Tribunal ruling opens farmers’ pesticide records to public requests

The spray records that farmers are required to keep can be requested by members of the public, a tribunal has ruled, in a decision with direct consequences for anyone farming land near a watercourse. The General Regulatory Chamber found on all grounds for the river charity WildFish in its case against the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), confirming that pesticide users hold their records on the regulator’s behalf and that there is public interest in disclosure.

What records does the ruling cover?

Under Article 67 of the Plant Protection Products Regulation, anyone using professional plant protection products, the insecticides, weedkillers and fungicides of everyday arable and grassland farming, must keep three years of detailed records and supply them to the HSE on request. The regulator, in turn, must provide access to that information under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004. The HSE had refused requests, calling one “manifestly unreasonable”, and appealed when the Information Commissioner disagreed. The tribunal has now dismissed that appeal in full.

The case grew from the charity’s SmartRivers invertebrate monitoring on the Welsh Dee, which pointed to pesticide pollution in a particular sub-catchment, and from an earlier request about glyphosate use begun by Cardiff University students.

What does it mean for farmers and landowners?

The immediate effect is that environmental organisations, and anyone else, can now ask for the spray records of a named catchment, and the HSE is expected to comply with the law in disclosing them. Dr Justin Neal, head of legal at WildFish, said the tribunal “accepted our evidence that the records are important data not available elsewhere and that the disclosure would promote public understanding of pesticide use”, adding there are “huge blind-spots in farmer pesticide records because the HSE hasn’t been looking”.

For farms that shoot, and for shoots renting ground across arable England, the practical point is that record-keeping discipline now matters beyond the farm gate: what is sprayed, where and when may be read by campaign groups tracing pollution, and incomplete records will stand out. Well-kept books, equally, are the farmer’s best answer to a wrongly aimed claim.

What happens next

WildFish is calling on the HSE to meet its obligations following the judgment and disclose the data it requested on the Welsh Dee. Farming and landowner bodies have yet to respond to the ruling, and any guidance from the HSE on handling requests will follow. The decision is published on the National Archives case law service, linked below.