The EIP: 10 Days of the 10 Goals - Goal 4: Chemicals, Pesticides and the Law of Risk Management

Goal 4 of the Environmental Improvement Plan 2025 (“EIP 2025”) is concerned with chemicals and pesticides. The Government’s ambition is framed with notable care: “We will reduce the risks from chemicals and pesticides to people and the environment.”

That phrasing matters. Unlike Goals dealing with air, water or waste, Goal 4 does not promise cleaner outcomes or restored ecosystems. It speaks instead in the language of risk-reduction rather than elimination; management rather than prevention. This reflects an underlying reality: chemical pollution is among the most technically complex, scientifically uncertain and legally fragmented areas of environmental regulation.

Reducing risks from chemicals and pesticides

Goal 4 is structured around a small number of high-level commitments rather than a dense matrix of numerical targets. That in itself is revealing.

At its core, Goal 4 commits the Government to reducing risks arising from the manufacture, use and disposal of chemicals and pesticides, while continuing to support innovation and economic activity. The delivery mechanisms are largely indirect, relying on existing regulatory frameworks rather than new primary legislation.

Chemical and pesticide regulations exist as a complex and relatively fragmented web, including but not limited to the following regimes:

• UK REACH, the retained EU chemicals regime now operating domestically under the Health and Safety Executive;
• Pesticides regulation, including the Plant Protection Products regime and the Pesticides National Action Plan;
• Environmental permitting, controlling industrial releases of hazardous substances;
• Product-specific regimes, spanning consumer safety, water quality and waste law.

Chemical regulation does not stop at national borders and Goal 4 must be read against a dense web of international obligations. The UK remains party to various instruments, most notably the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, under which certain PFAS are already restricted.

Notably absent from Goal 4 is any pledge to consolidate or simplify the domestic architecture. There is no introduction of a new overarching chemicals regulator, nor a unified statutory framework. Instead, it signals incremental reform layered onto an already complex system.

At the same time, post-Brexit divergence from EU law looms large. The EU is progressing towards a group-based restriction on PFAS under EU REACH, reflecting growing acceptance that regulating these substances individually is scientifically and legally inadequate. The UK’s more incremental approach risks misalignment, with consequences for environmental protection, product standards and international trade. It also sharpens the role of domestic accountability mechanisms, particularly the Office for Environmental Protection, in scrutinising whether Government action under Goal 4 is compatible with environmental law principles.

PFAS: a regulatory conundrum

Goal 4 sets out the Government’s intentions concerning per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (“PFAS”); the so-called “forever chemicals”.

PFAS are a vast class of synthetic substances defined by carbon–fluorine bonds of exceptional stability. That stability makes them exceptionally useful: the first PFAS were invented by Teflon in 1938 for use in non-stick cookware, and they have been put to work on everything from skin cream to yoga pants since. It also makes them exceptionally harmful: they are highly persistent, mobile in water systems, and bioaccumulative in humans and wildlife. For this reason, they were branded as “forever chemicals” by an article in the Washington Post in 2018.

PFAS are now detected in soil, rivers, drinking water and blood serum across the globe. They are linked to serious public health concerns, including a range of cancers, endocrine disorders and reproductive health concerns. The risks posed by PFAS formed the subject of a recent Panorama programme (aired 1 Dec 2025) and there is an ongoing parliamentary inquiry by the Environmental Audit Committee.

From a regulatory perspective, PFAS expose various fault-lines in traditional chemical control. For example: (i) substance-by-substance regulation struggles to cope with large chemical families; (ii) assumptions of localised harm fall down when the contamination is often historic, diffuse and transboundary; and (iii) control at source are complicated when the source may no longer exist or may lie overseas.

Goal 4 responds by committing to a PFAS Action Plan in 2026, followed by a decision in 2027 on whether to restrict PFAS in firefighting foams under UK REACH. These are important signals, but they lack the concrete and detailed commitments that are a feature of other Goals.

All told, what Goal 4 presents on PFAS is primarily a ‘plan to make a plan’. While it offers positive noises in the right direction, but it doesn’t run to catch the UK up with the more advanced regulatory position in the USA and EU on this front. The reliance on future plans rather than immediate controls raises familiar questions. Is the complexity of the problem causing the regulatory can to be kicked down the road? And how does a risk-based, forward-looking approach sit with the precautionary principle, particularly where widespread exposure is already established?

Pesticides, targets and accountability

Goal 4 also encompasses pesticide risk reduction, including commitments to reduce the Pesticides Load Indicator by 2030.

This sits within a long-running legal debate about pesticide authorisation, post-approval controls and the application of precaution where scientific evidence is contested. For example, Alex Shattock advised the NGO ClientEarth on their OEP complaint regarding the emergency authorisation of bee-killing neonicotinoids, which resulted in a refusal to authorise the pesticide by the UK Government in January this year (see here and here). However, the ban is still not outright and there is a further request in the pipeline for sugar beets to be treated with it next year. There is also litigation in the pipeline regarding growing concerns about the pesticide Glysophate, which faces similar complexities in proving harm to a legal standard.

