On 10 April, the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) launched a new inquiry into the risks from Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), a 10,000-strong group also known as ‘forever chemicals’ as a result of their extreme resistance to breakdown in the natural environment.  

Human exposure to PFAS pollution can lead to a variety of ill effects including liver damage, thyroid disease and cancer. Owing to their indestructible nature, PFAS pollution is irreversible – while new legislation can reduce the entry of new PFAS into the environment, contamination is already ubiquitous in Europe. Research has found that the cost of cleaning up PFAS pollution could be over £1.6tn across the UK and Europe over a 20-year period. 

The EAC’s inquiry comes after an extended period of mounting pressure from NGOs, media, academia and the wider public on the UK Government to take action to tackle PFAS pollution. It seeks to understand, amongst other areas of focus, whether the incumbent regulatory regime for the use and disposal of PFAS – including UK REACH – is fit for purpose, and to what extent the Environment Agency and other competent bodies are resourced to understand and monitor the threat from these chemicals. Crucially, the inquiry sets a wide field of vision to include approaches from outside of the UK’s borders, looking to learn more on how PFAS are regulated, monitored and their associated pollution treated in other jurisdictions across the globe. 

IEEP UK research has already found that chemicals regulation has been one of the areas of most visible EU/UK divergence since the UK’s exit from the EU, with the work of UK REACH not matching the pace and scale of that of EU REACH. The latter has moved to restrict further categories of PFAS outside of PFOS and PFOA since 2021, including PFHxA and C9-14 PFCAs, while UK REACH has not followed suit. More widely, the EU also committed to a gradual phase-out of non-essential PFAS usage in its 2020 Chemicals Strategy, while the UK has made no such commitment. 

The EU’s Drinking Water Directive imposes binding limits on PFAS content in drinking water, with which Member States must comply by 2026. By contrast, in England and Wales the current approach to monitoring PFAS levels in drinking water is limited to a nonbinding target under the guidance of the Drinking Water Inspectorate.[1] It is worth noting, however, that the guidance of 0.1 µg/L for a group of 48 PFAS is more ambitious than the EU’s limit of 0.1 µg/L for a group of only 20 of these chemicals. 

Within Europe, the inquiry can also look towards countries such as France and Denmark, which have both gone further than current EU regulatory demands in their legislation on the restriction and monitoring of PFAS. Both nations have imposed product-specific bans on these substances, with the legislation passed in France in February 2025 including major product groups such as cosmetics (from 2026) and clothing (from 2030). Both the French and Danish legislation is at odds with the single market, and as such sends a clear political signal to the EU that these nations expect comparable bans to be enforced across the Union as a whole as soon as possible. 

[1] A Private Members Bill seeking to introduce statutory limits on PFAs is currently on its passage through parliament. However, as a Private Members’ Bill, it is unlikely to become law. 

Photo by Paul Teysen on Unsplash