Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The noble Baroness mentioned the Brexit deal agreed by the previous Government, which provides de facto guarantees for EU boats to UK waters beyond 2026. What we have done is to secure a deal with the EU that ensures returns for our fishing community, including scrapping red tape and restoring shellfish exports to the UK. This demonstrates that we are absolutely committed to the long-term prosperity and sustainability of our fishing industry. On the SPS agreement, I am sure the noble Baroness knows that negotiations are due to start shortly. I cannot give any further details until we move further down the line, but we absolutely want a really good deal for our country.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I am sure the Minister would agree that there is no point investing in our fishing industry if there are no fish to catch. The sad truth is that, according to Oceana UK’s latest report, Deep Decline, over half of the UK fish stocks are being overfished, particularly the top 10 species. What plans do the Government have to ensure that fishing quotas are set on a sustainable basis, so that the stocks can recover and provide our fishermen with livelihoods not just today but in the future?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right: overfishing has been a real problem and we absolutely need to ensure that it does not happen in the future and that the fishing quotas that are agreed are sustainable. In fact, they are, in theory, sustainable at the moment, but we need to get the best data we can in order to make the best decisions in the future. Clearly, we hope that working with the EU more closely will enable this.

Waste Crime

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right to say that this is a really serious problem, and the Government need to get to grips with it. That is why we are taking specific actions to try to start making a real difference in the amount and impact of waste crime in order to genuinely start to reduce what is a terrible blight on our country. We want to crack down. As I said, we have increased the EA’s budget for waste crime enforcement by over 50% this year. The Joint Unit for Waste Crime has nearly doubled in size due to the extra funding we have given. The Environment Agency has been able to increase its front-line criminal enforcement resource. We are also looking for further recruitment to enable enforcement work in the new duties that they will be given. The Environment Agency’s economic crime unit was launched last year and is specifically targeting the financial motivations behind waste crime, which are often huge, so that we can bring in asset freezing and freeze the proceeds of crime actions. We are looking to do a number of things to genuinely get to the bottom of this and tackle the outcomes.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister will no doubt be familiar with the case of Hoads Wood in Kent that was exposed by the BBC a while back. Hoads Wood is a site of special scientific interest in which trees were cut down and 30,000 tonnes of illegally dumped waste were deposited. It took four years for the Environment Agency to impose a restriction order to prevent this continuing, and now we are faced with a £15 million bill for clean-up. The Environment Agency has said that there are six other sites like Hoads Wood where illegal waste dumping is happening on a large scale. Can the Minister please tell this House, either now or in writing, where these sites are and what is being done to clean them up and prevent continued illegal waste dumping?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I will have to write to the noble Lord and the House about exactly where the sites are because I do not have that information in front of me. When we came into government, we acted to put pressure on to get that area, Hoads Wood, dealt with, because it had been dragging on for far too long, as the noble Lord is aware. That is also why we have brought in the changes that we are making, increasing the Environment Agency’s budget and looking to do more about enforcement, because we do not want these situations dragging on. The blight on the countryside is just too grim.

Global Plastic Pollution Treaty

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Thursday 11th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The noble Baroness’s last point was the main point—getting everybody back to the table. If we are to make a real difference globally, we need those countries with us to appreciate that the production method of plastic has to be part of where we move forward regarding plastic in the future. You cannot solve these issues on their own; it is a global issue. I know that it is incredibly frustrating that we feel that we have stalled. As I said, we have made some progress—we are getting to a better understanding of where other countries are coming from—and we will continue to try to make the further progress that we so badly need.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

It was reported last month that the sale of single-use plastic bags in this country jumped from 407 million items to 437 million in one year, a 7% increase. This was largely driven by online shopping, and particularly by the online supermarket Ocado, which accounts for about half of the single-use plastic bags sold. Although Ocado claims that most of its bags are recycled, we know that in the waste hierarchy, avoidance of use comes above recycling, and other supermarkets, such as Waitrose, provide online deliveries without plastic bags. Could the Government engage in conversations with our major supermarkets to encourage them not to use single-use plastic bags for food delivery?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a really important point. We have to continue to reduce our own plastic use in this country. Whereas recycling is important, if you do not have to use it in the first place, that is clearly an even better way to behave. We talk to supermarkets on all sorts of issues, and the noble Lord is absolutely right that this is something that we need to discuss and tackle with them. Consumers are expected to change their behaviour, but it is also important that retailers—and that includes online retailers—ensure that their behaviour is not adding to the plastic pollution problem.

Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations 2025

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Lords Chamber

Where this is relevant to our debate today is that Wales and Scotland had an opportunity to join in this legislation and chose not to do so. I think that was principally because they wanted to align with European Union legislation rather than with the English legislation. This regulation applies only to England. As it happens, today the Polish presidency has secured agreement in the Council of Ministers and entered a trilogue. So, we are making considerable progress in the European Union. As far as I can see, that answers the central question from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett: how can we achieve something which is comparable across the United Kingdom? The answer is that there is no reason why within a reasonable period we will not have both legislation for precision-bred organisms and precision-bred plants in this country, and provision for NGTs, which are not under the GMO regulations, in the European Union—and soon.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly and in so doing declare my interest as a scientific adviser to Marks & Spencer. I do not want to repeat what has been said, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, that much of the debate this evening has been a repetition of what we heard in Committee and on Report of the primary legislation.

However, I just want to recap on the question of mandatory labelling, which has cropped up in a number of noble Lords’ contributions. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, made the point that it would be very difficult to enforce mandatory labelling because you cannot tell the difference. That is the whole point: precision-bred organisms, as defined in the Bill, are organisms that could be produced by conventional breeding. So, if I were an enforcer, I would not know where to start. My noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington made the point that in due course, these gene-edited, precision-bred products will be pervasive in the food chain. Once there is a wheat that could grow without application of pesticides or could grow more effectively in our climate, it will become pervasive in the food chain. So where does the labelling start and end?

My third point, which was made by my noble friend Lady Freeman, is that it may be up to retailers, on a non-mandatory basis, to label the benefits. So: “Here is a tomato that is better for you”—and it may be labelled like that. It is not the process but the end product that matters. But if we insist on the process, and I agree with what the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, said, we should be equally willing to put labels on conventionally bred organisms—apples, bread or other products—that says, “This product has been produced by bombarding gametes with nuclear radiation”. That is a process: it is the equivalent of gene editing but on the other side of the fence.

My final point is about cross-contamination. If I were a farmer producing gene-edited wheat, I would be really worried about cross-contamination from the neighbouring organic farmer. I would want guarantees that that organic farm was not going to contaminate my gene-edited crop. At the same time, the organic farmer is looking at me and saying, “I don’t want his stuff contaminating my crop”. It is in the interests of both sides to figure out ways of reducing or minimising the risks of cross-contamination. So it is not a one-way street, and I strongly support this secondary legislation.

[Lord Dodds of Duncairn (DUP)]

My Lords, I shall intervene very briefly on the issue that was highlighted in the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s report on the impact on the UK internal market. As we have heard, products of precision breeding that are approved for sale in England can be sold into Scotland and Wales, and we have had a bit of discussion on that, but at paragraph 47, the committee said:

“In relation to Northern Ireland, Defra explained: ‘Under the Windsor Framework, mutual recognition does not apply to precision bred organism legislation. Therefore, precision bred products must comply with GM legislation before it can be sold in Northern Ireland’.”


At paragraph 48, it said that

“because PBOs are currently not recognised in the EU and therefore in NI”—

since we are under EU law and jurisdiction, despite Brexit—

“producers with PBO authorisation in England will have to label their products as GMO for trade with NI or the EU. This is a matter of concern”.

It talks about the submissions that were made raising fundamental questions about the ability to trade with our EU neighbours. Therefore, I ask the Minister when she comes to reply just to explain and clarify the position of Northern Ireland. What is the impact on Northern Ireland of this particular situation that Northern Ireland finds itself in, compared even to Scotland and Wales?

