Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 21st November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Trees, and to reinforce his concern about gene drive and his desire for a direct answer from the Minister at some point.

The House may not know that the term “genetic engineering” was coined by a pulp science-fiction writer, Jack Williamson, in the novel Dragon’s Island. As you would expect from a 1950s pulp science-fiction novel, it was an extremely lurid, overwritten and overblown expression of concern, but the concerns that arise from gene drives fit within that framework.

Returning to the framework of this Bill, your Lordships’ House is now used to Bills coming before us, from the Commons or directly from the Government, in a dreadful state. However, the Schools Bill was at least about schools. The Procurement Bill was at least about—you guessed it—procurement, however poorly drafted it might have been, as the Government acknowledged. Yet with this Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill we have hit a new low. Experts from across the field, including many in favour of the widespread rollout of gene editing, say that “precision breeding” has no technical or legal meaning. The phrase is a sales slogan, not a definition, making the tabling of this Bill extremely surprising. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, set out many other practical concerns from the Regulatory Policy Committee. I will not repeat them, but the red flags are flying.

Echoing and building on the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Winston, coming back to “precision”, how DNA works is far from precise, and the tools with which we manipulate it interact with highly variable genetic material in unpredictable ways. I will venture a little into the depths of the science because it is crucial. As with so many other issues within science, understanding is changing fast. Science often revises itself in deeply fundamental ways. I am afraid that your Lordships’ House as a whole has not truly grasped that. There are few people in politics with a scientific background, though many of them are here in the Chamber today, and some who acquired it many decades ago, while those understandings have since moved on, and sometimes have reversed.

As the noble Lord, Lord Winston, outlined, genes do not operate in a deterministic way how an organism develops. Living beings are complex, ever-changing. They are not machines built to a blueprint. Picking up some of those technical points, copy number variation, the number of instances of a gene, can have widely varying effects. There are epigenetic changes: under different environmental circumstances the code of the genes can be read differently. Even the location of the same gene in a different place can result in widely different outcomes.

What I was taught in a science degree 30 years ago was junk DNA—about 99% of the total—is now titled “non-coding DNA”. We know, as we knew then, that it does not produce proteins, but it has widely varying impacts on the DNA that does produce proteins. I pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, about exogenous DNA, paraphrasing a little, that we do not really have to worry about it, but his junk DNA can have unknown and variable effects, so we really must think about it. However, I thank the noble Lord for putting “tardigrades” into Hansard, I think, for the second time, since the first time was in my maiden speech.

There is increased scientific understanding of how genetics and the environment interact. It is neatly, if somewhat cryptically, summed up in the phrase “genotype does not determine phenotype”. Plants and animals are products of complex, sophisticated, ever-changing interactions between their genes, the microbiome that, in effect, makes every complex organism in an individual ecosystem—including every Member of your Lordships’ House—the chemical and physical framework around them, and even pure chance. I point noble Lords to a fascinating article in New Scientist on 21 September on fascinating new research showing how there is a large element of chance in the way your brain develops.

The tools used for gene editing are not nearly as precise as has been claimed and there is a practical reality about how these studies are carried out. They often fail to check beyond the intended outcomes; they see if they produce what they wanted, but they do not see what else they have produced. To quote one careful academic analysis from this year,

“very few studies have used ‘unbiased’ methods and a systematic approach to detect genome-wide off-target mutations.”

That is where we look for the driving force, the commercial interests, behind so much of this research. People are very often not paid to find the results that they did not want.

I point noble Lords to an excellent briefing, which covers these issues in far more detail than I have time to, from the Alliance for Food Purity. There is a great deal of very detailed technical work in that briefing. However, the underlying problem is that the Bill is applying the language of engineering to biology, and they are not compatible. The outputs—the food that we might all eat without knowing it, if the Bill is allowed through in its current form—could see the appearance of unexpected allergens or even toxins. With the Bill in its current form, farmers could see genetically edited seeds planted in their neighbours’ fields and changing the genetics of their fields, without their being informed. That is a particularly huge issue for organic farmers.

That issue is played out on a national scale too. Both the Scottish and Welsh Governments have indicated that they do not want gene-edited crops, but there is no way of stopping the seeds or their genes at these borders. The issue extends beyond these islands. The Bill is likely to be in breach of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety—an international agreement that aims to protect biodiversity from the impact of genetic engineering.

The list of problems with this Bill—a familiar set—goes on. There are Henry VIII clauses, step by step, allowing changes by ministerial diktat at virtually every key point. To pick out just one, Clause 1(8) allows the Secretary of State to widen the definition of a precision-bred organism through regulations. That is a crucial part of this Bill. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, set out the issues around labelling and how it could be changed by regulation.

Many noble Lords have already covered the issue of whether animals should be excluded from the scope of the Bill. It has been very widely covered and the Minister, in a debate we had a couple of weeks ago on avian flu, almost made a concession in acknowledging that we have huge problems with pests and diseases in our factory-farmed animal populations, because they are enormous. This inevitably allows one disease to flourish but, if you tackle that one disease while leaving the system in place, another disease will arrive in short order.

