Great thread by @pmdfoster on chemicals regulation out of the EU. There is a fundamental dilemma here.
https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1359563690723446789
Out of the EU you can try to set up your own equally thorough system of regulation: including huge and expensive-to-generate datasets. Problem: huge costs (and for a far smaller market); and suppliers will simply decide it’s not worth it and stop supplying GB*.
Other option: just “me too” EU approvals. But then you are tied to the EU regime and lose your own regulatory capacity. And have no accountability when things go wrong.
Moreover if you don’t have access to the EU dataset (and we don’t) you are taking a certain amount on trust.
There are two ways of trying to square that circle. The one that industry is pushing the government towards: partly to follow the EU regime (a form of default “me too” approval) but to allow UK/GB to take action (require more information/take its own action) in hard cases.
Problem is that the UK authorities will be less well placed than the EU, at least at the start. They won’t have the huge EU dataset. You may decide that what they will have, combined with what they can get, is good enough: but that’s a tricky judgment.
(And when it goes wrong it may be hard to explain to angry voters why the UK made do with less data than the EU insists on.)
The other route would have been to try to stay in these single market regimes. That was what the May government proposed to do. It was even hinted at in the 2019 political declaration - but the Johnson government chose not to pursue it.
Why was it rejected? Dogma, again: “The Government’s position on not remaining within the jurisdiction of the European Courts of Justice (ECJ), means that we are not seeking alignment with EU REACH or participation in the European Chemicals Agency”.
But if the UK had accepted that it would accept EU/EEA law in this area (eg the EFTA Court), it might have been possible to remain as a participant in the the EU/EEA regime (with which GB manufacturers will comply anyway, given exports).
Add to the list: “Choices made by the Johnson government that any successor is likely to want to revisit”.
*NI remains part of the EU regime under the protocol: so we are talking about a GB, not a UK, regime.
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