The National Chemical Emergency Centre (NCEC) is a former UK government agency, now privately owned as part of Ricardo plc, providing information related to chemical accidents (spillages and fires) to emergency services in the United Kingdom and other countries.
The NCEC is headquartered on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in the Vale of White Horse in Oxfordshire.
[1] On 1 March 1979 the Centre launched, in cooperation with the Home Office, its Hazfile computer database, made available to fifteen British fire services,[2] listing over 10,000 chemical compounds; this was later replaced by the Chemdata system.
A similar system in the USA is called RTECS (Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances).
In the 1980s the NCEC developed the Chemdata[4][5] hazardous material database, which was provided to British fire services for use in case of chemical accidents.