I come to my final group of points. Various noble Lords have made implicit or explicit references to food security. If our standard approach is through gene editing, we are aiming for a silver bullet-type approach by continuing as we are now but looking to find magic solutions. But we know what we need to do to feed the world—to use that phrase—and, on occasions, we have heard an acknowledgement of this from the Government Bench opposite. We need agro-ecological approaches that work with the sophisticated complexity of nature, which we are just beginning to grasp, to truly cultivate the systems that have developed over hundreds of millennia, rather than to take to them like a toddler trying to put back together a clock that it has disassembled with a hammer.

In his introduction to the Bill, the Minister said that science must be at the heart of our national recovery. I absolutely agree with that statement. The 21st-century sciences of ecology and systems thinking understand that these complex ecosystems cannot be managed like machines. That is the science that we desperately need to feed ourselves and look after our natural world.

The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said that the green revolution was a miracle that came at a cost. The COP 15 biodiversity talks are coming soon and we are starting to see that that cost has been enormous and unaffordable. We cannot afford to repeat today the same mistakes we made in the 1960s.

I will finally pick up on the Jonathan Swift quote used by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. I give the noble Lord credit for making a gender update to it, but I am going to make a speciesist update. Noble Lords will recall that it talked about growing two ears of corn or two blades of grass where previously there had been one. Well, if you want those extra blades of grass or ears of corn, you actually need a healthy soil, with a rich ecosystem of fungi and bacteria working co-operatively with the plant. Then you will get a lot more than two extra ears of corn; you will get healthy, rich food, a healthy environment and security for all of us.

Avian Influenza

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right to raise the importance of keeping people informed. In fact, it works both ways: members of the public are keeping us informed—often through NGOs, but also directly—in particular about the impact on wild birds. Defra and the Government keep consumers and customers informed directly through social media and other media announcements. We also work through retailers; they give us information and we give them information. I should say that there is a well-established method in England and Wales of reporting sick birds that are discovered. They can be reported to the RSPCA—and similarly in Scotland to the SSPCA—which will give advice and will euthanise wild birds that are sick. Single dead birds, birds of prey or three or more of any species can be rung through to the Defra helpline, which is on our website.

In terms of consumers and what they are going to eat, we will be keeping them informed, but there is absolutely no need for people to rush out and panic buy. This is a very resilient supply chain and we are talking to retailers and others regularly and keeping them informed as well.

On vet schools, thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Trees, and others, we have developed new vet schools. We have more veterinary surgeons coming into the system and we want to make sure that they are coming into government work as well as the private sector and private practice. We particularly want to encourage them into the large animal sector and this area as well. It is a constant problem, but we are trying to resolve it.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I am sure the Minister is aware that, in the past 50 years, the global population of domestic poultry has multiplied by six, from 5.7 billion to 36 billion, representing 70% of the avian biomass on this planet. That is a large reservoir, connected by trade, for disease to flourish, which inevitably spills over into wild populations, as we are seeing here. We know that this avian flu originated in a domestic population. The noble Lord may be aware of the editorial last month in the journal Science, which said this avian flu outbreak should be regarded as

“a warning, with devastating consequences if not heeded”.

There is also African swine flu spreading over into wild populations and mycoplasma gallisepticum in finches and other wild birds in North America. The authors argue that we need to see reduced livestock numbers, reduced density on farms, limited movement of livestock and, in middle and higher-income countries, movement to plant-based protein sources. Does the Minister agree that there is a systematic issue with factory farming, which represents an unacceptable risk to human and environmental health?

Environmental Targets

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

As the noble Duke knows, the Environment Act places several duties on government and water companies to reduce sewage discharges from storm overflows. The Government have now launched the most ambitious plan to reduce sewage discharges from storm overflows in water company history. Our new strict targets will see the toughest crackdown on sewage spills and will require water companies to secure the largest infrastructure programme in water company history: £56 billion of capital investment over the next 25 years. Our plan will protect biodiversity, the ecology of our rivers and seas, and the public health of our water users for generations to come.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in answering the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, the Minister appeared rather powerfully to make the case for the Prime Minister’s going to COP 27, so we can only hope that he was listening. I want to go back to an earlier answer from the Minister. He said that the delay occurred because it was important to listen to public concern. Did the response to this consultation really come as a surprise to the department? As the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and many others in this House highlighted, there was enormous public concern about these issues. Why did the department not put enough resources into handling these responses in a timely manner—or does the department not have enough resources to do its job?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Every department could do with more resources. As I said at the beginning, the Government regret not being able to hit this target. Perhaps we were overambitious in thinking it could be done to the timescale we had. There is no point in holding a consultation if you do not listen to the consultees’ replies, and more than 180,000 is at the maximum end of the response to most consultations. That requires that this House and the other place make sure that we are putting in place statutory instruments that really do the job. It is a complex process, and I regret that we have not done it by now, but we will do it as soon as we can.

