The role of HSE’s Pesticide Incidents Appraisal Panel (PIAP)

Summary

This SIM is aimed at raising the awareness of inspectors and complaints officers of the role of HSE’s Pesticide Incidents Appraisal Panel (PIAP) and the use that it makes of the information contained in pesticide incident investigation/follow up reports.

Introduction

1  All pesticides are biologically active substances and as such are subjected to a thorough screening process. No pesticide may be advertised, sold, supplied, stored or used unless it has been formally approved for each of these purposes. This means that all pesticides should be ‘safe’ when properly used i.e. used in accordance with the conditions of approval and consent. However, a measure of uncertainty will always remain as no chemical substance can ever be declared to be absolutely safe, no matter how rigorous the screening process.

Background

2  Inspectors and complaints officers investigate pesticide complaints in accordance with HSE’s complaints procedure and submit their completed investigation/follow up reports to the Sector. In turn all reports of incidents of alleged ill health resulting from the use of pesticides are submitted for consideration by PIAP.

3  PIAP has been increasingly concerned in recent years at the paucity of information contained in many of these reports.

Information

4  Post-approval monitoring of all pesticides is essential to detect any health effects that have not been identified by the initial screening process. PIAP makes a valuable contribution to this process.

5  PIAP considers all reported incidents of ill health which are alleged to have been caused by exposure to pesticides used at work. PIAP is informed of these incidents only on completion and submission of the investigation/follow up reports. PIAP itself does not carry out any further investigations and relies entirely on the information collected by FOD staff.

6  PIAP considers each incident report, not to establish causation or blame, but to judge the strength of association between exposure and ill health. This enables PIAP to detect any reliable patterns or trends of ill health associated with either individual pesticides or particular groups of pesticides. PIAP reports its findings to the Government’s Advisory Committee on Pesticides (ACP) which in turn advises the relevant Ministers and their counterparts in the devolved administrations who are responsible for pesticide approval.

7  PIAP also prepares an annual report of pesticides incidents that, again, relies entirely on information extracted from investigation/follow up reports. This report is published on the HSE website.

Action by inspectors and complaints officers

8  Inspectors and complaints officers should follow the instructions in the HSE’s complaints procedure when investigating/following up pesticide incidents and, in particular, should address the questions listed in the two pesticide checklists (see Step 1.3)

Contact

For further advice please contact Bob Hadway, Agriculture and Food Sector, Nottingham Tel. 0115 971 2849, email robert.hadway@hse.gov.uk