Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution

ROYAL COMMISSION ON ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION NEWS RELEASE

Last October the Royal Commission announced its intention to study the long-term effects of chemicals in the environment. This Study is still at the scoping stage, and will cover many of the issues raised in the White Paper in due course. At this stage the Royal Commission would only wish to offer the following preliminary comments, although your attention is also drawn to the many relevant points made in the Commission's 21^st Report, Setting Environmental Standards (in particular chapters 2 and 3) and in the response of December 1998 to your consultation on Sustainable Production and Use of Chemicals.

The Royal Commission agrees that the current European legislation for existing chemicals has not been effective and is in urgent need of reform. It agrees with the aspirations expressed in the Council Conclusions of June 1999, as laid out in Council document 6493/01. However, it does not believe that the White Paper adequately addresses those aspirations. Indeed, there seems to have been a shift in the balance of priorities in the two documents from the focus on protecting human health and the natural environment evident in the Council Conclusions towards a greater emphasis on the enhancement of competitiveness and international trade considerations in the White Paper.

The Royal Commission suspects that the draft conceals further tensions within the European Commission on the amount of evidence required to justify control action, on the one hand, under the precautionary principle, and, on the other, to avoid damage to competitiveness and conflict with WTO rules. The balance between these considerations needs to be clarified.

In particular, the Royal Commission is concerned that the strategy outlined in the White Paper is likely to result in many of the same problems as currently exist, such as control debates on individual chemicals lasting many years. The basic problem seems to be the combination of large uncertainties in chemical assessments, together with a lack of sufficient resources to drive the process forward.

Resources

The White Paper proposes addressing the latter problem by transferring much of the burden of assessment from regulators to industry. The Royal Commission has previously expressed its support for such a shift (response to DETR consultation on Sustainable Production and Use of Chemicals, December 1998). The financial cost of the testing requirements has been variously estimated at between €2.1bn (European Commission) and €20-30bn (CEFIC), but will no doubt result in a huge increase in the data available for the assessments. However, the uncertainties in the risk assessment process itself will remain, as will the long debates on costs and benefits⁽¹⁾ of individual risk management proposals. Indeed, the sheer volume of assessments being produced will increase the demands on regulators.

The Royal Commission has no strong views on whether the regulators should be located at the European Chemicals Bureau or in Member States, but it is clear that there will need to be a considerable increase in public resources to implement, monitor and manage the system. This must be considered a prerequisite for any successful strategy.

The Royal Commission supports the moves to extend obligations to downstream users and importers of chemicals in products to ensure that they assume responsibility for the safety of their products, but is concerned that this will only increase the existing long-standing problems with data sharing (resulting from the understandable concerns of responsible companies not to give a free ride to less scrupulous competitors). The White Paper is somewhat coy on how these problems will be overcome in practice.

Animal testing

The Royal Commission is particularly concerned at the implications of the proposed REACH system for tests on animals. It remains unconvinced by the White Paper’s bland assurances that OECD endorsed alternative methods will become available within the relevant deadlines. There must be grave doubts as to whether the public will accept the increased level of animal testing that seems to be implied.

Public values

Indeed, it is disappointing to note that the White Paper, while proposing improved public access to data on chemicals, is silent on involving the public in the processes being carried out in their name. The Royal Commission’s 21^st Report, Setting Environmental Standards, has much to say on the need to incorporate people’s values into the environmental policy process (see in particular chapters 7 and 8). The Royal Commission supports the efforts of the UK Chemicals Stakeholder Forum, both to involve stakeholders in the process and to articulate public values on the issues, and would like to see similar efforts undertaken at a European level.

Prioritisation for assessment

The Royal Commission considers the scattergun approach to data gathering and assessment to be costly and inefficient in financial, resource and animal terms. It would like to see the feasibility of alternative approaches investigated before the strategy is agreed. For instance, a more effective method for protecting humans and the natural environment from adverse chemical effects might be to divert a proportion of the available resources from laboratory testing of all chemicals into broad spectrum chemical and biological monitoring in the environment to identify priorities for detailed assessment.

Such an approach might imply a change of emphasis for the strategy, from routine provision of complete datasets and their evaluation, to an expanded system of authorisation for those substances identified as a concern by the monitoring programmes.

Authorisation of uses

The Royal Commission supports the concept of positive approvals for acceptable uses of particularly hazardous chemicals. This idea recognises that there is a balance to be made between the risks of a hazard manifesting itself and the benefits accruing to society from particular chemical uses. The Royal Commission's 21^st Report, Setting Environmental Standards, also expressed support for the extension of the principle of comparative assessment from the Biocides Directive to all regulatory procedures for the marketing and use of chemicals (paragraph 3.45). It is disappointing that the principle has not been sufficiently firmly adopted in the White Paper.

The Royal Commission regrets the narrowness of the criteria identified in the White Paper for the authorisation stage of the process, which will result in very few chemicals undergoing this process other than the CMT (carcinogenic, mutagenic or teratogenic) chemicals. In particular, the decision to remove the authorisation criteria present in earlier drafts for PBT (persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic) and VPVB (very persistent and very bioaccumulative) chemicals seems odd when compared to the accepted authorisation procedures for other types of less hazardous chemicals, such as pesticides and biocides. The reference instead to the UNEP POPs Convention criteria seems particularly inappropriate given that these criteria require a substance to be persistent, bioaccumulative, toxic, have evidence of long-range transport potential and an adverse risk assessment, leading one to wonder what uses of such an industrial chemical would be considered acceptable.

The Royal Commission would welcome further opportunities to contribute to the UK position as the strategy develops.

⁽¹⁾ With regard to the consideration of costs and benefits, your attention is drawn to the first sentence of paragraph 5.49 in the Royal Commission's 21^st Report, Setting Environmental Standards - “Economic appraisal should be regarded as an aid to making decisions which also take other factors into account.”

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