MANCHESTER, UK — The British Coatings Federation (BCF) has welcomed recent proposed changes to the forthcoming UK REACH regime as a small but welcome step in the right direction. However, it has also warned that these changes alone will not be enough to prevent the coatings sector – and wider chemicals industry - from being hit hard financially under the new post-Brexit regime. This is because it still does not resolve the underlying, inherent problems with the proposed UK REACH system, namely duplication of the EU REACH system and re-registration of all substances in a new database. It is this wholesale re-registration – including full data dossiers duplicating registrations already held in the EU REACH system - which will prove so bureaucratic, burdensome and costly to business.
The easiest and seemingly best way to avoid this wholesale duplication would be for the UK and EU to negotiate a data-sharing agreement as part of the ongoing Free Trade Agreement talks. This would potentially mean the UK regulator would maintain access to data already registered in the EU REACH database and avoid it having to be re-registered in the new UK REACH system. The BCF fully supports the UK Government’s attempts to achieve this result as part of the FTA talks.