Horticultural Sector

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, for securing this debate and introducing it in an informative and lively way. I join the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, in regretting that we do not see more Members of your Lordships’ House in this debate. Perhaps if I point out that there were excellent briefings from the Wildlife Trusts, Buglife and NFU, that might encourage a few more to engage next time.

I had cause this morning to be reminded that on 1 November I will have an Oral Question on the importance of philosophical education at all levels of education for critical thinking. Had the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, not secured this debate, I would have been tempted to do something similar for food growing because while this question focuses on the importance of education for careers, I assert that in this age of shocks, with resilience needing to be uppermost in Government’s mind, everyone in our society being able to grow their own food—food security at its most personal and basic level—is a crucial skill. This would truly be education for life not just exams.

I say that as someone who has an agricultural science degree—admittedly I specialised in animal husbandry—but it was only in my 40s that I grew some of my own food and learned all sorts of useful things, such as that brassicaceae and slugs really do not go together and that if you put beer traps in a garden with a Staffordshire bull terrier who loves beer, it does not work out very well either.

This is not just a food security issue. It is also an issue of public health. In 2018, only 28% of adults were eating the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables per day. The average was 3.7 portions and only 18% of children aged five to 15 ate five standard portions of fruit and vegetables per day. Horticulture is a public health issue. Indeed, this is recognised in the National Food Strategy, which has a target of a 30% increase in fruit and vegetable consumption in the UK by 2032, but that raises a key question. Where are these fruit and vegetable crops going to come from?

One aspect that has not yet been touched on is the potential for urban horticulture, which is largely overlooked in the national food strategy. However, it was historically important. In the UK during the “Dig for Victory” campaign, 18% of fruit and vegetables that the population ate were grown domestically in allotments and gardens. With more than 84% of the population in the UK now living in cities and towns, this is an area we need to look at, and that requires education. A study in Sheffield, admittedly a very green city, showed that if domestic gardens and potential and existing sites for allotments and community gardens were utilised, Sheffield could be 122% self-sufficient in vegetables and fruit.

Education does not necessarily have to be in a formal context. I credit the organisation Incredible Edible with having done an enormous amount. There are now more than 100 groups in the UK and many around the world educating people in food growing through informal elements. But when we are talking about education for commercial growing, I want to focus, too, on the excellent work done by the Kindling Trust in Manchester. Its figures and those from the Royal Horticultural Society show that the number of applicants for work-based training programmes have reached the highest numbers in decades. There is a huge demand from people who want to get into horticulture, but many of them, rather than simply seeking a job in horticulture, want to set up their own small businesses or join a co-operative with a small number of like-minded people to produce vegetables and fruit. Doing that requires one crucial thing—access to land. Access to land to be able to start those small businesses for people to develop those skills is a huge, pressing issue that desperately needs to be addressed.

We need to think about the human resources. We have long been stuck on the idea of finding people jobs, but that thinking is being turned around in all sectors. Earlier today in your Lordships’ House, we were talking about the shortage of people for the social care sector. The human resources of time, energy and talent are scarce resources and we need to use them well, and horticulture is a space where we can do that. Maybe we need a large-scale training programme to convert financial sector workers into fruit and vegetable growers. That would be a good use of human resources in an age where we have so much danger from our financial sector.

The UK is only 18% self-sufficient in fruit and 55% self-sufficient in fresh vegetables. The vegetable figure has declined 16 percentage points over the past two decades. We must ask ourselves what right we have to rely on other people’s scarce water supplies to produce our fruit and vegetables in ways that may destroy other people’s soils and involve human rights abuses and abusive labour conditions. There is a huge responsibility for us to take the kind of actions that the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, outlined. The Food Foundation calculated that if everyone in the UK ate five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, we would be 2.1 million tonnes annually short of the supplies that we need for the UK. Yet as work from Sheffield shows, it is perfectly possible to grow enough vegetables and fruit here in the UK: we have simply not devoted the land or human resources to doing that.

I thank the noble Baroness for stressing the environmental aspects of horticulture, as well as the need for skills and education. Buglife’s briefing focuses particularly on the risk of invasive, non-native species and risk of the trade in pot plants. We tend to focus on fruit and vegetables in horticulture, but growing trees for the reforestation that we need and even growing the plants that enliven our homes and public spaces is crucial. We currently import £1 billion-worth of live plants and planting materials. That is not only a lost economic opportunity for the UK; it presents an enormous threat in terms of imported diseases and species. Buglife notes that the invasion of non-native flatworms risks reducing local earthworm populations by 20%. People knowing about these things and replacing our supply systems from overseas with local systems are crucial.

