Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations 2025

Debate between Lord Cameron of Dillington and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, for clarity, I express that this is a regret amendment, not a fatal one. That is due in part to an error of mine, but I am choosing to regard this as an opportunity. I know that many Members would not vote for a fatal amendment, but here is an opportunity for noble Lords to show their concerns about this deeply flawed instrument before us. I will listen to the debate before deciding whether to divide the House.

Your Lordships do not have to take my word for the statement that this is a flawed instrument. I am sure that many Members of the House have already seen the 15-page—yes, 15-page—report from our hard-working Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, to which the Minister referred. It contains a great many concerns about the basic workability of what is here before us today; these are issues that I will get back to.

In bold on the front page of the committee’s report is a suggestion that

“The House may wish to question the Minister further”


on the concerns raised about

“about the lack of labelling requirements despite apparent strong consumer preferences for mandatory labelling”.

The committee also says that Members may want to ask about the impact on trade and on organic producers. I would also add—and we may hear more—about the impacts on Scotland and Wales.

I am confident these issues will be at the centre of our debate and that the Minister will be pressed on them. Trust in our food system, and trust that the label will tell you what you want to know about what is in the packet, is clearly crucial. We have seen in the US —and, yes, I will use the phrase—“Make America Healthy Again” deployed very often. This is what happens when trust breaks down.

There are already signs of growing concern here in the UK. I point noble Lords to an article in the Independent published yesterday, headlined:

“A mobile app told me my kids’ food isn’t healthy—now I am emptying out my kitchen cabinets”.


The writer comments:

“Like many other mums, I’ve become hooked on it”—


the app—

“mainly to check if the food I feed my kids is any good for them”.

Before I get back to that, and in deference to the fact that many new Members have joined your Lordships’ House since we debated the legislation behind this statutory instrument, I will explain the background. Many will remember, I am sure, the public reaction, the concern, which started in the 1990s, about the possibility of genetically modified organisms getting into the food system in the UK. Public concern here and around the world has not faded. Courts in the Philippines and Kenya, to take just two examples, have recently ruled against GM foods. In January, responding to a Trumpian push to force GMO crops on his country, the Mexican President said:

“We do not want GM … We are a sovereign free country”.


We were told that what is being proposed under the legislation was different and rather than introducing genes from other species, the gene-edited organisms that this covers would allow only genes from other organisms that would have interbred naturally or genes that had been deleted from the original organisms. But that is not really what is happening.

Handily, Rothamsted Research released news in the past month to help me illustrate the point. It had proclaimed success in gene-editing a wheat variety low in the amino acid asparagine, which on cooking can be converted to acrylamide, about which there are concerns. This wheat might be handy for the manufacturers of processed snacks since it is classed as a processing contaminant that legally needs to be monitored.

As with so much of this regulation, we are talking about benefiting biotech companies and food manufacturers, not consumers. But Rothamsted acknowledged to Euronews that it had encountered a snag. Foreign DNA it had introduced into the wheat, not wheat DNA at all, had proved impossible to breed out so this wheat cannot meet the definition of gene-edited and very clearly remains a GMO.

That lines up with an informative—rather technical, I confess—slide that I would be happy to share with any interested noble Lords that Dr Vladimir Nekrasov from Rothamsted presented at a Westminster Forum event on gene-editing that I chaired last week. It identified challenges to gene-editing, including limits to the understanding of the genetic networks controlling key traits in crops, the recalcitrance of some crops to gene-editing, the difficulty of changing multiple genes at the same time, and the difficulty in ensuring that the result is free of transgenes; that is, foreign genes.

In summary, this is not a simple or predictable process. It is not a precision process. As I said in Grand Committee last week, putting the terms engineering and biology together reflects a profound misunderstanding of how life works. Engineering is fine for machines but not for biology. In that debate I pointed to the astonishing new discovery that mitochondria can migrate between cells. In another new discovery this week, phys.org reports:

“Scientists make discovery that upends our beliefs about how cells divide”.


