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

To ask His Majesty's Government what processes the Environment Agency follows in identifying and nominating chemical substances to the Prioritisation and Early Warning System (PEWS) for chemicals of emerging concern; and whether there are routes for individuals or other organisations to raise chemical substances of concern to PEWS.

The Environment Agency has developed a nomination process that integrates horizon scanning, environmental monitoring, and international collaboration. Nominations are received from internal and external stakeholders, collected from systematic reviews of published research, and watchlists developed by international environmental agency counterparts.

Individuals and organisations are able to feed into the nomination process by raising chemical substances of concern to any contact within DEFRA or the Environment Agency via PEWS@environment-agency.gov.uk who can nominate the substance following the instructions provided on the internal intranet page for PEWS.

The Environment Agency has adopted recommendations made by the Hazardous Substances Advisory Committee on stakeholder engagement, from their 2021 review of PEWS.