Peat is an area of absolutely crucial environmental concern in terms of both climate and nature. We need to look at education, research and development to ensure that we end all use of peat in horticulture. The endless foot-dragging on the peat sales ban is an enormous government failure of this past decade. As an example of the positive alternatives, Dalefoot Composts takes 100% of its inputs from the Lake District, including bracken, sheep’s wool and comfrey. This is an agroecological approach to producing inputs for our horticultural sector. This is the kind of innovation, technology change and social innovation that we need, and it requires input of not just physical resources but human resources—time, energy and talents.

Finally, I also note the importance of real development in paludiculture. Even if we leave the soil sitting there on the peatlands, we must not allow them to dry out. We can be growing different fruits and vegetables—a diversity of crops—on those lands if we put the human resources in.

Pig Farming

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 16th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, for securing this debate, which I am sure is going to be very interesting and rich. I begin by expressing sympathy to the pig farmers in the UK, who have done what the supermarkets demanded of them and what decades of government policy has directed and guided. They have set up a business on a model that sees 10 million pigs in the UK raised overwhelmingly in intensive systems and fed on grains and legumes. The pig farmers have invested money and effort, they have employed and trained staff and put themselves into building up a business.

Now, however, the combination of Brexit, the labour crisis and the situation arising from the Russian attack on Ukraine, which has produced a global food security crisis with rising input prices—what is generally called agflation—sees that model suddenly and crunchingly hit the buffers. As other noble Lords have said, fully 80% of British pig farmers say they will not be able to survive the next 12 months with this current model, unless the gap between the cost of production and pig prices is significantly addressed.

It may not surprise Members of your Lordships’ House that I am going to approach this debate from a broader and more structural angle than we have yet done. Although those events are all immediate, the overall model—of intensive systems feeding animals on grains and legumes that could feed people—is facing overwhelming demands for change. There is overwhelming demand for change driven by animal welfare concerns. I agree that significant improvements have been made in the UK that have not in other places, but we are still talking about the factory farming of intelligent, sentient animals that are often compared to dogs. There are some real issues to raise if we think about how we treat our dogs and our pigs.

This change is also being driven by environmental concerns, just one factor being that about 10% of pig feed in the UK is currently imported soya, much of it linked to deforestation in South America and to human rights abuses. Here, I have to make reference to the tragic news confirming the murders of the British journalist Dom Phillips and the indigenous activist Bruno Pereira. It is also worth noting the disgraceful comments of President Bolsonaro around that. However, that framework helps to feed British pigs right now.

There is also change driven by concern about air pollution, something in the forefront of my mind as I come to the Chamber fresh from the launch this morning of my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb’s clean air Bill, which will have its Second Reading next month. Change is being driven by the public health and environmental needs to reduce meat consumption: by 30%, said the much-lauded National Food Strategy, although of course that was not followed by the much criticised government food strategy.

This debate comes a day after the release of the Sustainable Food Trust report Feeding Britain from the Ground Up. That sets out a model for at least keeping self-sufficiency at current levels, although I would say we need to go further. In this insecure, shock-ridden world we need to look at ensuring that everything we can produce ourselves, we should. The report’s model would involve the ending of intensive, grain-fed livestock production, with a 75% decline in pork and chicken production. However, I know that many Members of your Lordships’ House will be pleased to know it concludes that grass-fed beef and lamb should be the meat consumed by most consumers. Grazing cattle and sheep would be part of a mixed farming system, in which they would rotate with crops to rebuild soil fertility. Under the model proposed by the trust, production of vegetables and fruit would double and grain production would halve. The production of UK-grown pulses would double, from 0.9 million hectares to 1.9 million hectares. This would all produce a diet that is great for the nation’s health. It would protect nature, combat climate change and create opportunities for many more small, independent businesses, farmers and growers, and deliver surely one of the most important roles of government policy: food security.

The model presented by this report would see woodland cover increase by 28% to nearly 1 million hectares. A lot of that would be agroforestry, hedges and sheltered trees, but there would also be woodland patches that would be great for pigs. As the Soil Association’s advice on organic pig farming, which, of course, does not allow for any intensive production, notes:

“A pig’s natural habitat is deciduous woodland providing them with shade and nutrients from the forest floor.”


Here we are talking about a system of sharing land, using it for both the environment and food production—pork production. This model involves freeing up significant amounts of land for wild spaces, recreational spaces and carbon storage.

I suspect many noble Lords, including the Minister, would respond, “But what about the cost of living crisis?” We undoubtedly have a huge issue of food security in terms of costs. Nearly one-quarter of adults have reported that it is very difficult or difficult to pay their usual household bills. We have a society that is really struggling to put food on the table. Getting foods from farms to supermarkets pays less than ever to the farmers, yet Tesco has just announced a trebling of profits to more than £2 billion.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, that imported pigmeat presents huge issues. We have covered a number of these, so I will add only to one: antibiotic usage. UK pig producers, even under our current intensive system, have made great progress on this, with antibiotic use in the pig sector reducing by 62% from 2015, according to the Responsible Use of Medicines in Agriculture Alliance. We do not want to import pork because of animal welfare, food security and environmental considerations. We need to grow pork here but under a different model.

