Global Plastic Pollution Treaty
Lord Krebs Excerpts(1 year ago)
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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(1 year, 4 months ago)
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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(1 year, 9 months ago)
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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(1 year, 10 months ago)
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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 ExcerptsFriday 18th October 2024
(1 year, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Environmental Targets (Public Authorities) Bill [HL] 2024-26 View all Environmental Targets (Public Authorities) Bill [HL] 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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.
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.
Biosecurity and Infectious Diseases
Lord Krebs Excerpts(2 years, 8 months ago)
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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(3 years, 2 months ago)
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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(3 years, 6 months ago)
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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.
Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill
Lord Krebs ExcerptsWednesday 25th January 2023
(3 years, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 View all Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 83-I Marshalled list for Report - (23 Jan 2023)
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, I shall introduce my amendments in this group, Amendments 11, 27, 29 and 30. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and my noble friend Lord Winston for their support. I declare my interest as laid out in the register as president of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.
During our Committee debate, the Minister stated that the Government’s intention was to take a step-by-step approach, particularly around the introduction of animals, and that the Bill had the ability to do so. Our concern is that we have heard no clarification as to how this will actually work. By what means do the Government intend to introduce provisions related to distinct species, rather than the “relevant animals” as a class, under the Bill as currently drafted? Despite the Minister’s assurances, we still have no guarantee that this step-by-step approach will actually happen.
My Amendment 11 would set this expectation on the face of the Bill. Combined with my Amendments 27, 29 and 30, the effect would be to prevent a precision-bred animal being released until it had met the date condition provided by my new clause, which would follow Clause 47. This proposes that, for farm animals, the date is no earlier than 1 January 2026, and for other animals, no earlier than 1 January 2028. Also scientific evidence must support this extension: if it does not, the date could be put back further. I just say to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that this is not an automatic introduction at that date; it is just putting the step-by-step approach on the face of the Bill.
The reason I have tabled these amendments is that, whether we agree that animals should be included or not, clear concerns were expressed during our Committee debates as to when they should be included, how quickly they should be included, and whether all animals should be included at the same time. We believe there is insufficient detail in the Bill regarding concrete provisions around timeframes: many of them are vague and noncommittal. Much of the preparation that we believe is necessary for a regulatory framework for animals has not yet been properly carried out.
When this issue was debated in Committee, the noble Lord the Minister said:
“All I can do is assure noble Lords that nothing will happen before we are in the right position to do it … The priority will be to try to do this for farmed animals first, and we want to make sure that we are operating a step-by-step approach. If we put it in the Bill, it may be too prescriptive, because we are in a fast-moving area of science, and it may constrain the ability of the scientific community to progress this if we do it in the wrong way.”—[Official Report, 12/12/22; col.503.]
We listened to the Minister’s words and, in order not to tie the Government’s hands or constrain the scientific community if there is clear evidence, for example, of a scientific breakthrough in tackling bird flu, the amendment allows for flexibility. An accelerated timetable should come in only if scientific opinion supported this. So we have not set these dates in stone in either direction.
I hope the Minister can see that we are taking a constructive approach to trying to put step-by-step on the face of the Bill. However, if he is not prepared to accept our amendments, I intend to seek the opinion of the House.
Lord Krebs (CB)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for her courtesy in giving way. I will make only two brief comments. The first addresses the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, raised, particularly the reference to the workshop that I helped to organise last Friday, where we had a number of experts giving us their take on the science. It is very often—in fact, usually—the case that scientists do not absolutely agree on everything; that is just the way that science is. When you go as a scientist to a conference, you do not expect everybody to say, “Fantastic, your research is absolutely superb”. People criticise it and challenge you and say, “Why are you doing that in this way and not some other way?” But there is sometimes a centre of gravity of opinion. Science goes through different phases. There may be no agreed position and gradually over time it is possible that a position consolidates in a particular way.
I think it is fair to say that Dr Michael Antoniou, to whom the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, referred, is probably not in the centre of gravity of current opinion on the safety issues and other technical aspects of gene editing. So while I absolutely applaud the noble Baroness’s point which raised the diversity of opinions in the scientific community, I do not think your Lordships should be too swayed by a particular individual’s point of view, because I do not think it is the centre of gravity of scientific opinion.
