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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps the Health and Safety Executive is taking to ensure it has the capacity to (a) implement legally enforceable (i) restrictions on and (ii) authorisations for chemicals after the transition period and (b) access chemicals regulation information in the period before a replacement for the European Chemicals Agency database is created.

At the end of the transition period, EU REACH will be transposed into UK law. Defra has been working closely with the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the Environment Agency and the Devolved Administrations to develop the processes for restriction and authorisation and we are confident that the processes will be operational when the domestic regime comes into force.

Under the domestic legislation, the Secretary of State will make a decision on a restriction on the basis of a proposal dossier and an opinion prepared by the HSE. To give this restriction legal effect, the Secretary of State will make and lay a statutory instrument to amend annex XVII of the domestic regime. If the restriction relates to a matter of devolved competency, the Secretary of State will seek the consent of the Devolved Administrations when making the decision.

A company must apply for and be granted an authorisation if it wishes to place on the market or use any substance that is on the authorisation list. Under domestic legislation, the Secretary of State will make the decision on whether an authorisation will be granted. Again, if the authorisation relates to a matter of devolved competency, the Secretary of State will seek the consent of the Devolved Administrations when making the decision. This decision and the reasons for it will be sent to the applicant and the HSE and the decision will be published. The Secretary of State’s decision will be made on the basis of the HSE’s opinion on the application for authorisation.

Our REACH legislation also provides transitional provisions for UK-based companies that hold (EU) REACH authorisations or are registered downstream users of authorisations at the end of the transition period or where the authorisation application has reached the stage where the European Chemicals Agency has adopted an opinion, but the Commission has not yet granted a decision.

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. Existing UK registrations and the duties on registrants will remain unbroken from Day 1. These duties include the duty to identify, transmit and apply appropriate risk management measures for chemicals, and the duty to hold all information relevant to their registration and to provide it to the UK regulator.

Our transitional provisions provide grace periods within which registrants must submit the data required to underpin their registration to the regulator. We have listened to concerns raised by stakeholders about the current timelines to supply that data and as a result, we intend 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 chemical substance registration data that they need and therefore reduce the risks of disruption to supply chains.

UK companies that have already registered a chemical with ECHA will be “grandfathered” into the UK system with no break in their legal access to the market. Those registrants would then have 120 days from UK REACH coming into force to provide UK authorities with some initial information on their substance.

The initial notification stage for UK downstream users of EU based registrations has been extended from 180 to 300 days from 1 January 2021. This is to allow UK downstream users the opportunity to assess how existing UK based registrants meet the 120-day deadline before starting their own 180-day process. We have also extended the deadline for completing a full registration supported by full data packages to 2, 4 and 6 years from the end of the initial 300-day period. The deadline for final submission of data underpinning the full registration is dependent on tonnage bands and hazard profile, with the highest tonnage and most hazardous chemicals first.