As Dr Nick Palmer, the head of Compassion in World Farming, has said, transition to a new model should be managed, rather than a crash in the industry. The retailers collecting profits hand over fist at the moment should have a significant role in contributing to this. The Soil Association has produced an outline route map for a just transition for the poultry sector. It could be replicated for the pig sector, rooted in active dialogue with key stakeholders.

I will finish with a personal reflection. I do not know how many Members of your Lordships’ House have worked on the floor of an intensive pig farm, but I have. I worked at the sharp end, mucking out, picking up dead piglets and herding frightened, angry animals on to the slaughter truck. I did that in Australia 30 years ago. I acknowledge that, even now, Australia’s standards are much lower than the UK’s, which is why pigmeat was explicitly excluded from the free trade agreement. I picked up piglets that had been cannibalised by their mothers in farrowing stalls. I saw and heard the sights and sounds, and I do not believe we should be keeping pigs in any system like that.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I refer your Lordships to my entry in the register.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, for securing this debate and welcome the opportunity to respond on the state of the pig farming industry in England. I am very grateful to all noble Lords for their contributions to this very good debate.

Recently I was at the National Pig Awards and I was bowled over by some of the innovations, entrepreneurial activities and the animal welfare measures that pig farmers are bringing in. Many are from Yorkshire, as the proposer of this debate mentioned. It is amazing to think that a pig now produces roughly twice the amount from the same amount of inputs we had on the pig farm I grew up on. That is a recognition of the huge contribution that the pig farming industry has made at the same time as improving welfare standards. It is something to be enormously proud of. I do not diminish the problems the farmers face and I will come on to talk about that.

There are about 4.1 million pigs in England. Pig farming and pork production play an extremely important role in our domestic food supply chain. A rise in international consumer demand for high-quality pork means that there are huge opportunities for growth in British pork exports. The UK’s pig industry exported £567 million of pigmeat products in 2021.

Our pig industry has faced several challenges over the last year, including those arising from the pandemic, such as the loss of exports to the Chinese market for certain pig processors, disruption to CO₂ supplies, and a temporary shortage of labour in the processing sector, all of which were well articulated by a number of speakers. This was accompanied by a 9% increase in the size of the pig herd between December 2020 and December 2021, the biggest increase in more than 20 years. We recognise that the industry is also now experiencing further difficulties following the increase in input costs, notably feed, fuel and energy, which has further impacted on farmer margins.

The combination of these initial challenges led to a significant backlog of pigs on farms, which in turn led to financial and emotional impacts on the individual farmers concerned and posed serious risks to animal welfare. I have huge sympathy for all those affected by this.

I am confused by those who say that at this time, we should be delaying the tapering of the basic payment scheme. Doing so would reward arable farmers, some of whom will see their gross margins double because of the current wheat price, whereas the pig and poultry sectors really need our help. Those who are saying, for whatever reason, that this is not the time to continue to change our farming system are missing the point.

The Government provided a package of measures in October 2021 to help address these unique circumstances. I refute those who say we did not act at speed: we acted as quickly as possible to help in these unique circumstances, including through a temporary visa scheme for butchers, private storage aid and the slaughter incentive payment scheme to facilitate an increase in the throughput of pigs through abattoirs. The PSA scheme allows processors to place pork products in frozen storage, enabling them to be safely stored and released on to the market later, while the SIP scheme encourages slaughterhouse throughput by providing a payment for any pigs slaughtered outside normal working hours. More than 740 tonnes of pigmeat has entered the PSA scheme, and close to 30,000 pigs have now been slaughtered under the SIP scheme. 

Together with the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and other government departments, we continue to work on expanding our existing export markets and identifying new ones for pork. In March this year, we announced the opening of a new export market to Chile worth £20 million over the first five years of trade. This follows our successfully gaining market access to Mexico for fresh pig meat in September 2021, with support from the UK Export Certification Partnership and pork-producing establishments.

Working with our British Embassy in Beijing, FCDO and DIT, we continue to press the Chinese authorities to re-list and allow exports of pork from those processors who voluntarily delisted themselves at the request of the Chinese authorities due to the Covid-19 outbreaks in the workforce back in 2020 and early 2021.

Over the past year Defra has worked closely with the pork industry to support it in clearing the backlog. My honourable friend the farming Minister, Victoria Prentis, has chaired three roundtables: two, on 10 February and 3 March, with pig industry representatives from across the UK, and one on 3 April with representatives of the wholesale and hospitality sectors, to discuss the challenges the sector is facing. As a result, processors made commitments to slaughter an extra 40,000 pigs during the period of March to May. As has been said, several retailers also committed to provide further support to the sector. Last month, Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and the Co-op made public commitments to increase both their financial support to the sector and the volume of British pork products they sell.

