The UK’s industrial hemp sector, and its potential, have been raised in Parliament nearly as many times in the first three months of 2026 as the entirety of 2025. 

In the House of Lords alone, peers have pressed the government in three separate exchanges in as many weeks, questioning whether current restrictions on hemp cultivation should be lifted, how much the UK is exporting, and how hemp can contribute to the country’s net-zero targets in construction.

While ministers have noted progress, including government grants and collaboration with producers, and have acknowledged hemp’s potential to contribute to sustainable building projects, concrete timelines and commitments remain elusive. 

This interest from Parliament reflects a broader shift. Private capital is beginning to flow into the sector. Institutional investors are backing hemp-insulated housing, major manufacturers are launching biobased product ranges, and government grant funding is underwriting the seed research that farmers have long said is missing. 

But the data tells a more cautious story. The UK has around 100 licensed hemp growers. It cannot cleanly measure how much hemp it exports for construction because no dedicated commodity code exists. 

The single regulatory change most likely to unlock the sector at scale, raising the permitted THC threshold from 0.2% to 0.3% to bring it in line with the European Union, has been accepted in principle by the government for over a year, with legislation still to follow. 

Yet, as the government sits on legislative change, the UK is rapidly losing its opportunity to capitalise on the promising sustainable sector to countries like France, which cultivated 23,000 hectares of hemp last year.

What the data actually shows

The most recent official figures, drawn from written answers to Parliament, offer a rough snapshot of the industry as it stands. 

As of November 2025, there were 102 extant industrial hemp licences in Great Britain, the majority issued to farms, with a small proportion held by educational and research institutes. That figure covers licences issued across the 2023, 2024 and 2025 growing seasons. The Home Office issues licences on a rolling three-year basis, which means the count is not directly comparable year on year. 

The Home Office does not publish licensed acreage, meaning the total land under hemp cultivation in the UK remains unknown from any official source.

When the question of support for the construction industry was put to the government directly in March 2026, the response pointed not to hemp specifically but to the Warm Homes Plan, described as ‘the biggest public investment in home upgrades in British history’. 

It also noted that ‘the government does not promote any one individual product over another’, a position that sits uneasily with DEFRA’s own identification of hemp as a strategic resource for food, feed, fibre, carbon capture and fuel, referenced in the same parliamentary period.

Trade data is similarly incomplete. When Lord Blencathra asked in March 2026 what information the government held on the quantity and value of UK industrial hemp exported to France for house construction, the Treasury’s response laid bare structural gaps. 

HMRC confirmed that no dedicated commodity code exists for industrial hemp used in construction. The crop is distributed across several broader headings, making a clean measurement of export volumes nearly impossible. Lord Livermore acknowledged that the heading most closely associated with hempcrete (code 6808) covering panels and boards, including hempcrete used as insulation, ‘may be the most appropriate,’ but is not specific to hemp.

Under that heading, the UK exported £49,784 worth of material to France in 2025, up from £4,939 in 2024 and £4,115 in 2023, a growth in percentage terms, but modest in absolute scale. 

A broader vegetable products code (1404) showed exports to France collapsing from £1.18m million in 2023 to £12,720 in 2025, though the government itself cautioned that none of these codes are specific enough to draw firm conclusions about hemp-in-construction flows specifically.

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Falling behind

The scale of France’s hemp construction sector puts the comparison in sharper relief. According to InterChanvre’s Memento 2025, a triennial industry observatory produced in partnership with the French Ministry of Agriculture and ADEME, France produced approximately 41,000 tonnes of hemp concrete annually as of the most recent assessment, alongside 14,000 tonnes of flexible hemp fibre insulation. 

Biosourced insulation currently holds an 11% market share in France and is projected to double by 2030. The crop itself yields an average of 7.1 tonnes of dry matter per hectare, of which 45–55% is shiv, the woody core that forms the primary input for hempcrete. Each hectare sequesters between nine and 15 tonnes of CO₂ per year; across France’s 23,600 hectares under cultivation in 2024, InterChanvre estimates 73,000 tonnes of CO₂ were stored in finished hemp products. There is no equivalent dataset for the UK, because the sector is not yet large enough to generate one.

