My Lords, in this debate noble Lords with considerable experience have made extremely valuable contributions, certainly for me. I also found it immensely valuable having meetings earlier to get abreast of some of the key, essential points that noble Lords have made today.
I reiterate what the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and my noble friend Lady McIntosh said, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, when talking about
Aston Chemicals. I feel confident mentioning the name, as the noble Baroness mentioned it. So many of these businesses are in the small business sector, and how essential it is. I acknowledge the importance of the chemical industry and its contribution. I think we all agree how essential it is to have a regime—we can discuss what would be the optimum regime—where we can all have confidence in the use of chemicals. There have been strong expressions on matters that I entirely respect and understand, but I have a responsibility to your Lordships to say—and these are not just my riding instructions from the other place—that we need this statutory instrument if we are to have an operable system, which the chemical industry acknowledges.
I have counted and I think I may have had 45 to 50 questions. It would be impossible to indulge your Lordships and answer every one in great detail, but I will endeavour to answer as many as I can. The noble Lord, Lord Fox, opened by asking if Her Majesty’s Government—Defra and other departments—are concerned about these matters. I say emphatically yes, for the two reasons I opened with that noble Lords raised. This is a major commercial interest of this country. We also have the great responsibility of ensuring that our country is safe, and indeed that products from our country are safe for others to use.
On IT, the first thing to say is that I could never have invented any of it—so I can safely say that I would not have been in any positon to say whether this will work—but I am assured that for day-one functionality we are ensuring that industry will be able to register new and imported chemicals and to provide authorities with information required for maintaining the validity of existing registrations. Post day one, we will enable joint registrations for industry and build back-end functions for the HSE. I acknowledge what the noble Lord, Lord Fox, the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, and my noble friend Lady McIntosh said about IT, but this has been tested with industry and I can only report what I have heard on the success of that testing.
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The noble Lord, Lord Fox, asked about the position on the UK-based only representatives relocating to the EU. For UK-based manufacturers or ORs to maintain their EU REACH registration process, they must transfer their registration to an EU-based entity. This is the policy of the EU and the ECHA, over which we have no control. That is the position. However, only representatives are not obliged to relocate; they can set up a subsidiary in the EU or leave a subsidiary in the UK. Even if they relocate, they will be grandfathered into the UK. These chemicals therefore would not be lost to the UK market.
The noble Lord, Lord Fox, asked about the two-year grace period. He conceded that the “no data, no market” principle is central to REACH. The new UK REACH IT system will need to be populated by data provided by industry. The transitional arrangements in the instrument mean that the industry has grace periods in which to supply this data, but it is important that we preserve the “no data, no market” principle.
As I said in my opening remarks, we will keep matters under review. But we have to balance the needs of industry, on the one hand, with the need to
have the data to protect health and the environment, on the other. We will work with the industry on this; it is important that the relationship is strong. I assure noble Lords that it is my understanding that our work with the industry, BEIS and the HSE has been very strong. To the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I say this: I am sorry we have not yet had our debate, but quite a lot of things have happened since that very helpful and important report.
The noble Lord, Lord Fox, asked about the capability of the DAs. We are working with the devolved Administrations, the HSE and the Environment Agency so that we can develop a UK framework for managing chemicals. We recognise that the DAs’ resources are currently relatively limited and we will work with them individually to see how that should be addressed. That is an important point.
The noble Lord, Lord Fox, mentioned making data available and relying on what trade associations say. It is not naive to rely on EU trade bodies such as Cefic; indeed, Cefic’s model contract has been widely used across the EU. I did not realise it, but Cefic is a very influential body and is widely listened to.