EnvironmentAL Audit Committee

We now come to the first Select Committee statement, on behalf of the Environmental Audit Committee. Mr Toby Perkins will speak for up to 10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of his statement, I will call Members to ask questions on the subject of the statement, which should be brief questions, not full speeches. I emphasise that questions should be directed to the Select Committee Chair, not the relevant Government Minister. Front Benchers may, of course, take part in questioning.

I am very pleased to present the Environmental Audit Committee’s ninth report of this Parliament, on addressing the risks from perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as forever chemicals. The inquiry was launched last year, at a time when the acronym PFAS might have been familiar only to a few experts. One year on, there has been an ITV and ENDS Report documentary about PFAS, the first ever Government PFAS action plan, and much more public awareness and scrutiny of PFAS pollution and contamination.

For the benefit of those watching who are unaware, I will briefly outline the PFAS issue before turning to the substance of our report. PFAS are a class of more than 10,000 synthetic chemicals that are used in a high variety of applications for their water resistance and resilience, from non-stick frying pans to making school uniforms more water-resistant and from firefighting foams to cosmetics. However, it is that same quality—their resistance to breaking down—that means they accumulate in the environment and in the human body over time. It is for this reason that they are known as forever chemicals. PFAS are now widely detected in UK rivers, soils and wildlife and in the blood of most people, and a growing body of evidence links high PFAS exposure to serious health and environmental risks, including certain cancers, immunity suppression, and fertility and developmental impacts. Addressing PFAS pollution is therefore essential to protecting public health, preventing long-term environmental harm and reducing future remediation costs.

Acknowledging the growing issue of PFAS, the Government published in February a PFAS action plan—the first of its kind, and a very welcome step. The Committee is grateful to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and to the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy), for engaging proactively and constructively with us throughout the process, allowing us the opportunity to examine the Government’s plan as part of our inquiry. The Committee’s inquiry found that the UK faces a growing legacy of PFAS pollution alongside continued emissions. Although the Government’s plan is a welcome starting point, it is short on the decisive action needed to prevent the harmful build-up of these chemicals in the environment. The plan focuses disproportionately on monitoring, rather than prevention and remediation. It also suggests voluntary action and industry self-regulation, which in our view will be insufficient to reduce PFAS emissions to the level we need to see.

In the Committee’s view, tackling the scale of contamination requires a combined approach. First, we must prevent ongoing PFAS emissions at source; secondly, we must manage continued PFAS emissions; and thirdly, we must address remediation and disposal of PFAS. This must be supported by sustained research, funding, monitoring and public transparency. The longer action to address the risks of PFAS is delayed, the greater the health, economic and environmental burdens will become.

I will briefly highlight some of the Committee’s recommendations to Government in those three areas. Right now, PFAS are still being manufactured, put into consumer products and released into the environment. The Committee made several recommendations to prevent PFAS pollution at source. We are calling for restrictions on PFAS in non-essential consumer products, including food packaging, cookware, cosmetics and coatings on school uniforms. Where the use of PFAS is considered essential to protect the health, safety and functioning of society, exemptions could of course be granted.

In phasing out PFAS, the regulatory system should shift from a substance-by-substance approach to group-based regulation, to prevent the replacement of banned PFAS with structurally similar and potentially harmful alternatives. We believe that without such a broad, group-based restriction on PFAS, the Government risk a whack-a-mole approach whereby new substances emerge faster than they can be evaluated and banned.

In the EU, more decisive action has been taken and chemicals are banned as a group, with firms having to seek a derogation from the law if the compound is either vital or irreplaceable. Lacking the same kind of action brings risks to our trade and economy, too; unnecessary regulatory divergence from the EU creates trade barriers in the UK—between Northern Ireland and the Republic and between the UK and the EU—which impacts UK manufacturing competitiveness. To research this issue, the Committee visited Angus Fire in Bentham in North Yorkshire and met directors of the firm, campaigners and villagers. It also visited Lyon and the French Parliament to learn about the regulatory actions in France, and about the state of the campaign and public opinion there.

The Committee argues that clear limits on the acceptable level of PFAS must be set to enable enforcement and remediation. The Government rightly mandated the guidelines for the level of PFAS allowed in drinking water; we would like to see statutory limits on PFAS in food and soils, and monitoring and enforcement by the Environment Agency to match. Protecting public health also requires long-term investment in biomonitoring and epidemiological research. The Committee recommended enhanced health screening for people with potentially high PFAS exposure. While monitoring and research are vital, they must not be used to delay action.

Finally, there is an important set of questions around existing and historic PFAS contamination: how should it be cleaned up, and who should pay for it? Where the Government were not clear, the Committee was. Based on the “polluter pays” principle, those who released PFAS into the environment should be expected to pay for it to be remediated. We of course recognise that in some cases, the Government and the manufacturing industry will need to work together to ensure that costs associated with the clean-up of the past do not endanger the future of these companies. We also recognise that in some cases, the companies that polluted in the past no longer exist, so the cost of the clean-up will fall on the Government. However, we want to see the Government starting from the perspective that the polluter should pay and the taxpayer should not be expected to foot the bill.

The Committee recommended that the Government should explore the implications of an emissions levy for PFAS on the UK REACH—registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals—candidate list, to deter ongoing environmental contamination and hold polluters responsible. In cases where the PFAS contamination is not attributable, central Government must provide dedicated funding for local authorities to clean it up and provide clear guidance on remediation and destruction methodologies. The Committee’s investigation of PFAS pollution was complex and at times technical, but our conclusions are not: forever chemicals are still being emitted, they are building up in our bodies and in the environment, and we know that they are harmful. Waiting will only make the problem worse; now is the time to act.

