The Retained EU Law Bill, known as the ‘REUL Bill’ for short, sets out to reform and revoke thousands of laws that have their origins in policies from the European Union. Any laws that have not been reformed or reviewed by the sunset deadline of December 2023, risk being lost entirely.
This Bill is particularly concerning for nature and the environment, given that many of the laws protecting our species and ecosystems originate from EU-derived laws. Indeed, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has at least 570 pieces of legislation threatened by the REUL Bill, although there may be hundreds more to add to this list. This is more than any other UK Government department.
As well as important laws like the Habitats Regulations and Water Framework Directive, much of the regulation that governs the use and approval of pesticides is also classed as ‘EU-derived’. This means that the laws that aim to protect people and nature from harms caused by pesticides will all need to be reviewed, and could be scrapped entirely if UK Government wishes to do so.
The regulations cover everything from determining which chemicals are allowed to be applied to crops or used in our gardens and when they can be applied, to how much of a pesticide ‘residue’ is allowed to be detected in the food we eat.
Weakening pesticide regulations would be a serious step backwards in our efforts to halt the decline of nature by 2030, and could have worrying impacts for human health also. This is because many studies have found a link between pesticide use and biodiversity loss, and pesticides are thought to be a major driver of the drastic declines in insect populations seen in recent decades. Pesticides can also negatively impact human health, which is particularly concerning given that global pesticide use has skyrocketed in recent decades, up 80% since 1990 according to a new study.
As well as helping to regulate pesticide use, our current pesticide legislation has helped to ban or severely restrict a number of chemicals that have been shown to pose a threat to people or the environment. One particular example is neonicotinoid pesticides, which were banned in 2018 after they were shown to be extremely toxic to our bee populations. If the REUL Bill leads to the weakening or scrapping of current pesticide regulations, its possible that we may see the return of toxic chemicals like neonicotinoids once again.
