Published on: 20 October 2022
The Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) has released updated guidance on the UK Timber regulations and Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) licences.
Any natural or legal person who buys and sells timber or timber products already placed on the GB (England, Scotland and Wales) market – a trader – or first places timber or timber products on the GB market – an operator – is responsible for compliance.
Traders must keep records of who they buy timber or timber products from, and any traders they sell them to. Traders should also be checking if due diligence (see below) was originally done on the timber when it was first placed on the market.
Operators must not place illegally harvested timber on the GB market and to avoid doing so must first apply a due diligence system, under which they:
- gather information on timber, including its species, quantity, supplier, country of harvest and compliance with applicable legislation
- assess the risk of timber being illegal, applying set criteria in the regulations
- mitigate any identified risk to negligible, by obtaining additional information or taking further steps to verify legality
In the OPSS’s updated guidance the due diligence checklist has now been replaced with a due diligence tool. The new ‘tool’ is similar to that used by OPSS to review due diligence systems. It indicates the information that operators need to demonstrate compliance. (The depth of supporting evidence required varies with risk, depending on factors such as the complexity of the supply chain, species risk, country risk and the nature of the product.)
The OPSS guidance and new due diligence tool can be found on the gov.uk website here.