In conclusion, I wish to place on record several thanks. I thank all the members of the Committee for their contributions and their thoughtful engagement with this inquiry; the community members, regulators and industry representatives in Bentham who took the time to meet the Committee to discuss this sensitive and important topic with great transparency and candour; and the staff of the Environmental Audit Committee, particularly Dr Misha Patel, Dr William Brittain, Jonathan Wright and Jacob Moreton, for their work and expertise in co-ordinating the inquiry, the visits, the communications and the report. With that, I place our report before the House.

I call the shadow Minister.

As shadow DEFRA Minister, I congratulate and thank the Chair of the Committee and his cross-party Environmental Audit Committee for this excellent and timely report. As he has said, PFAS—these forever chemicals—are hugely damaging to the environment and pose significant risks to human health, animals and wildlife. The previous Government started work with the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive to look at monitoring and risk, and as the Chair said, the current Government have taken that work forward through the PFAS report in February this year. However, as his report rightly says, more needs to be done, so does he agree that the Government now need to take this work further and move more into the areas of prevention and solutions, such as placing pressure on water companies to enforce Drinking Water Inspectorate guidelines on PFAS limits?

I absolutely believe that the Government need to be ambitious on this issue. We welcome the fact that we now have a PFAS plan, which we did not have previously, and we want to be right behind the Minister in ensuring that DEFRA is as ambitious as it can be. Water companies contributed to our inquiry—they were quite glad to be in the unusual position of not being battered over the head for polluting, since in this case, they are the victims of pollution. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that the Drinking Water Inspectorate needs to be held to account, although it is important to recognise that among the panoply of water regulators, it is more successful than others. Alongside drinking water, we want to see the same sorts of limits applied to food and our agricultural sector more generally.

I congratulate my hon. Friend and his Committee on their important and timely report, on an issue that we know all too well in Redditch from our new fire and police hub. What we found reflects the report’s findings. Large-scale contamination was discovered on the site. While that has now successfully been remediated, the work relied on containment rather than destruction, echoing many of the Committee’s findings. I understand that the Committee heard that UK destruction capacity is extremely limited and largely reliant on high-temperature incineration. Does my hon. Friend agree that this local example in Redditch underlines the urgency of expanding safe, scalable destruction capability beyond incineration alone?

I absolutely agree. We know that the firefighting industry is very much affected. In comparison to some industries, it has clearly made significant progress in finding alternatives to PFAS, but it has been a major polluter over the years. We also recognise, of course, that being able to put out fires is incredibly important. Firefighting is the kind of essential use where we would understand that there could be derogations, but when PFAS are being used in cosmetics and so on, I wonder whether we should not be aiming to be more ambitious in putting bans in place. I agree with the points that my hon. Friend makes, and I thank him for that contribution.

I commend the Committee Chair and the Committee on the report, and I commend the Government on the PFAS plan. I thank him and the Committee for attending the location in my constituency that has suffered from this issue. Realistically, I cannot see this Government or a future Government being able to put in the money needed. The levy idea that he refers to seems to be a key way ahead. While consideration is given to his report’s recommendations, does he agree that communities impacted by PFAS need to have confidence in statutory authorities, such as the Environment Agency and local authorities?

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. I thank him for his engagement with us on behalf of his constituents and an important employer in his constituency. We do not want the message coming from this report to panic communities. We do not want to create the sense that Bentham or anywhere else is a community that is blighted and that no one should want to live there. At the same time, we want to recognise where these pollution contamination events have taken place. People need to be confident that the Environment Agency has not only the tools, capacity, resources and expertise, but the legislative heft to take action where there have been contamination breaches.

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee and all members of the Committee for their hard work and endeavours on synthetic chemicals and for highlighting the dangers to us all as citizens and to the environment. Environmental issues are a devolved matter, so what discussions or inquiries did the Select Committee and the Chair have with the Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs and perhaps the Health Minister at the Northern Ireland Assembly? Regulations are a necessity, and they will have an impact not just here, but in Northern Ireland. I ask that question to be helpful, and I hope the Chair can give us an answer.

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. In fact, his colleague, the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson), is a member of our Committee. He made the point strongly that because we have divergence from the EU in this area, it potentially causes major problems for the agricultural sector in Northern Ireland. Effectively, it will have different rules from the Republic, which creates a major issue. The Committee debated the impact on Northern Ireland at considerable length. It is an important point in our report, and one that we will be taking to the Government. We have not yet communicated with the Northern Ireland Assembly, but we would be happy to do so following this report.

I call the Minister to ask the final question on this Select Committee statement.

I thank my hon. Friend for highlighting this issue. As he said at the beginning of his remarks, it is clear that it is one that many people were not talking about until recently. I thank him for recognising that it is this Government who are creating the plan. I hope he will continue to work with us to raise this issue and finally tackle it in this country.

We look forward to working with the Minister. We will do everything we can to provide her with the support that she might need within the Department to get this issue taken as seriously as it should be. We recognise that there will always be people who push back. There are important reasons why we need to tread carefully, such as to support UK manufacturing, but we also need to recognise that this is a serious public health issue. We welcome the work she is doing and thank her for it.