My second, very brief point concerns timescales and is related to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock. One can see this in two ways, as her introduction to her amendments implied. You could see it as putting the brakes on—do not rush too quickly before you are sure—as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, would wish us to do. On the other hand, towards the end of her speech, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said, “We don’t want to hold things back”. On the one hand we do not want to rush, and on the other hand we do not want to have the brakes applied too sharply.
I am trying to anchor that in a bit of reality. As far as I am aware—I was told this at the meeting last Friday by Professor Bruce Whitelaw, director of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, which is the UK’s leading centre for this sort of technology in animals—in the US, the Food and Drug Administration is already reviewing a licence application for gene-edited pigs. The animal genetics company, Genus, in collaboration with the University of Missouri, has developed a pig that is totally resistant to the virus that causes porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome—PRRS for short. So the question in assessing the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, is, would that amendment hold up the commercialisation of this pig, if the FDA and the relevant bodies in the UK approved it?
Given that it would improve pig welfare, because PRRS is not a pleasant disease, and save the pig industry a very large amount of money—an estimated $2.5 billion a year in Europe and the US alone—do we want accidentally to place a barrier on that kind of development through timescale limits? I do not land on one side or the other; I just think it is useful to have a real-life example of what is going on. My question to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, is this: if this PRRS-resistant pig came to market before 2026, would that count as an example of where the 2026 hurdle should be removed, because it is ready to go, or would she want to keep it in place? The question on the other side is whether it will realistically go from FDA approval to commercialisation in about three years. I am not trying to land on one side or the other, just to anchor this in a specific example which may help us think through our response to the proposed amendments.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
Just to come back on that, proposed new subsection (4) in my amendment says:
“The Secretary of State may, by regulations, amend the dates listed in subsection (2)”—
the dates I read out—
“if the requirement under subsection (3)”,
which is the evidence condition the noble Lord is talking about,
“is met before the dates”.
There is flexibility in the amendment to bring those dates forward if that scientific evidence is there.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I will intervene briefly on a point of information. I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has helped his cause, although he is very knowledgeable in this area and I pay tribute to him in that regard, in mentioning that a particular academic is not deemed to be at the centre of gravity on these issues. Who are we to judge? This is a fast-moving and complicated field. We are leaving what has been a highly regulated area, where our farm products have moved very freely between here and the European Union; if we go down this path of very light regulation in the Bill, how do we know that the EU will accept our food products? I shall listen very carefully to my noble friend’s response, in particular to the amendments from the Opposition Front Bench.
I feel that there is an uneasiness and lack of understanding among the public about this, which I share. I am in awe of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh; it is my alma mater, although I studied law rather than science or veterinary science. I realise that cloning is different, but the very fact that we do not seem to be going down that path, which was first brought up with Dolly the sheep, raises issues. I am very uneasy about moving to light-touch regulation when the science is not at one on this issue.
Lord Krebs (CB)
If I could just interrupt the noble Baroness, I think it is wrong to bring up Dolly the sheep in this conversation, because this has nothing to do with cloning. It is a completely different technology.
While I am on my feet, I will respond to her point about how we know where the centre of gravity of scientific opinion is, who is to judge it and whether it will change. I appreciate her kind words about me; I am a scientist but I am no expert in genetics or gene editing. However, I know from my general experience of a lifetime as a scientific researcher that, when there is a centre of gravity of opinion, there are always outliers. Sometimes those outliers turn out to be right and there are transformations, but I have seen no evidence at this stage that the outliers are right and the centre of gravity is about to shift. That is all I want to say.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
I have nearly finished my remarks. I have some sympathy with the amendments from the Front Bench opposite and would like to hear a very good reason why my noble friend may be minded not to support them.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, and his officials for the very productive conversations that we have had and thank the Government for tabling amendments that, as he just explained, meet the essential request of my Amendments 4 and 7 in this group. I do not think that there is further debate to be had about the purpose of my amendments, but I thought that I might spend a few minutes, if noble Lords do not mind, explaining what I was talking about with a couple of simple examples. Although he gave a very correct and detailed response, I could see the eyes of one or two of your Lordships beginning to glaze over. I will therefore try to give an illustration.
