Examination of Witnesses (Questions 215
- 219)
MONDAY 9 FEBRUARY 2004
MS JUDITH
HACKITT, MR
JOHN KEMP
AND MR
CRAIG BARKER
Q215 Chairman: Welcome to you all
and thank you very much for coming along this afternoon to help
us with our inquiry into EU Chemicals Legislation. I will kick
off by asking you about the meeting which we had with the Commission
last Monday. They denied that the legislation would place EU industry
at a competitive disadvantage. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
Ms Hackitt: What we do have is
a great deal of concern among our members about the cost of this
legislation if it is not implemented in the correct way. Before
I say any more about that and I ask my colleagues to comment,
I think the most important thing to recognise is that we believe
this legislation needs to happen. We have no doubt whatsoever
that the existing legislation needs to be replaced. It does not
work well for existing substances and we are as keen as anyone
to see new legislation brought into place. We believe it can be
done in a way that is cost effective, proportionate and pragmatic,
but we are not there yet. We think that the Commission themselves
recognised that they were at risk of adding too much to the burden
of the regulation with the scope and corrected that before they
published the proposal in October, but we now believe the challenge
that lies ahead is to make the regulation more workable and that
there are many things that could be done to make the legislation
more workable from where we are now.
Q216 Chairman: So you are not concerned
about competitive advantage and so on?
Ms Hackitt: Yes we are because
of the direct costs of conducting the test but also, I think,
because of over-burdensome administration which could result from
legislation.
Q217 Chairman: What is that Commissioner
talking to us about if there is no problem? How do you prove him
wrong or right?
Ms Hackitt: One of the things
that we have been asking for for some time is a proper extended
impact assessment that would look at some of these things. The
Commission clearly believe that they have done an impact assessment
and we would acknowledge that they have assessed some of the potential
impacts of the legislation but it has not yet looked at things,
particularly, we believe, that any assessment that assumes the
European economy to be a closed one, has not adequately looked
at the real life situation and assessed what will happen in a
global industry and a global economy such as our industry now
operates in today.
Q218 Chairman: How do you make the
regulations more workable then? What are the important ways in
your view to make it more workable?
Ms Hackitt: There are some very
simple one liners, and we can talk about any of them in more detail.
First and foremost we believe that there is more work that needs
to be done in prioritising the substances that go through the
system. We are not convinced at all that volume alone is the right
criteria to be used to determine which substances are done first.
That, in turn, would ensure that we did not waste time and resources
unnecessarily on substances that do not need to be tested simply
because they are high volume but we know them to be harmless.
We think that prioritisation is important. We think the role of
the Central Agency—which is far from clear in the current
proposals—needs to be very carefully thought through because
the role that that Central Agency plays and the impact it has
on ensuring consistency, pragmatic decision making and timely
decision making are the sorts of things that will make a huge
difference between regulation that is workable, cost effective
and delivers the results that we all want to see from this legislation.
Q219 Chairman: You have talked about
an independent impact assessment. Who is going to carry that out?
Who is independent enough for you to carry that out? Who would
you nominate? Who have you in mind?
Ms Hackitt: I think there are
any one of several consultants out there who could do the impact
assessment. I think it is immaterial to us in industry who does
that. What matters is how that work is scoped out and it ought,
we think, to be done under a multi-disciplinary steering group
in an open and transparent fashion that involves everyone who
is interested in the output from it.
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