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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their current estimate of the cost of leaving the EU REACH programme and creating an alternative UK Register for chemicals.

UK REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of Chemicals) aims to ensure that companies putting chemicals on the market understand and manage the risks they might pose. Under UK REACH, manufacturers and importers have a duty to register chemicals to access the GB market.

The transition to UK REACH has presented some challenges for the chemicals industry, particularly the cost of having to negotiate and potentially pay for access to data needed to support a UK REACH registration. In response to this, in December 2021, we committed to exploring alternative arrangements for UK REACH transitional registrations, aiming to significantly reduce industry costs whilst ensuring high standards to safeguard public health and the environment. This work is still in progress.

Our estimated cost to industry of registering under the original UK REACH model is £2 billion over six years; however, this estimate is uncertain and actual costs would be a matter of commercial negotiation. We have recently consulted on extending the existing deadlines for the transition to UK REACH so companies do not incur these costs while we complete the work to develop an alternative transition model.