The House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee has published an inquiry report investigating veterinary medicines and their impact. You can read the full report here: Paws for concern: pets, parasites and pollution
Last week the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee published an inquiry report investigating veterinary medicines and their impact. Paws for concern: pets, parasites and pollution (2026), concludes that the widespread routine use of pet parasite medications (PPMs) containing pesticides such as fipronil and imidacloprid is not supported by a sufficiently robust evidence base and poses an avoidable risk to the environment. The Committee found that these chemicals enter rivers and soils from treated pets, where they threaten aquatic and terrestrial wildlife, while significant gaps remain in understanding their full ecological and human health impacts. The report criticises weaknesses in the current regulatory system, including inadequate environmental risk assessments, poor data on product use, and the potential for regulatory capture. It recommends adopting a precautionary, risk-based approach to prescribing parasite treatments, restricting access to products through trained professionals, improving environmental risk assessments for all products, strengthening advice to pet owners, and investing in independent research to address evidence gaps.
What is the Committee?
The Environment and Climate Change Committee is a Select Committee in the House of Lords. Select Committees run inquiries on specific topics. The outcomes of these inquiries are public, and many require a response from the government. Select committees also carry out their work through correspondence, by engaging with the public through events and surveys, holding round-table discussions and undertaking visits.
What is the inquiry?
The inquiry heard from experts across the academic, environmental, industry and veterinary sectors and received wide ranging written evidence, including from Buglife.
Inquiry summary
The Committee’s report identifies credible evidence of aquatic contamination and ecological hazard, while simultaneously finding that the regulatory and monitoring system is not capable of determining the full scale of the problem. The Committee’s conclusions support a change in the regulatory presumption: where a parasiticide is not deemed necessary, exposing freshwater ecosystems to it should not be regarded as the default acceptable outcome. The report provides a strong evidential and policy foundation for arguing that prevention of unnecessary veterinary chemical pollution should sit alongside animal health as a core objective of the veterinary medicines regime.
The following recommendations directly align with Buglife urging Veterinary Medicines Directorate, transparency and combatting real or perceived regulatory capture; the need to ensure Phase II risk assessments are carried out; acknowledges that the pet industry’s marketing of the need for prophylactic use is invalid, and the need for a precautionary approach to reset a more realistic and fair balance when weighing up human, pet and environmental needs, hazards and risks.
A disappointing conclusion is that the recommendations include advocating for a minimum of being sold with some sort of guidance, known as the sales category called Non-Food Animal – Veterinarian, Pharmacist, Suitably Qualified Person or ‘NFA-VPS’, when Buglife would have liked to have seen a more robust approach where the Committee called for Prescription Medicine Only-Veterinarian (PMO-V) which means that these products would only be able to be prescribed by a vet.
Buglife was invited to speak to the Committee as expert witnesses to an inquiry that had initially been shaped around the need to examine and clarify whether or not pesticide pollution was taking place, and the possible environmental harm that is was causing. We helped to change the narrative, highlighting the need to acknowledge that major environmental pollution was already taking place, the need to focus in on the systematic failures of the Risk Assessments taking place; the risks of industry marketing prophylactic use, and the need to reform how pesticide-based tick and flea treatment products are sold and used in the UK. Given how receptive the Committee was to our concerns and the facts we presented, we are content that the focus was fair and right, and we hope this can provide a useful foundation to further set out our case to restrict imidacloprid and fipronil based products as well as reform both the risk assessments and the general use of all pesticide products used in tick and flea treatments for companion animals.
The Committee recommends that the Government:
- establish a clear and comprehensive evidence base on the use of PPMs, including the volume of products sold, the proportion of pets routinely treated, and the prevalence of pet parasites.
- address, as a matter of priority, the significant evidence gaps concerning the environmental impacts of PPMs, including their accumulation in soils and sewage sludge, and the potential risks to human health. This research should be funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), with a contribution from the pet health industry.
- require more rigorous Phase II Environmental Risk Assessments for all existing and future PPMs as soon as possible. This will help to address some of the evidence gaps mentioned above.
- advocate for a more precautionary approach to PPM use to reduce the number of unnecessary treatments, particularly for low-risk animals. This includes strengthening advice and guidance, ensuring PPMs cannot be sold without qualified advice, and making risks more visible on packaging.
- review the relationship between the regulators (VMD, industry and VICH (International Cooperation on Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Registration of Veterinary Medicinal Products) to ensure that any risk, or perceived risk, of regulatory capture is eliminated.
We welcome the Environment and Climate Change Committee’s report and its call to end the general sale of harmful veterinary medicines. This recommendation reinforces Buglife’s longstanding campaign and the evidence presented in our report earlier this year on the damaging effects of veterinary medicines on invertebrates. We also welcome the cross-party concern about the lack of regulatory transparency and the chemical industry’s influence. The Government must now act on these findings to deliver stronger safeguards for wildlife, people and pets.
Read our report on this topic: The effects of veterinary tick and flea treatments on freshwater invertebrates and ecosystems.
Image credit: Alexis Vaudelin, CC BY 2.0