Under EU law, such disputes frequently played out before the Court of Justice (and continue to do so, see here). Post-Brexit, they now fall primarily to domestic judicial review, informed by retained EU principles and the Environment Act’s environmental principles duty, and nuisance / negligence claims.

What remains unclear is how far the EIP’s pesticide commitments will translate into legally enforceable constraints, as opposed to policy aspirations mediated through guidance, voluntary uptake and funding incentives.

Litigation, liability and future trajectories

Those who have read or seen ‘Dark Waters’, a legal thriller based on Robert Bilott’s claim against DuPont (a Teflon manufacturer) for poisoning the local community with the PFAS ‘PFOA’, will be aware that PFAS contamination has already generated extensive litigation in the United States, including class actions and product liability claims resulting in settlements running into the billions.

The UK litigation landscape is different and PFAS claims are only just starting to come through. A pre-action settlement has been achieved in September 2025 involving alleged PFAS pollution in North Yorkshire in relation to the Angus International Safety Group factory in Bentham (see here and here) and it claims are being investigated linked to AGC Chemicals’ Lancashire facility where high levels of PFAS were detected in discharges into the River Wyre by the Environment Agency) (see news coverage here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly85p0jndko).

I expect the coming years will see a growing trend in claims for:

• Judicial review of regulatory failure or unreasonable delay. The Courts have generally treated pesticide risk reduction as a matter of regulatory judgment mediated through plans, guidance and expert assessment, rather than as a source of directly enforceable environmental limits (see e.g. R (River Action) v Environment Agency [2024] EWHC 1279 (Admin) and R (Fighting Dirty) v EA [2024] EWHC 2029 (Admin), concerning sludge use in). But it will be interesting to see what comes through in the forthcoming 2026 Plan and whether that gives rise to tighter obligations with teeth;
• Statutory nuisance or negligence claims linked to contaminated land or water (following in the footsteps of Manchester Ship Canal Co Ltd v United Utilities Water Ltd (No 2) [2024] UKSC 22), potentially with a personal injury element depending on the nature of the claim (see my previous post on Goal 3: clean water, for some further thoughts on this area of litigation);
• Potentially human rights-based arguments, particularly where exposure engages Articles 2 (right to life) or 8 (right to private and family life) ECHR;
• Groundwork claims to compel the release of information concerning public and regulatory decision-making, e.g. the Information Commissioner’s Office decision to release HSE information to WildFish. Alex Goodman KC and Alex Shattock have been successful in similar tribunal appeals against ICO decisions on the basis of the public interest in understanding the role of net zero considerations in government decision-making: Amin v ICO [2025] UKFTT 952 (GRC).

The ingredients for future claims are increasingly present: scientific knowledge of harm, diffuse contamination, historic use and regulatory inertia. But this area of litigation raises interesting questions about causation and attribution: perhaps not dissimilar to asbestos, we know these chemicals are harmful, but don’t have an exact understanding of their toxicological or epidemiological issues to necessarily pin down fault on the balance of probabilities. It will be interesting to see if the Courts show willing to respond innovatively to PFAS litigation, as they did in the seminal mesothelioma case of Fairchild v Glenhaven Funeral Services Ltd [2003] 1 AC 32. But this will be tricky in a context where all of us are being unavoidably being exposed to many different PFAS on a regular basis, and there is no disease that has (thus far) been solely linked to these chemicals.

Where scrutiny will matter

As with other Goals, the success of Goal 4 will turn less on aspiration than on implementation. Several fault-lines stand out:

• Delay versus precaution: The staged approach to PFAS regulation risks criticism where exposure is already widespread and long-lasting. Future action plans may come under legal pressure if they are perceived as substitutes for timely intervention.
• Regulatory fragmentation: Chemical control remains scattered across multiple regimes and regulators. Without stronger coordination, gaps and overlaps are likely to persist.
• Scientific data and transparency. Risk-based regulation depends on high-quality data. Yet chemical testing, disclosure and monitoring remain uneven, particularly for legacy substances.
• Enforcement capacity: Local authorities and regulators face chronic resource constraints. Without adequate funding, even well-designed regimes struggle to deliver.

Overall thoughts

Goal 4 is less about dramatic ambition and more about structural adequacy. The promised PFAS Action Plan and future UK REACH decisions will be pivotal: not merely as policy documents, but as tests of whether Government is willing to recalibrate chemical regulation towards precaution, group-based controls and long-term environmental protection.

In that sense, Goal 4 functions as a stress test: of regulatory courage, of legal coherence, and of environmental law’s capacity to grapple with risks already embedded in the fabric of modern life.

Natasha Jackson is a barrister at Landmark Chambers.