The logic of my Amendment 4 was that the Bill says —and the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, has just repeated—that a precision-bred organism could have been produced by traditional breeding. My amendment says that while this is true in principle, in practice it may be very difficult to achieve these changes by traditional breeding. The Government’s amendment, in slightly different words, acknowledges that point. I will illustrate why I tabled my amendment with two examples.
Noble Lords will know that cystic fibrosis is an incurable and often fatal disease caused by a single gene mutation. That gene is extremely bad for you, yet one in 25 of us carries that gene, which is extraordinary. After 10,000 generations or more of human evolution since Homo sapiens first emerged, why is that gene still around? If it is so disadvantageous—indeed, fatal—why has it not disappeared? The answer is very simple: traditional breeding—what we do—and natural selection over 10,000 generations has been unable to remove that gene because it is recessive. In other words, most of us who carry the gene—we do not know which ones of us do—show no manifestation of it. If two carriers have children then, statistically speaking, one-quarter of those children will manifest the disease but the others will not. That is the law of Mendelian genetics. Although, in theory, selection and traditional breeding could eliminate the cystic fibrosis gene, the fact is that it does not. But precision breeding could, if we applied it to that example.
My other illustration is on linkage. Genes that live together also travel together, which means that they are passed down through the generations as joined-up twins. One example might be hair colour and eye colour. In general, blond hair and blue eyes go together and brown hair and brown eyes go together, although not always, because those genes for hair colour and eye colour are linked together on the same chromosome but not incredibly closely linked. If they were absolute neighbours, it would be very hard, in the normal process of the reshuffling of chromosomes that occurs during traditional breeding, to separate them. Yet, with precision breeding, you could separate them at a stroke using molecular scissors.
That is what the amendment is about, and I believe that the Government’s amendment has addressed those points with slightly different wording from mine. When I asked Defra officials whether they agreed with the logic of my amendments, they said, “Yes, but our lawyers don’t like your wording.” I defer to the Defra lawyers and accept that they have come up with an alternative form of wording.
Briefly, I move on to my Amendment 7 which, as explained by the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, is about whether having any small fragments of exogenous DNA—probably bacterial DNA—left over after gene editing is a bad thing. The first thing that I need to say to noble Lords in case they are not aware of it is that there is nothing wrong with exogenous DNA. None of us would be alive today were it not for our exogenous DNA. In fact, no multicellular organism on the planet would be alive today were it not for their exogenous DNA. The reason is that, in every cell of our body, there are tiny little organelles called mitochondria, which started life as bacteria. They are not our own DNA; they got into multicellular organisms long before we appeared on the planet 1.5 billion years ago and have been accepted by the host—and, in fact, used by the host to generate energy. The energy that fuels your body and keeps you going is created, second by second in every cell of your body, by these little inclusions that are controlled by exogenous DNA.
Lord Krebs (CB)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for introducing the amendment because it gives me a chance to say two things quickly. One, which she alluded to, is our discussion in Committee about detectability by analytical methods. I asked Wendy Harwood from the John Innes Centre to give me an exact form of words about that, which I shall repeat with her permission. It confirms, in a way, what the noble Baroness has just been saying. Wendy Harwood said:
“If you had details of the exact edit made, then you could detect”
the PBO by polymerase chain reaction,
“followed by sequencing of the PCR product. If you were just presented with a plant, and no audit trail and asked whether it was genome edited, you could not determine whether it was or not.”
One therefore needs an audit trail in order to be able to tell. She continued:
“If exactly the same change had been made by precision breeding as had been made by traditional breeding, and you tested by looking for that precise change, then you would not be able to tell which was which. Again an audit trail would be required. You might however have a case where both PB and traditional breeding had made changes to the same gene, giving the same trait, but these changes were not identical at the DNA level, in this case you could tell the difference.”
That emphasises that if one is serious about knowing which products on the shelves are produced by PB, there needs to be an audit trail.