The fact is that these issues, as the committee says at paragraph 49, could not be addressed in any detail whatever through a de minimis impact assessment. As the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, said, discussions are happening with the devolved Administrations. I would be very interested to hear what stage they are at. What discussion is happening with the Northern Ireland DAERA Minister? I have certainly not heard anything being reported in the Northern Ireland Assembly on this matter, so I would be grateful if the Minister could just clarify those very important issues, which have been highlighted in the report, with regard to Northern Ireland.

Solar Farms and Food Production

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

First, I reassure the noble Lord that estimates suggest that ground-mounted solar used just over 0.1% of land in 2022, and we expect any future rollout to take up a very small amount of agricultural land. The large solar farms that I have information about are not on any grade 1 or grade 2 agricultural land, as far as I am aware. However, the noble Lord makes the very important point that the land use framework will be critical in how we manage what our land is used for. Is it used for energy, housing or farming, and so on? We expect the Green Paper to be published for consultation in the new year and I urge all noble Lords to read it and take part in the consultation.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister referred to the long-awaited land use framework, which she helpfully announced is due to be published in the new year. I would like to ask whether, at the same time, her department has considered what skills and data will be required to use the land use framework to inform decisions such as the one that is being debated in this Oral Question?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

As part of the consultation and the development of the land use framework, we are intending to engage with a very broad range of respondents in order to have meaningful co-design, and resources absolutely have to be part of that.

Waste: Incineration

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

As I just mentioned, we are looking to do a review right across the piece on this, so anaerobic waste will certainly be part of that.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, it is all very well to incinerate waste, but does the Minister agree that a real priority should be to reduce the amount of waste that we produce as a country? The real way to deal with this problem is just to produce less waste.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

It is a really important point that the noble Lord makes. If we are moving to a more circular economy, as this Government want, we have to see less residual waste being generated —in fact, less waste as a whole. There is a statutory target to effectively halve residual waste by 2042 from 2019 levels, but there still will be an estimated 17.6 million tonnes of residual waste to manage in 2042. Therefore, we have to look at the bigger picture. How do we actually reduce waste overall?

Environmental Targets (Public Authorities) Bill [HL]

Lord Krebs Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Krebs]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, late on Friday afternoon, or even early on Friday afternoon, is known in academic circles as the graveyard slot. I hope that this is not the slot where my Bill enters the graveyard. In introducing the Bill, I declare my interests as set out in the register; in particular, that I am on the scientific advisory board of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, a consortium of NGOs and Cambridge University, and that I am an independent scientific adviser to Drax, the power company. I thank the Minister for meeting me to discuss the Bill —in fact, twice—and Richard Benwell and Matt Browne of Wildlife and Countryside Link for their help in preparing the Bill and providing a briefing.

We have outstanding legislation in this country relating to climate and the environment, so why the need for further legislation? I intend to explain that over the next few minutes. The Climate Change Act 2008, and its associated secondary legislation, sets a legally binding target to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 and to meet the interim targets in the carbon budgets. Furthermore, the same Act places a requirement on the Government to ensure that the country adapts to the inevitable impacts of climate change on our infrastructure, buildings, land and people.

The Environment Act 2021 also places specific legal obligations on the Government, including targets on biodiversity, water quality and use, woodland cover, waste and air quality. Examples include halting the decline of biodiversity by 2030 and reducing nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in water from agriculture by 80% by 2038, compared with the 2020 baseline.

The unfortunate news is that, in spite of this excellent legislation, the Government are nowhere near on track to meet their legal obligations on climate and nature. The Climate Change Committee said in its report to Parliament in July this year:

“The UK has committed to reduce emissions in 2030 by 68% compared to 1990 levels, as its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement. It is the first UK target set in line with Net Zero. Now only six years away, the country is not on track to hit this target”.


In the same report on adaptation, the Climate Change Committee said:

“The UK’s Third National Adaptation Programme … lacks the pace and ambition to address growing climate risks, which we are already experiencing”.


In its January 2024 report, the Office for Environmental Protection said:

“Government remains largely off track to meets its environmental ambitions and must speed up and scale up its efforts in order to achieve them”.


The OEP concluded that the Government were on track to meet just four of the 40 targets it examined.

