Response: Government’s PFAS action plan is a roadmap to nowhere - Wildlife & Countryside Link

Today (Tuesday 3 February) the Government announces its PFAS action plan – this is designed to clear up and stop new contamination from forever chemicals, which are now present in an estimated 10,000 sites across the country. PFAS are linked to cancer, immune suppression, reproductive harm, and biodiversity loss. Without decisive, precautionary regulation now, this plan risks locking the UK into decades of avoidable harm.

Wildlife and Countryside Link, the largest environmental coalition in England, leads the Chemicals Taskforce and has long been calling for a ban on PFAS and re-alignment with EU standards on chemicals to keep people and nature safe. In July 2025, the Taskforce wrote a proposed PFAS action plan, but there is a chasm between this and the Government’s new plan.

Chloe Alexander, Chemicals Policy lead at Wildlife and Countryside Link, said: “This plan is a roadmap to nowhere for one of the most serious pollution threats facing nature and public health. After years of warnings about the harms of PFAS, the Government has produced a crushingly disappointing framework that ducks the hard decisions and kicks action into the long grass. There are no binding phase-outs, no timetable for ending everyday uses for which affordable alternatives are already available, and no commitment to match the EU’s proposed broad ban on the use and manufacture of all PFAS – despite overwhelming evidence that tackling these ‘forever chemicals’ one by one simply does not work. Instead, the plan leans heavily on more monitoring, guidance and future consultations, while PFAS continue to build up in rivers, soils, wildlife and even our own bodies.”