My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, with another message on the need for environmental protection. I will speak briefly in support of Amendment 293E and thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for moving it and for his long-term concentration on the issue.
We are yet again in a non-regression cause—I feel something like a broken record. We were promised non-regression; we heard it again and again through the whole Brexit debate and subsequently. We need to consider this amendment in the light of the debate that was conducted publicly in February and March, when the industry initially proposed a light-touch registration of chemicals that were already on the EU REACH registration at the end of the transition period, effectively allowing a rubber stamp on those already in use. In response to that, environmental groups warned that this would contravene the principles that are apparently contained in the Environment Bill, which commits to maintaining the “no data, no market access” principle on which REACH is based.
The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, made some very important points about how the EU is progressing with investigations of the impacts of cocktails of chemicals—something that is highly relevant to Amendment 152, which we debated some weeks ago, also in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, about the impact of pesticide applications near homes.
If we do not have full data on each and every chemical, the Health and Safety Executive will simply not be able to do its job and will be at risk of legal challenge. The data being out there somewhere is not enough. Regulation is an ongoing and continuous process that requires access to high-quality, up-to-date data. I note the response in March from Breast Cancer UK, which said that such an action would weaken the Health and Safety Executive’s ability to protect public health.
This is my final contribution to this very long Committee, and indeed the final contribution of the Green group. So, if the Committee will allow me a couple more sentences, I will say that it has been a long and fruitful haul, at least in the airing of issues and the identification of many flaws in the Bill. That is not surprising, perhaps, as this is such a fast-moving area and we have been dealing with a Bill so long in gestation. We have given the noble Lord the Minister a busy Recess in terms of meetings and, we hope, the
drafting of government amendments reflecting our debates. The noble Earl, Lord Devon, back at Second Reading, said that this was the Green Party’s Bill. We have done our best to make a positive, constructive contribution to this Bill, and we hope that we will see some results. I will see all noble Lords in September.