On whether whole-genome sequencing is of value, one angle is that so much mutation in the genome is going on all the time that it is hard to know what one’s reference material would be. The Royal Society produced in its evidence to the Defra consultation a calculation that in a hectare of wheat there would be at least one mutation for every base pair in the wheat genome. There are 10 billion base pairs in a wheat genome. In a one-hectare field of wheat, there would be a mutation somewhere in every one of those base pairs. So the difficulty with using whole-genome sequencing is what one makes of the information one gets. There will be huge variation and one does not quite know what the value of the information is.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
I think we have agreement that some parts of the genome are functionally relevant and have a particular functional significance. We perhaps have points of disagreement about how relatively protected some of those may be from natural mutations. There are lots of mutations that happen naturally in areas that may be beneficial to the plant but only in certain parts of the genome and with certain sorts of functional effects. The parts of the genome that are particularly crucial to the function of the organism are the structural, basic ones, where there are far fewer natural effects. If you read the complete list of the genome, you are going to look at certain bits to see which changes are significant, which ones may be deleterious and which ones are less significant. Does the noble Lord agree?
Lord Krebs (CB)
Obviously, I agree that the different parts of the genome serve different functions. As the noble Baroness said in Committee, when we were students, we learned about junk DNA. However, it is not junk DNA; it can play an important part in regulating the expression of other genes. I take the point.
Lord Winston (Lab)
I love the idea of the noble Lord’s field of wheat waving gently in the breeze and the sunlight, but does he not agree that certain genes in those wheat seeds are rather well conserved and, in fact, do not change? Indeed, certain genes are protected from mutation. Therefore, there is nothing to prevent us looking at analysis to see the frequency of certain mutations within the genome; perhaps we need to be doing that. The data there could be very useful in all sorts of ways.
Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill
Lord Krebs ExcerptsWednesday 14th December 2022
(3 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 View all Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 64-II Second marshalled list for Committee - (12 Dec 2022)
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 60 in this group is in my name; I will speak to it relatively briefly.
First, I thank the chair of the FSA, Professor Susan Jebb, for her helpful meeting with Peers about this Bill last week. We covered a number of issues including labelling, safety and enforceability. I listened carefully to her advice, which was extremely helpful.
However, this amendment raises concerns about the resources and capacity of the FSA to take on the additional functions envisaged in the Bill. It is a probing amendment. I would welcome some reassurance from the Minister that the FSA is in a good position to meet the demands set out in this Bill in a meticulous and timely fashion. I raise this because we know that, like many public bodies, the FSA is not in a great position financially. At its last meeting, the CEO reported that, although the budget for next year would not be cut, there would be no extra money for inflation; as we know, that is in effect a cut in income. She also reported that staff are feeling overwhelmed by the relentless pace of and increase in different demands.
As a result, the FSA has already identified key areas of its existing work to be reduced, paused or stopped. My own union, UNISON, is already reporting that the FSA is removing many daily meat inspections in abattoirs, for example. The sector is facing huge food safety challenges, for example from the fall in the number of inspections of food businesses and the ongoing delay in establishing proper import controls for high-risk food and feed from the EU. These are all pressures with which the FSA is already grappling. Incidentally, it is also having to divert resources to assess 150 pieces of EU legislation before the retained EU law deadline of December 2023.
My question for the Minister is a genuine one: in the light of all these diverse pressures and the fact that there does not seem to be any more money around, can he assure us that the FSA has sufficient resources and in-house expertise to take on another complex regulatory role when it already faces so many challenges? I look forward to his response.
Lord Krebs (CB)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, for allowing me to ask a brief question. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, asked an important question about resources for the Food Standards Agency. The noble Lord and I are both former chairs, so we know a bit about how it operates. I will add a little twist to the question. If the FSA will not be given additional resources to fulfil these duties which we envisage in relation to this Bill, can the Minister tell us which activities the FSA will have to stop to re-divert resources for precision breeding?
Lord Rooker (Lab)
I thoroughly endorse that question. This is probably not the night to go into that area, but the fact of the matter is that, to the best of my knowledge, the meat industry remains subsidised by the taxpayer. We have never got full cost recovery. It is a huge industry—£6 billion—so we are not talking about a few little abattoirs. The industry has been subsidised for years, with a free management service provided by the Food Standards Agency. However, that is not my purpose.