This is where my Bill comes in. The simple fact is that myriad day-to-day decisions that could help to deliver the targets are not in the hands of central government. It is as though the Government have a set of levers on their desk that they can pull, but the levers are not connected to anything under the desk. Instead, these actions are spread across many public authorities, which are listed in the Bill. These include land managers, such as the Forestry Commission, Forestry England and the national parks authorities; regulators such as Ofwat; local authorities responsible for planning decisions; and infrastructure authorities such as Network Rail and National Highways. The Bill encompasses not just the public sector but, indirectly, the private sector, such as water companies that are regulated by the authorities listed.

Meeting the legally binding targets will require a Stakhanovite effort not just from central government but from all those public authorities. In fact, I argue that, without action from the public authorities, there is little or no chance that the Government will meet their targets. This Bill would give the public authorities a duty to have as a priority helping to meet the targets. Contributing to the targets is referred to in the Bill as the environmental recovery objective and the listed public bodies have a duty to take all reasonable steps to meet that objective.

Some of the bodies predate the Climate Change Act and the Environment Act, so it is not surprising that they do not have a responsibility to help to meet the targets in these Acts. For instance, the work of Forestry England, the country’s largest landowner, is closely tied to legislation written over 100 years ago. In general, where public authorities do have duties in relation to the environment and climate change, the duties are weaker than those implied by the Climate Change Act and the Environment Act.

For example, National Highways, established under the Infrastructure Act 2015, has as one of its eight objectives to

“minimise the environmental impacts of operating, maintaining and improving the network and seek to protect and enhance the quality of the surrounding environment”.

It is also obliged to

“conform to the principles of sustainable development”.

These are well-intentioned obligations, but they do not imply a specific duty to help to meet the biodiversity or greenhouse gas emission targets, yet transport infrastructure can have a major impact on both. We know that surface transport accounts for roughly a quarter of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions and these emissions have barely reduced at all over the past 30 years.

Local authorities have a key role in this Bill, and councillors from across the political spectrum and from a range of councils across England have expressed their support for it, both personally to me in writing and in public statements. The briefing from Climate Action is very revealing and salient. It concludes that, without action by local authorities, the Government will not achieve its net-zero target and that voluntary action is not sufficient.

In 2024, according to the Local Government Authority, two-thirds of councils were not confident that they would reach their net-zero target. The barriers to achieving the targets include lack of money, lack of expertise and lack of political will. In Scotland, all councils have to produce an annual report on climate action. In England, under two-thirds of councils do so. That is the case for giving public authorities a duty to help meet the targets in the two Acts to which I have referred.

There will no doubt be objections to the Bill, so I will address three of them. The first objection is that it is unnecessary because the listed public authorities are already doing the work. The second is that it is too burdensome and costly for the nominated authorities to implement. The third is that it is too blunt an instrument.

It is apparent that the first two of these objections cannot both be true at the same time. If it is unnecessary because public bodies are already doing it, by definition it cannot be too burdensome. Some public authorities may already be contributing to the targets to the best of their ability. For them, there will be no extra burden or cost. However, as my examples have illustrated, not all public authorities contribute to meeting the targets. Many of them—perhaps most—have weaker obligations than those implied by the Bill. In fact, if all public authorities were contributing fully to meet the targets, one might ask why we are so far off track in meeting them.

What about costs? There might be some modest additional costs in the short term, but they have to be considered alongside the costs that will be avoided. These include costs associated with flood damage, damage to infrastructure from extreme weather, and loss of ecosystem services such as clean air and clean water, and—we now know from the excellent book by my noble friend Lady Willis of Summertown—good health. Those costs could be avoided by modest investment in taking action to help protect the climate and nature.

The third possible objection that I raise is that the Bill is too blunt an instrument, imposing requirements on public authorities that they cannot meet because of other priorities. However, although the Bill is prescriptive, it is not too prescriptive. It states:

“The environmental recovery objective is a principal objective”,


not the principal objective. So public authorities have it within their discretion to balance it against other objectives.

Finally, two further considerations are measurement and reporting. How will progress be measured and who will assess how well public authorities are doing? The targets are in the two Acts to which I have referred; therefore, the measurement of progress and the baseline for each target will be based on the criteria that the Government have set out in these Acts. The most obvious body to assess public authorities’ progress in meeting the targets would be the Office for Environmental Protection.

