The UK’s Cannabis Industry Council (CIC) has launched a new report calling for industrial hemp regulation to be transferred from the Home Office to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), arguing that the current licensing regime is holding back a crop capable of helping the UK meet its binding Net Zero commitments.
The report, Opportunities from Industrial Hemp, was launched at the House of Commons yesterday (October 14), with backing from medicinal cannabis API specialist RX Extraction and regenerative solutions firm Unyte Group.
Authored by CIC Student Ambassador Luke Strong, a policy analysis MPhil candidate at the RAND School of Public Policy, it lands as the Climate Change Committee’s July 2024 assessment warned the UK is not on track to meet its 2030 interim target of a 68% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Industrial hemp is currently licensed under the Home Office, with a £580 three-year licence, an application window that opens in January and closes on April 1, and a legal THC ceiling of 0.3%, raised from 0.2% in November 2024 on advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD).
Strong argues the Home Office has ‘more pressing concerns’ and recommends DEFRA as a more appropriate regulator, alongside raising the THC limit to 1.0% in line with Australia, Thailand and Switzerland, allowing whole-plant use, and creating a UK-based seed approval process to replace the current reliance on EU-approved varieties bred for continental climates.
The whole-plant push revives a complaint aired in the UK’s first parliamentary debate on medical cannabis in April 2023, when former Scotland Secretary David Mundell told MPs that laws requiring hemp farmers to destroy most of the plant were holding back a UK CBD industry he described as the second largest in the world. The then minister of state, Will Quince, ruled out removing the distinction between the industrial hemp and cannabis cultivation regimes.
The commercial case
Hempcrete, a hemp-hurd-and-lime composite, has been shown to cut energy consumption in buildings by 45% compared with concrete, and the report cites research estimating that hemp sequesters eight to 15 tonnes of CO₂ per hectare during growth, against two to six tonnes per hectare for trees.
In a headline modelling scenario, if 50% of the roughly 180,000 permanent UK dwellings completed in 2024 had used hempcrete as a concrete alternative, lifetime carbon capture would reach 340,200 tonnes of CO₂, equivalent to the annual emissions of 79,353 petrol passenger vehicles.
Hemp-reinforced asphalt is flagged as a parallel opportunity, with the UK facing a £16.3bn carriageway repair backlog on a road network that is 95% asphalt. Biofuels and regenerative agriculture are presented as further routes to commercial scale.
In a joint foreword, Jamie Bartley of Unyte Group, a long-standing voice calling for UK government investment in the hemp sector, and Damien Bove of RX Extraction write that the report arrives ‘at a critical juncture’, as the UK stands ‘at a crossroads in its Net Zero journey, with ambitious targets but daunting challenges.’
They describe hemp as ‘not merely as a crop but as a regenerative solution, one that heals soil, captures carbon, stimulates innovation, and creates new economic opportunities’, and argue industrial hemp ‘can, and must, be central to our collective efforts to achieve Net Zero.’
The investment backdrop is supportive. UK green construction investment reached around £5bn in 2024 and is projected to grow to £13bn by 2033, and UK hemp licence numbers rose from six in 2013 to 136 in 2023.
The CIC also flags hemp’s role in voluntary carbon markets, an angle BoC has tracked since the launch in June 2023 of a four-year, £5.9m research project backed by 22 industry and research partners, including Unyte and the British Hemp Alliance, to study carbon capture in industrial hemp and other rotational crops.
Despite these clear opportunities, the report details the regulatory barriers holding the industry back. Case studies include Andre of Waltham Place, whose licence application was rejected on DBS grounds despite the same check being judged sufficient to foster a child from Ukraine, and Josh Dugdale of the Wasing Estate, whose 2021 renewal was refused on grounds including proximity to AWE Aldermaston, nearby Traveller sites and a road running alongside the growing field. Iain Tollhurst of Tollhurst Organic in Reading is cited as enduring six to seven weeks of exchanges with the Home Office over field suitability.
The launch is likely to feed into wider calls from the UK hemp lobby for a dedicated industrial strategy ahead of the 2026 growing season, when the Home Office’s six-year licence term and the ability for farmers to defer growing by a year are expected to take effect.