My colleague Victoria Prentis also met representatives of the agricultural banking sector to discuss the situation in the pig sector. The banks confirmed that they are working closely with impacted pig farmers during this exceptionally challenging period and remain keen to be supportive. Furthermore, we are launching a UK-wide review—this reflects the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington—of supply chain fairness in the sector. We are also engaging with industry and expect a consultation to launch shortly. We want to hear from the industry about improvements to fairness and transparency that could be made to ensure a profitable and productive future. That is addressing the medium to long-term as well as the short-term difficulties. We also continue to work with the industry to support its efforts on the recruitment and retention of domestic workers. 

The combination of these measures, together with an increase in slaughter numbers in processors, means that the backlog of pigs has now been almost completely removed, with only small pockets of producers still experiencing backlogs. That is the up-to-date information, and I hope it addresses some of the concerns that have been raised today. This is good news for the sector and demonstrates our commitment to it.

There remain, however, many challenges to pig producers, not least those arising from the conflict in Ukraine and the increase in input costs. The supply chain disruption seen across the agricultural industry, particularly in the pig sector, in recent months, driven significantly by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has created challenges across this sector and the wider food and farming industry. Farmers are facing increased input costs, including for fertiliser, feed and fuel, which we recognise are creating short-term pressures on cash flow.  

We are working closely with the pig industry to identify where mitigations are available to tackle these challenges. Together with the devolved Administrations, we continue to keep the market situation under review through the UK Agriculture Market Monitoring Group, which monitors UK agricultural markets including price, supply, inputs, trade and recent developments. We have also recently increased our engagement with the industry to supplement our analysis with real-time intelligence.

I want to address some of the points that have been made. I hope that I misunderstood the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, when she seemed to suggest in her introduction that pork products entering this country just come here. That could not be less true. In recent times, we have recruited an extra 180 inspectors. We are also designing a global import control scheme that will be simple, efficient and safe to use, and best suited to our own needs. We want to utilise digitalisation while also maintaining strict biosecurity controls on the highest-risk imports.

A lot of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Trees, mentioned the very serious threat of African swine fever. He is right to point out how it is progressing across Europe, often in the wild boar population. I chair a monthly biosecurity meeting and the next one will be on Tuesday, where we will hear the latest information on this issue. The Government take this very seriously. We have raised the risk profile for certain countries and undertaken exercises with the Animal and Plant Health Agency and our Border Force colleagues on how we will react to an outbreak and what we can do to mitigate it. However, the most important thing to do is stop it getting here in the first place.

The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, raised the issue of short-term cash flow, and he is absolutely right. It will help some pig farmers that we have brought forward the basic payment scheme by six months because they will have other farming interests, but the majority of the pig sector is unaffected by the support schemes. We want to make sure that there is more action and that they can benefit from the new, reformed farming system through all the innovation grants we are bringing in and the improvements they can bring to their processes. We can make sure that they will benefit.

The Groceries Code Adjudicator was a very welcome change brought in under the coalition Government. It is working for producers and other parts of the supply chain.

I absolutely assure the noble Lord that the pot of government support is not getting smaller. The £2.4 billion that was in the basic payment scheme will continue to be allocated to the sector.

The noble Lord, Lord Trees, talked about food as a percentage of household income. He is right, but we are mindful that a great many families are suffering at the moment. There is wider support for them right across government in how we deal with that. I agree with the noble Lord about waste. We could resolve all our food supply issues if we wasted less food. I was always taken by a campaign called The Pig Idea, which involved the use of safe swill in feeding pigs. However, that might be above my pay grade.

The issue of African swine fever was also raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. I assure her that we can block imports from African swine fever countries in the EU through the regionalisation agreements we have made. We want to make sure that future farming support reaches pig farmers.

I absolutely note the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, about rare breeds and I am delighted that the Berkshire breed has been saved; it was going fast towards extinction. It is just one example of the possibilities of future development here. The noble Baroness’s involvement with the Rare Breeds Survival Trust is noted.

In the last few minutes, I will again run through the vital work that we are doing. I hope that this will reassure noble Lords. We included temporary visas for skilled butchers, private storage aid, slaughter incentive payment schemes, and working with the AHDB to seek new export opportunities and an expansion of existing export markets. There were 12 specialist pig abattoirs in England in 2020 and, overall, 93 registered slaughterhouses of all sizes, commodity-specific and cross-species, that can process pigs. Yesterday, I was at Fir Farm in Gloucestershire, looking at a mobile slaughterhouse. This is an innovation that I hope the Food Standards Agency will authorise in the near future. This will be of enormous benefit to stock farmers, and it will alleviate the movements that some stock has to make.