In summary, the Bill fills a gap in the Government’s plans for climate and nature. We know that they are not on track to meet their targets. If they do not accept the Bill, or at least the principles within it, I would ask the following question: if this is not part of the answer to the question of how to get back on track, what do the Government propose as an alternative? I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have taken part in this debate and sacrificed their Friday afternoon. I will not spend a lot of time going through the contributions as I am sure we are all quite keen to get away.

However, I shall respond to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for whom I have the greatest respect, and I thank him for his kind words about me. He raised a mixture of points, including that some public authorities are already straining every sinew to help to meet the targets, that some of them have no capacity to do so and would not know how, and that for some of them some of the targets are irrelevant. These are all arguments worth exploring, and I hope that in Committee we can have a further debate on those points.

I have a particular point about Network Rail. Those of us who suffer at its hands travelling in and out of London all agree that we wish that Network Rail, the train operating companies and their public owner successor could actually get the trains to run on time and get us from A to B. However, it is nevertheless the case that Network Rail owns 55,000 hectares of land, is a neighbour to 7 million people and has a biodiversity strategy. Last week, the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, and I met its director of biodiversity, Neil Strong, and discussed this Bill with him. He was broadly supportive of it; he thought it would help Network Rail with its ambition to have no net loss of biodiversity by the end of this year—which by the way is way ahead of the Government’s target of 2030—although it was not clear to us that Network Rail was measuring biodiversity in the right way and therefore whether it would know if it had achieved the target. I do not think Network Rail would push back at the Bill if a duty were placed upon it, and it would be up to the company to balance that duty with the duty of getting the trains to run on time.

I thank the Minister for her response and for the two meetings we have had, and welcome her offer of further discussions. I took away a number of points from her response. The most important was that the revised environmental improvement plan may be a home for some of the ideas in the Bill, and I would very much like to discuss that with her.

Another important point made by the Minister, which I had forgotten to make and which had not been made before, is that this is about not just avoided costs but economic growth. The Government’s plans for green growth would be supported by the skills and actions that followed from the Bill.

The Minister also made the point that the Government are still relatively newly in place. She used the words, “reviewing” and “actively considering”. I take the point that many of these issues are under review. Perhaps, once those reviews have concluded, or even while they are being carried out, we will be able to discuss the merits or demerits of the proposal in my Bill. I am not claiming that it is a magic bullet, and there may be better solutions. If so, I would like to hear them, and I look forward to further discussions.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Biosecurity and Infectious Diseases

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, and to join others in congratulating my noble friend Lord Trees on his excellent introduction to this important debate. I also join others in welcoming the Minister and look forward to his maiden speech. I should declare that, among my interests in the register, I am a scientific adviser to Marks & Spencer.

In recent decades, this country has experienced four major farm animal disease outbreaks caused by breaches in biosecurity. First, there was mad cow disease, or BSE, in the 1990s. Here, the deregulation of the manufacture of meat and bone meal and the consequent lapse in biosecurity allowed the disease to spread within the cattle population. The infective agent, the prion protein, could pass on the disease via meat and bone meal because the rendering temperature had been reduced.

Secondly, there was foot and mouth disease in 2001. This epidemic was the result of inadequate biosecurity and monitoring. It originated from infected imported pork products fed as pig swill, and it spread rapidly throughout the country because of movement of livestock. MAFF was slow to recognise the scale of the problem and to implement appropriate biosecurity measures.

The third disease, bovine TB, has been an ongoing problem in this country since the 1980s. Here, there are two biosecurity issues: the transmission from wildlife, primarily badgers, to cattle and transmission from cattle to cattle within and between farms. Although the randomised badger culling trial showed that the latter is more important than the former, in the past 13 years emphasis in policy has been placed on killing badgers rather than on measures to prevent the spread of the disease among cattle. The fact that the comparative skin test for bovine TB in cattle has a sensitivity of only around 50% in field conditions means that there continues to be a hidden reservoir of infection in our cattle population.

