Influencing Westminster

Long-term Campaigning & Influencing

A large portion of the BCF’s public affairs effort for the past few years has, of necessity, been focussed on reacting to large and immediate problems that needed navigating. Covid saw us channel resources into helping triage, interpret, and produce resources and guidance for members to help cope with the amount of Government advice and legislation being issued. We also put a lot of effort into helping members prepare for Brexit, especially as the clock ticked down on the end of the transition period. While neither of those issues have truly gone away – not least as the UK still finalises its own chemicals regulation regime and UK REACH – they are now receding to the extent we can look ahead a bit and be more proactive in our future campaigning and influencing work.

Top of the list is our plan for an ‘Essential Coatings’ campaign. This will be our main umbrella campaign for some time, and will be aiming to explain to politicians - and other influencers and decisionmakers - just how important the coatings sector is to the UK. We want to ensure the entire range of our industry’s contribution is understood and acknowledged, increasing the understanding that our members’ products are not confined to, for instance, indoor decorating or publishing, but are vital to other manufacturing sectors from automotive to aerospace, and from food packaging to healthcare, right across the country. We will take the essential coatings campaign to Parliament and increase our output via traditional and social media channels to make our case. We will be looking for your support to help maximise the impact of our work, especially with local MPs. The essential coatings campaign is likely to kick off in the second half of 2022.

In the meantime, we continue to build our other ongoing, strategic campaign: ‘Sustainable Coatings.’ We have added new pages to our website, and increased our social media output, to better display to the wider world the work the coatings, inks and wallcoverings sectors are doing to improve their environmental and sustainability performance. We are using the campaign not just to highlight the steps already taken to significantly improve our performance in areas such as recycling over recent years, but to publicise our pledges and plans for the future as we push towards Net Zero. Many members have already provided us with case studies of their own sustainability achievements to be shared online and if your company has a good example of best practice to share, please get in touch so we can add it to our growing list.

The Sustainable Coatings campaign in many ways dovetails with the essential coatings campaign, as so many of members’ products help extend the life-cycle of other products and infrastructure. And it also picks up on other initiatives being carried out by the BCF, from our Coatings Care work and our plans for a sector-wide Net Zero Roadmap, to the PaintCare and Paintsafe initiatives.

The other thing we will be looking to achieve this year is broadening and deepening our political contact base across the UK. While we already have excellent relationships with officials at BEIS, Defra and at the HSE, we should always be

looking to build on these so as to increase our lobbying power when needed. The work we have carried out through our sustainability initiatives has already helped open new doors and in early 2022 we held meetings with the Defra Minister in charge of chemicals policy – Jo Churchill MP – and also made new contacts at the Defra unit in the Treasury. Our campaigns and other planned activities should help us build new and deeper contacts at appropriate official, Ministerial and special advisor levels within various Government Departments, and in Number 10, as well as with more Members of Parliament and other useful stakeholders.

As usual, BCF also continues to try and punch above its weight by utilising membership of other organisations. In the UK, we are active and committed trade association or affiliate members of the Confederation of British Industry and Make UK, the latter representing the British manufacturing sector. These memberships confer benefits like macro economic intelligence reports that we share with our own members, as well as allowing us to feed into their broad political lobbying on things like our future customs relationship with the EU or what the Chancellor’s Budgets should be doing for business. This allows BCF to focus on the areas where we can add more expertise and value, e.g. on chemicals regulations. Other synergies are found through our memberships and partnerships with other organisations such as the British Printing Industries Federation, the Packaging Federation, Construction Products Association, and the Graphics & Print Media Alliance. These bring us more specific sector knowledge and expertise, such as on plastic packaging tax, which we can then share with BCF members. Moreover, our CEO Tom Bowtell, continues to hold the Chair of the Alliance of Chemicals Associations, which means we have close relationships with other trade associations across the chemicals supply chain, including the Chemical Industries Association and the Chemical Business Association. We also continue to work closely with other groups on issues like education, skills and training, or sustainability, and will look to continue to utilise and enhance these relationships over the coming period.

At the same time, BCF continues to work with other partners outside of the UK. This year, our CEO, Tom Bowtell, has been elected President of the World Coatings Council. This will ensure we are at the forefront of shaping and delivering global campaigns to benefit the coatings sector and Tom is looking forward to getting started on some new initiatives over the coming months. Moreover, now the UK has left the EU, it is arguably more important than ever that we work handin-glove with our European coatings associations, CEPE and EuPIA. We remain active across all of the CEPE working groups and Committees, with Tom sitting on the Operational Board. In addition, a new CEPE Public Affairs working group has been established with a view to developing more proactive and effective lobbying to feed into, and push back on, upcoming EU policies. We are also working more closely with the International Wallcoverings Association, IGI.

All in all, there is a lot to be done over the next year.The better we are known and the more contacts we have, the easier it should become to lobby for individual policy changes we want and need to see to help benefit BCF’s membership. As it happens, that list of asks is a long one, and looks set to grow still further the more the UK’s future chemicals strategy is developed, and as the EU seeks to amend its own existing regulations and strategies still further. We discuss some of our ongoing, more granular lobbying activities in a separate article later in the Handbook.

David Park

BCF Public Affairs Manager

david.park@bcf.co.uk