Together with an increase of pigs slaughtered by processors and, sadly, the on-farm culling of an estimated 40,000 pigs—not the 60,000 that was allocated, but still a horrendous number—the combined impact of these measures has helped reduce the backlog of pigs on farms significantly. The size of the backlog has fallen from close to 200,000 pigs at its height to almost nothing, with the backlog now estimated to be cleared by the end of June. This is based on a combination of industry intelligence and internal Defra modelling based on February slaughter data, culling estimates and butcher arrivals. Small pockets of pigs remain backed up on farms where there are specific challenges.

A mention was made of the temporary visa scheme. Due to Covid, many of the butchers did not start to arrive in the UK until February or March 2022, but their arrival has enabled processors to increase the throughput of pigs. The private storage aid scheme closed to new applications on 31 March. Under the scheme, 745 tonnes of deboned pigmeat have been placed in frozen storage, which has been of great benefit.

I will write to any noble Lords whose points I have not been able to answer. We acknowledge the important role that the pig farming industry plays in our domestic food supply chain, and the challenges that it has faced over the last year and continues to face as a result of the war in Ukraine. We will continue to work with and support the industry to ensure its long-term future.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I covered extensively the Sustainable Food Trust report, Feeding Britain From the Ground Up. Can the Minister commit to the department looking at the report to see what it might draw from it for government policy?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I was at the launch of that report yesterday. I read it and it has been received by the department.

Government Food Strategy

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness eloquently identifies a very serious societal problem, but to say that the Government are not addressing it because it is not specifically mentioned is not the case. The Department of Health and Social Care, working with other departments, has a very clear view about how we can help reduce the problem she identifies. She is right to say that it affects more challenged communities much worse than others. We are working across government and working with local government, education and in a variety of other different ways to tackle it. We will always be open to her expertise and knowledge in trying to make sure that those are felt right across government.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, does the Minister really think that this is a strategy about healthy meals or healthy profits for a few multinational companies? The first paragraph of the executive summary says:

“The food and drink industry”


is the biggest “manufacturing industry” and creates

“£120 billion of value for the economy every year”.

Does the Minister think that food is something you manufacture or something you grow and produce in the natural environment? You have to get to paragraph 7 on the second page before health or sustainability are mentioned. It is described as a government food strategy. Would it not be better described as a corporate strategy to produce profits? Why does it not focus on healthy local fruits and vegetables? The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said that alcohol is not mentioned, but it does get mentioned once. The very first product mentioned is Scotch whisky. It then goes on to mention

“Worcestershire sauce, the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie … Cornish Clotted Cream”—

all lovely treats, I am sure. But where is the food to healthily feed people? Why, when we are talking about fruit and vegetables, do we focus on tomatoes and lettuces? Where are the root vegetables, the apples, pears, nuts and pulses, and the things we can do to help give people healthy stable food grown here in the UK?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

On her last point, I refer the noble Baroness to the points we make about expanding horticulture and our investment in new technologies to produce sustainable fruit, vegetables and leafy greens from a variety of different new sources, not only vertical farming. The noble Baroness shakes her head, but it is in there.

On the other point about the food industry, every job is liberating and household-supporting, which is fundamental to a family. That is the point we are making. This is not some corporatist point; it is about the individuals working in these businesses. Every single parliamentary constituency in the country, with the exception of Westminster, has a food processing or manufacturing company. They are agents for levelling up. They give people apprenticeships, skills and an income. They pay taxes, which build hospitals and schools—we need to be reminded of that occasionally.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

To my noble friend I say that the Government have stated in their policy that they wish to see life expectancy rise across the population. However, she is absolutely right to point out that there are some areas where the life expectancy, and indeed other health outcomes, are vastly different. It is not just in the report that we are looking at the health of the nation; it is in the whole Government’s levelling-up agenda. I sit on a committee with Ministers from other departments who are absorbed by these issues and want to see a change so that the life expectancy, as well as the life opportunities, of people in deprived areas are addressed. If we are not getting that message across, we must do better, because it is an absolutely key ambition for this Government. We want to see the inequalities that have existed for too many decades change in fast time on our watch.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will follow up on a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, who referred to the Government’s attachment to the word “revolution”. The strategy offers £5 million to deliver a “school cooking revolution”. I believe that there are about 24,000 schools in England; with a rough bit of maths, that is about £200 per school. Is that how the Government plan to deliver a revolution in school cooking?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Leading on from the last question, it might be more important that those lessons in supporting young people in making the right diet choices are targeted at the places where there is evidence of the worst food choices being made. That is not a preachy way of doing it. We want to deal with the problem where it exists, recognising that there are very serious health issues around the diet choices that people make. Without pointing fingers or doing this in a way that has not worked in the past, and looking to a different way of approaching it, tackling the problem in schools is really important.