We are messing with systems we do not understand, like a child dismantling a clock and throwing the pieces into a microwave to see what happens.

I hope that explains the legislation—which, unfortunately, already exists—so I turn now to the practical problems of this instrument, many of which were outlined so clearly by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. In the interests of time, I will be brief; I believe other noble Lords will be picking up some of the points I am making. I have already referred to the failure to require labelling of gene-edited crops. The Minister spoke about a register that you might be able to look up online—I think the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee sets out how utterly inadequate that is for the consumer, that mum such as the Independent writer, who is there in the supermarket, wondering what to buy for her children that night.

Method-of-production labelling is common in our food system. It is what allows us to choose free-range eggs, organic milk or fairtrade coffee or tea, or which items are halal or kosher. Indeed, we still do not know how these certifications will regard this gene-editing. Labelling allows consumers to meet their own personal food needs and to shop their values, which is surely the cornerstone of a democratic food system. The other issues—some of which the committee has already covered—for organic farmers and food producers include that gene-edited organisms remain GMOs and must be excluded from their supply chain. This regulation does not allow them to do that.

The Minister spoke about implementing the legislation, but the Government still have not solved the issue that none of these organisms can be sold commercially unless it is first on the national seed list. Will they be a separate listing on the list? This is very much unclear.

I will briefly mention the devolved nations because I have confidence that this issue will be covered very strongly by other noble Lords. I will set out where we are at. An English producer can sell a bag of gene-edited grain or a tomato into Scotland and Wales and the internal market Act means that that cannot be stopped. But once those commodities undergo further processing and become flour or tomato sauce, under Welsh and Scottish law they have to be labelled as GMOs. I really do not see how that is going to be solved.

Going beyond the other nations, in terms of trade issues, a new legal opinion published in the European Union says that not labelling what we are calling PBOs directly contravenes the obligations under the Cartagena protocol—which aims to prevent potential harm to biological diversity caused by the movement of GMOs across international borders—to which the UK is a party.

We could see the EU lay down a phytosanitary marker that says that unlabelled English PBOs will be rejected at the border. It is considering the possibility of bringing in something like these rules—its labels are NGT 1 and NGT 2. I will not go into the details of all of that here, but it has an entirely different classification system from what this regulation introduces. The complications—and I am happy to talk to any noble Lord who would like to discuss this later—are very high.

Finally, I note that while everyone in this legislation and regulation is talking about food crops, we are in fact talking about regulations affecting any plant, including ornamental and wild plants, and how we could be messing with our already much-depleted natural systems. But we are going to hear, and have already heard, from the Minister about feeding the world. I am going to go to Katja Tielbörger, a professor of plant ecology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, who spoke to Euronews about the Rothamsted difficulties. She said:

“We don’t need any new varieties to feed the world. Food security is not an issue of which varieties we have. It’s an issue of how the food is distributed and what is happening with it”.


I am pro food security, pro agroecology and pro working for farmers and consumers and not for multinational food companies and giant agrochemical companies. I am pro a healthy food system, and so I beg to move.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, it will be no surprise to anyone in the House that I strongly support this statutory instrument. Precision breeding as a method of plant breeding is safer and more precise than the random selection methods of existing traditional breeding. Above all, it is the speeding up of the process of developing new and urgently needed varieties that makes it so important in today’s world.

If you have 15 to 20 years to spare and are dogged enough to pursue your single-issue target with the millions of options available to you from the 200 or 300 hybrids you are breeding every year—95%-plus of which you destroy—you might eventually be able to produce a variety with the vital characteristics you want. But we do not have the time for the 20 or so harvests needed for the random-chance mutations that such traditional breeding provides. We urgently and desperately need to make multifaceted improvements to a whole range of crops.

Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill

Debate between Lord Cameron of Dillington and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Monday 12th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, surely the whole point of this Bill is to speed up the process of bringing into being the plants and animals that the world really needs, as a matter of some urgency, to prevent our populations at home and abroad—I mentioned lots of examples in sub-Saharan Africa at Second Reading—starving, and to avoid further destroying our planet. We hope that our scientists will be able to make a difference sooner rather than later and show the world what can be done. We must lead on this and encourage others to follow, hopefully in the EU and sub-Saharan Africa. So why on earth should we as politicians want to delay this process? Surely that is going against everything that this Bill is trying to achieve.

It might be helpful if I gave some examples of how the whole process will work. Let us say a seed-breeding company finds and edits a variety of wheat for a trait of value—such as stronger straw that does not go flat just before harvest, or resistance to drought or Septoria. We then have its in-house testing for off-target characteristics and, above all, for the stability of the crop through the generations. I am advised that this testing takes three or four years, with three or four generations being bred. By the way, EFSA and ACRE would both be informed at a very early stage that this wheat was being bred, and they would be involved. Then you have a further two years—and two generations—of statutory testing. Then, hopefully, your new variety gets a recommended listing. You probably have another one or two years of multiplying up the seed for the farmers’ marketplace. That is six or seven years from the original genetic editing before the crop gets into the market on a commercial basis.

In animals, the same multigenerational gap exists between the original edit and the product being produced—except, in this case, each generation of cattle, for instance, will take an absolute minimum of two years, and I believe a single generation of salmon can take up to four years. So it will be a good 12 to 16 years after the actual gene editing before any such beef or salmon product reaches our plates. Breeding improvements in a species is a very long-term process, even with gene editing, so we cannot afford to wait any longer. I believe that we have to get on with it.

There will be some companies that will hold back on certain products when considering the European market, but it is not for us or Parliament to take a decision for them. If those sorts of business decisions were to be taken by parliamentary legislation—which is what we are doing now—our nation’s economic performance would really be in a pickle.

In any case, it seems to me that the EU is amazingly hypocritical about all this. Who is it that bans all GM products and yet is the second largest importer of GM products in the world? The answer is the EU, which imports 30 million tonnes of GM material every year. It is, of course, quite likely, with the snub of Brexit and the ongoing vexation of the Northern Ireland protocol, that the EU will cut up rough about this. But, as I say, I do not think that we as legislators dealing specifically now with the wording of this Bill should get involved in all that. Leave it to businesses to take their own decisions. It is interesting that Argentina, whose overall national wealth depends hugely on its ability to export agricultural products, has proved willing to adopt this technology. I think that sets us a very good example of how to balance reward versus risk.

If we are going to take a decision to proceed with this legislation, which I hope we are, please allow the many small businesses, which are waiting expectantly for this legislation to pass, to get on with their plans as soon as possible. I say small businesses because, at the moment, only really very big companies can breed seeds and breed different animals because of the time it takes. We are shortening it only by a small amount, so it is the small businesses which will benefit from this legislation. I think we ought to get on with it and not have any more delays.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, but I think the contribution that the noble Lord has just made demonstrates a fundamental difference in approach to, understanding of and belief in systems for—to use the phrase—feeding the world between him and several of us on this side of the House. I am going to take a very practical example of this because, last week, we saw reports emerge in the mainstream media of a new wheat variety called Jabal. The noble Lord spoke about our scientists finding solutions for Africa, and he spoke about leaving it to business. He said that only big companies could now develop new varieties of crops such as wheat. Jabal, which means mountain in Arabic, is a new durum wheat which is extremely tolerant to drought and heat. It was developed for climate resilience through the Crop Trust’s Wild Relatives project. It was developed between 2017 and 2021, so over a period of five years, and by working with farmers on the ground in the communities affected. It is looking to be extremely successful. There is no big business. There are some scientists—I have no doubt that there were some British scientists, but scientists from all round the world were involved in this—but it is grounded in the communities that need these crops and has been done without anyone making huge amounts of money out of it. If we are talking about feeding the world, there is a potential alternative model.

