Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution

On 16 June 2004 the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution announced that it had agreed to a request from the Rt Hon Alun Michael, Minister of Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality, to carry out a special study on pesticides and bystander exposure.

The Commission examined the scientific evidence on which Defra has based its decision on bystander exposure and its policy on access to information on crop spraying. The Commission also considered wider issues related to the handling and communication of risk and uncertainty, as well as public involvement, values and perceptions in this context. On the 4 August 2004 the Commission officially opened the consultation process and invited evidence on, and comments regarding, the intended scope of the study as well as recommendations for specific questions to be addressed. A list of individuals and organisations invited to submit evidence to the pesticides and bystander exposure study can be found here. The Commission held a pesticides and bystander exposure public meeting at Church House, Great Smith Street, London on Saturday 25 September.

Many responses were received to the call for evidence, and 14 oral evidence sessions recorded. A number of consultations were also undertaken in the course of the study to inform Members on specific issues. A large amount of written evidence was received in the course of the study, both from individuals and organisations. Due to the amount of evidence submitted in a non-electronic format, in the instance of this study it will not be made available on the web. A list of those organisations and individuals that submitted evidence is given in Appendix C of the report. Please contact jo.bray@rcep.org.uk, if you wish to make a query about this material.

Peer Review
Oral Evidence Sessions
Consultations
Responses

Peer Review

There have been a number of enquiries about the people involved in the peer review process of the pesticides report. We undertook two rounds of peer review, contacting people who are experts in their areas, and considered the factual comments they made on the report.

• Round 1
• Round 2

Oral Evidence Sessions

Oral evidence was received from the 14 organisations listed below in the course of a number of Commission meetings from the October 2004 meeting to the March 2005 meeting. All transcripts were recorded by a verbatim reporter and corrected in consultation with the respective witnesses.

Each transcript is a PDF file, for use with Adobe^® Acrobat^® Reader^TM. If you do not already have this free software, please click the icon to transfer to the Adobe site to download a copy.

Transcripts

Advisory Committee on Pesticides
Agricultural engineers association
British Crop Production Council
Certis Syngenta
Chief Medical Officer
Crop Protection Association
Department of Health
Georgina Downs
Health Protection Agency
National Association of Agricultural Contractors
National Farmers Union
Pesticides Action Network
Pesticides Safety Directorate
Soil Association

Consultations

Four consultancies were commissioned in the course of the study:

The potential economic and financial impact of buffer zones
Agra CEAS consulting Ltd.

National estimates of residential land adjacent to arable land using Countryside Survey sample data
Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

Pesticides and Bystander Exposure: Tort Liability
Mr John Murphy, School of Law, Manchester University

Pesticides literature review
Professor Michael Burr, Department of Epidemiology, Cardiff University

For further information on the study please contact: jo.bray@rcep.org.uk.

Responses to the report

The Advisory Committee on Pesticides produced a document in response to the short report. The RCEP has produced a response to this document (please note that this is a PDF file, for use with Adobe^® Acrobat^® Reader^TM). Defra expected to officially respond to the report shortly.