The European Commission confirms France accounts for more than 60% of EU hemp production and is the only member state with a fully integrated processing chain from decortication to insulation manufacturing. 

In February, 2026, Lord Vaizey raised this directly in the Lords. He stated: “Hemp is grown in this country and is a fantastic building material that is both carbon negative and sustainable, with fantastic insulation qualities. 

“The French are the largest growers of hemp in Europe and use it in an extraordinary amount in construction. Given that 34 miles of rope on HMS Victory was made of hemp, how have we let the French steal a march on us, and what are the Government going to do about it?”

Baroness Hayman acknowledged the lobby for hemp in construction and said it would be considered as part of sustainable building going forward. It was a response that satisfied the question formally without committing to anything specific.

Signs of intent

Against that backdrop, recent months have brought tangible signals that both government and private capital are beginning to take the sector seriously, even if the legislative framework has not yet caught up.

In January 2026, the government awarded £912,000 to Precision Plants, an agri-biotech company working with researchers at the University of Hertfordshire and Rothamsted Research, to develop three hemp varieties specifically suited to UK growing conditions, one for grain, one for fibre, and one for dual-cropping. 

The grant was made through DEFRA’s Farming Innovation Programme in partnership with Innovate UK, as part of a broader £21.5m round backing fifteen agricultural innovation projects across England.

This awards operates under the UK’s updated precision breeding framework, the first bespoke competition of its kind following the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act, positioning hemp as an early beneficiary of post-Brexit agricultural innovation policy. 

It also directly addresses the reliance on imported European seed varieties that are poorly adapted to the UK’s cooler, maritime climate and divergent regulatory requirements.

“This investment supports the creation of a reliable, UK-based hemp seed pipeline that reduces regulatory risk for farmers and improves consistency in the field,” said Charles Clowes, research director and co-founder of Precision Plants. 

Farmers participating in the regional trials will receive seed and assistance navigating Home Office licensing requirements, an acknowledgement that the application process itself remains a meaningful barrier to entry.

On the private side, M&G has committed a further £30 million to Greencore Homes, which constructs low-carbon housing using panels insulated with hemp, lime and wood-fibre. Kingspan, one of the world’s largest insulation manufacturers, is launching a HempKor range with up to 95% biobased content. 

IndiNature’s hemp insulation products have become the first UK-grown and manufactured natural fibre insulation to achieve BBA certification, making them eligible for funding under the government’s £1bn Great British Insulation Scheme, a milestone that helps bring hemp insulation into the mainstream retrofit market.

Processing infrastructure is also developing. East Yorkshire Hemp has been processing UK-grown flax and hemp since 2002. UK Hempcrete and Unyte Hemp are now establishing new primary processing facilities across the country under the CHCx3 project, targeting the separation of fibre and shiv for commercial production streams.

What comes next

The government accepted the ACMD’s recommendation to raise the permitted THC threshold from 0.2% to 0.3% in February 2025, stating it intended to make the necessary legislative changes subject to parliamentary procedures. More than a year on, no such legislation has been introduced.

Moving from 0.2% to 0.3% would expand commercially viable seed varieties from roughly five or six to fifty or sixty, reduce compliance risk as rising temperatures push cannabinoid concentrations higher in the field, and, once legislated, could provide the first workable legal definition to begin addressing POCA’s continued chilling effect on banking and professional services for hemp businesses. 

Even then, Brexit-driven seed catalogue divergence means farmers cannot automatically access expanded EU varieties; each requires a separate DEFRA approval process.

Investment is arriving, infrastructure is developing, and the government is signalling intent. France, with 23,600 hectares under cultivation and a mature processing chain built over decades, illustrates both what is possible and how far the UK has to travel.