However, I am now going to come back to the detail of these amendments, starting with Amendment 16, already very ably introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. I do not really think that I need to add much to that, having attached my name to amendment, although I will note that Amendments 76 and 77, both of which appear in my name and which the noble Baroness has also kindly signed, have more or less the same intention of inserting in Clause 43 instead of earlier in the Bill. Amendment 77 looks at impacts on UK exports to the EU, as the earlier amendment did. Amendment 76 is broader and looks at exports around the world and what impacts it might have.

Amendment 78 in my name, which the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell and Lady Hayman, have kindly signed, addresses some of the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron. It says that regulations under this Act must particularly look at the impact on small and medium enterprises. Here, perhaps we are not thinking so much about enterprises that might be producing those so-called precision-bred organisms, but more the farmers using them and small farmers and the kind of impact we were addressing on the debate about intellectual property and the issues of market dynamics and competition which have been such an area of concern with GMOs.

Finally, I come to Amendment 75 in my name; the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, also kindly signed it. If the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, were here, she would probably be giving me lessons in the structure of Bills and exactly how a five-year review should be constructed. In her absence, I have done my best to propose that there should be a five-year review of how the Bill is working.

The debate on animals and plants provided some powerful ammunition for the discussion. The Minister acknowledged that the Bill will evolve and change according to events, but we also need to note that this is a fast-moving area of both technology and scientific understanding.

I will not go into great depth on what has been roughly described as the new biology but huge, fundamental debates within the science of biology are going on at the moment about the structure of organisms, of life and of ecosystems. In five years, the scientific framework behind this—not just the technology but scientific understanding—may well have moved on significantly. Surely a Bill this controversial, complex, difficult and technical should have a five-year review built in.

Environment Bill

Debate between Lord Cameron of Dillington and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 26th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, as someone who spoke passionately about the independence of the OEP at earlier stages of the Bill, I support my noble friend Lord Krebs in his amendment.

The OEP will be at the centre of our country’s new environmental future: post Brexit, post COP 26 and post COP 15. The world is changing fast, and I am pleased to say that, as the Minister mentioned earlier, we are slowly waking up to the environmental dangers we face and gradually—very gradually—moving in the right direction.

We all have great hopes for and expectations of the OEP, and within the nation’s ambitions to drive a cleaner, more sustainable and more biodiverse future, I cannot stress how important it is that we get the OEP right. The success or otherwise of everything in the Bill depends on it. At the moment, it still looks as though it will be a tool of the very department it should be overseeing, as has been mentioned.

Let us not forget that Defra is in charge of and funds our most important environmental bodies: Natural England and the Environment Agency. Even local authorities do much of their environmental work in partnership with Natural England and the Environment Agency, so the auditing and bringing to book of these, our most important environmental bodies, will be crucial. Sadly, in my experience of working with NDPBs within the Defra family, I believe this is unlikely to happen if Defra is allowed to exert undue influence over the OEP. As I said in debates at earlier stages, the OEP has not only to be independent but to be seen to be independent, and at the moment there is a severe danger that it will be neither.

This House’s views on the vital importance of the independence of the OEP have been expressed again and again by noble Lords from all sides of the House with much more eloquence than I can muster, so I will not go on, but I urge Defra, which originally fired the arrow of an independent OEP when Michael Gove was Secretary of State, to now let it fly. This is the department’s chance to do that.

This excellently crafted compromise amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Krebs is, like all compromises, probably not to the satisfaction of all, but I strongly believe that the Government and all noble Lords should now grasp this opportunity to resolve the impasse and give us an OEP we can be proud of by voting for my noble friend’s Motion F1.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lord, extremely briefly, I offer the Green group’s support for all the opposition amendments in this group. On Motion E1, I have a question for the Minister. Will he acknowledge to the House that we cannot keep the same mantra of “It is either deal with climate change or deal with national security” and acknowledge that, as the integrated review says, the climate emergency is the number one threat that the Government should be focused on internationally?

On introducing this debate on Motions F1 and G1, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said that he was not commenting on any individual involved in the OEP. I shall comment on individuals, to note the two noble Lords moving those Motions and urge noble Lords to support those extremely distinguished Members of our House in their area of absolute expertise and get behind them.