The fourth disease caused by problems with biosecurity, referred to by my noble friend Lord Trees, is avian flu. As he said, this poses a particular problem because it is spread by wild migrating birds. What lessons have the Government learned from these four major problems that we have faced in recent times? Have those lessons been enshrined in Defra thinking and in policy for the future?

I will now briefly look to the future. The risks, as my noble friend Lord Trees expressed so clearly in his introduction, include a mixture of unknowns—for example, mutations of pathogens, just as BSE may have arisen from a mutation of the scrapie agent—and other risk factors that are known and more predictable. We have already heard about these: international trade, wildlife reservoirs, climate change, drug resistance and animal husbandry, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

I will ask the Minister about two aspects of planning for the future. The first is early warning. The Government have a programme to monitor pathogens called PATH-SAFE, described in their literature as

“a three-year project to develop a pilot national surveillance network, using the latest DNA-sequencing technology and environmental sampling to improve the detection and tracking of foodborne and antimicrobial resistant pathogens through the whole agri-food system from farm to fork”.

Can the Minister update us on the progress of that project?

My second point about the future is import controls, already mentioned by a number of speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. As we heard, since Brexit there have been no border checks on imports from the European Union, but the new risk-based approach to inspections, the border target operating model, which has been delayed five times, will finally kick off at the end of this month. It will go through a series of phases in April and October until its introduction is complete. The model relies heavily on documentation rather than physical inspections. What proportion of checks will be physical, rather than looking at pieces of paper? Will port health authorities have the required resources to carry out paper and physical checks?

This applies only to legal imports, and illegal imports are likely to pose much greater risks to biosecurity. We know from the experience of Dover Port Health Authority in October 2022 that there are major consignments of illegal meat coming in from eastern Europe and, importantly, there are still ongoing imports of bush meat from Africa—which is completely unregulated—that could carry major disease risks. What is the Government’s estimate of how much illegal bush meat and other meat is imported into the UK and what is being done to bear down on that and enhance our biosecurity?

European Union: Trade Barriers

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Tuesday 4th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

We work very closely with Hannah and other port managers—for example, on the common user charge, which is a way of alleviating very high costs on some and very low costs on others, which we think is fair—but we also work with local authorities. The local health authority is also facing a cost-recovery arrangement. We are making sure that we have a risk profile that minimises the number of stops for low-risk items, but we are absolutely focused on the problem. We will continue to work with ports and all other authorities to make sure that the impact is minimised as much as possible.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister has referred on several occasions to a risk-based system for checking food imports: the border target operating model. Of course, we are moving into unknown territory here—we have not used it before—so does the Minister agree that it would be sensible for the Government to ask the Food Standards Agency to produce an objective assessment every so often of the impact of the changes in import controls on consumer food safety?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. Obviously, we work with the Food Standards Agency—although it is not covered by my department—daily to make sure we have got this right in all areas of food safety. At the moment the highest-risk items are products of animal origin, for obvious reasons, and certain plants that can bring in diseases such as Xylella, which I mentioned earlier. None of the work we are doing with the Food Standards Agency is secret, so there is no problem with making it public.

UK Food Shortages

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Thursday 23rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that very helpful summary of the situation. I would like to ask him a few questions. There are photographs in the newspapers today of full shelves in Spain, France, Germany and the Netherlands; if the problem is bad weather causing a crisis in production in Spain and Morocco, how come these other countries, including other northern European countries, apparently have access to plenty of salad and fruit? That is question one—why are we different? I know the Republic of Ireland is also having problems, but why are we different from many other European countries?

My second question is more forward-looking. The Minister talked about meetings with the industry and what can be done to support them, and I have two points about that. First, the horticulture sector is very energy intensive in this country. Does the discussion that the Minister referred to include the possibility of crucial support for energy costs in the horticulture sector? Secondly, this raises the broader issue of the resilience of our own food system. Does the Minister think that this affects the conclusions of the Agriculture Act 2020 that we should be paying farmers public money for public goods, excluding food production, like farming butterflies and hedgerows, which I am all in favour of? Does it change the perspective we have on trying to increase food production in this country?

I should have declared an interest of mine that is in the register.