EU market needed to transfer their existing registrations to an EU/EEA/NI entity organisation by 31 December 2020. Completing this process removed the need for either purchasing access to testing data or further animal testing.

For GB exporters to the EU that have not completed this process, registration obligations fall to the European Union/European Economic Area/Northern Ireland (EU/EEA/NI) based importer of a substance. It is possible for a GB manufacturer to appoint an Only Representative to fulfil this function and either submit a new registration if one does not exist, or pay existing EU based EU REACH registrants for a letter of access to their data and/or member status of their registration.