Food Security

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

There are many grants that people can source, even at a household level, to acquire and install solar panels on roofs, and the noble Lord is entirely right to point that out. He is also right that we need more trees. We have very ambitious targets of planting 30,000 hectares of additional trees every year by the end of this Parliament. That can be achieved without impacting our food security, and there are many areas of renewable energy production that can be done in accordance with food production as well.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I am sure the Minister is aware of figures from 2019 showing that corporations already own 18% of England, together with oligarchs and City bankers owning 17% and the aristocracy and the gentry owning 30%, all of that adding up to less than 1% of the population owning more than half of the land. Does the Minister agree that for food security to allow new small farmers and food growers to enter and start small businesses, we need to democratise land ownership?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The most beneficial way to encourage people into farming at all levels is through a system of let land and tenure. It is very often those corporations and those individuals that the noble Baroness mentions that provide the only entry for people who do not have access to capital to purchase a farm. We want as broad activity as possible in agricultural production, and that means encouraging new and younger people to enter farming through the tenancy system.

Tree Health in England

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, for securing this really important and interesting debate. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, I am going to concentrate on what she labelled as amenity trees—what I might call street trees or urban trees in general. That is because I want to put some positive spin in here. We need to think about some positive news; we have heard lots of negative news and there is certainly a lot of that around on tree health.

I can attribute campaigners in Sheffield as playing a really important role in raising understanding of the importance of street trees, in particular to public health and well-being, as well as to biodiversity and in cooling our climate emergency-heated cities as well. I note that 19 cities in the UK have now taken the Tree Cities of the World award. A number of these were awarded last month. Sheffield was among them and it is notable that Leeds, Hull and Bradford were too, perhaps influenced by all the public interest in the news that came out of Sheffield, so we are really seeing the valuing of street trees.

But just as we need trees for healthy cities, trees need a healthy environment to flourish in cities. I pick up the point of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, who talked of the need to a healthy phytobiome of a diversity of trees. Of course, what we also need is clean air; it is good for us and for the trees. I have to point here to my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb’s Ella’s law clean air Bill, which is now in your Lordships’ House.

Hard surfaces make trees chronically stressed if they are not given sufficient space, so we desperately need to think about the planning and design of our cities for people and trees. Taking note of the point the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, made, I am not going to say “the right tree in the right place”, but I am going to say that we need the right tree in the nursery. Lots of people have been saying how much we need to grow so many more of our own trees, but we need to think about what kind of trees we are propagating in our nurseries to be street trees. What kind of signals are we giving to the industry? At the moment lots of the street tree plantings are very small rowans and birches, but we want to see the addition of some of those magnificent trees the Victorians planted—the big specimens that truly shade and enrich our cities in ways that little saplings meant to be lollipop trees are never going to.

We have to think about how we make sure we plant trees in cities so that they survive. In Britain, the current figures suggest that around 13% of street trees die in their first couple of years. In a study in Canada, 50% were dead within one year, so we really need to look after our trees.

Finally, I want to focus on a question for the Minister. There is a desperate shortage of trained arborists. The Institute of Chartered Foresters estimates that we need 70% more trained people to meet the Government’s tree-planting goals. Thinking about the pressures on the health of our trees, we desperately need the people who can look after them. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what the Government plan to do to tackle that issue.

Food Security: Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am always amazed by and respectful of the noble Lord’s ability to get naval matters into almost any Question. He is right that this is a matter of global security and not just about what Britain does. It is about what we do with our allies to support the free movement of goods around the world. There has been huge investment in the Royal Navy, which I am sure he is really pleased about, but we want to see that continue.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Given that more than 50% of human calories come from just four crops, with a fast-changing global climate, does the Minister agree that increasing the diversity of crops is crucial? What are the Government doing to ensure that we grow a more diverse range of crops in the UK, particularly more vegetables and fruit?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

There are enormous opportunities under our new schemes for farmers to operate in a more entrepreneurial way. They are really good at seeing new opportunities. With the new technologies which Defra and the Government are investing in for farmers, particularly in the fruit and vegetable sector, there are new possibilities with vertical farming and other means to make sure that we are disrupting the age-old food supply chains which have been found to be so vulnerable at this time.

Ukraine War: UK Food Security

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am happy to do so. Food security is absolutely at the centre of what we are seeking to achieve in supporting farmers to think as entrepreneurially as they can and recognise that they have been constrained in the past by a system that now allows them to provide exactly what society needs and produce more, good-quality food.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

The Minister referred to farmers. Given the now extremely high fixed cost of artificial fertilisers and pesticides—these imports also have massive environmental impacts in terms of damage to soil, water and air—and that some farmers are already productively and profitably farming and producing good-quality food without such imports, are the Government planning an emergency effort to support farmers in sharing their agroecological knowledge, drawn from organic farming, regenerative agriculture and integrated farm management systems, and to provide free advice to farmers?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am sure that the noble Baroness will welcome the fact that there is a significant shift towards regenerative farming, which will address precisely that issue. In emergency terms, through the sustainable farming initiative and our soil standard, we are encouraging farmers to plant nitrogen-fixing crops, which will reduce the need for synthetic fertilisers.