Regarding the clause stand part notices in this group, it is always good to be learning new things: I did not know that you could not put an amendment down to take out a part of the Bill—it is not something that I had ever tried to do in the past—but you cannot do it, so you need to list the clauses. The reason for doing so is given in the19th report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, paragraph 30 of which suggests that Part 3 of the Bill is quite unusual because it
“provides for the regulation of food and feed produced from PBOs. It consists of skeleton clauses: the provision on the face of the Bill is so insubstantial that the real operation of Part 3 would be entirely by the regulations made under it.”
I will not go through the whole report at this time of night—there is no need—but I will highlight a couple of paragraphs from the committee’s report. The memorandum supplied by the department is referred to, which justified these clauses which are so insubstantial. Paragraph 35 of the committee’s report says:
“We find these justifications far from convincing.”
It points out that the Guidance for Departments on the Role and Requirements of the Committee states:
“Skeleton legislation should only be used in the most exceptional circumstances. Where the government decide that such exceptional circumstances apply, the delegated powers memorandum should make an explicit declaration (‘a skeleton legislation declaration’) that the bill is a skeleton bill or clauses within a bill are skeleton clauses. Such a declaration should be accompanied by a full justification for adopting that approach, including why no other approach was reasonable to adopt and how the scope of the skeleton provision is constrained.”
That is paragraph 9 of the guidance to departments—something that Defra has clearly decided to ignore in this case.
Lord Benyon (Con)
The noble Baroness is absolutely right. I was referring to the capacity of the FSA to have the right information to feed through to precisely the people she is talking about. I am assured that it has the resources necessary to do this.
The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is also right. The unsung heroes are very often the sometimes underappreciated food safety and trading standards officers in our local authorities. I am wondering—I might have to have a discussion with the noble Lord before Report—whether they would have an application here for precision bred-food. That lies at the heart of what the FSA does and there is a question around whether it goes through to what happens in local authorities. We will come on to talk about labelling in a moment, but I think this traceability element is covered by the FSA. I am not sure how much more work we are going to require of local authorities in order to deliver this, but I am happy to have further discussions with the noble Lord.
Lord Krebs (CB)
I want to follow up on that point. We will come to it in a moment when we discuss labelling, because I will mention it again then, but the pressure on local authorities will be more through trading standards than through environmental health. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, raised a point about traceability and authenticity, and that is really the job of trading standards and public analysts, with their analytical methods of determining the authenticity of food. That might be where the pressure applies in local authorities, rather than with EHOs.
Lord Benyon (Con)
I was uncertain about the point that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was making, but I take the noble Lord’s point seriously. In our discussions with the FSA, I will make sure that all actors in this field are engaged and understand their responsibilities.
Lastly, in relation to the amendments to Part 3 of the Bill, I will discuss Amendment 63. The FSA is fully committed to establishing and maintaining a register of food and feed produced from precision-bred organisms in the best possible way. The FSA already maintains similar registers for other regulated products that communicate to stakeholders the decisions made by the Secretary of State to authorise regulated products, including feed additives, smoke flavourings, and GMOs for food and feed uses. The register relating to food and feed from precision-bred organisms will be incorporated into this framework. It will give a comprehensive record of precision-bred organisms authorised for use in food and feed in England.
As I have already laid out, detailed proposals for the register will be included in the new framework for precision-bred organisms. This will be subject to a full public consultation. The consultation findings will be presented to Parliament as part of the full scrutiny process of the affirmative resolution for the resulting draft regulations.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, for the opportunity to debate whether Clauses 26, 27, 28 and 29 should stand part of the Bill. We recognise noble Lords’ concerns in these areas. I hope that my words regarding the crucial role and important work that the FSA has and will continue to undertake have provided some reassurance about the importance of these clauses standing part of the Bill. We will of course provide a detailed response to the DPRRC report, having heard the views of noble Lords and having taken into account the valuable detail provided in that report. With that, I hope that I have reassured noble Lords.
Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)
My Lords, after much thought, I am afraid I am a reluctant opposer of these amendments. I understand the need for transparency with the consumer—and the answer to the noble Baroness’s last question is very important—but I feel labelling will not work in this case.
Everybody supports the proposal to have a register of PBOs, and no one is trying to hide anything. If anyone really wants to know, they can find out, but not necessarily in 20 seconds—which, I gather, is the time it takes an average shopper to decide on a product. Secondly, we do not currently require people to label that a crop has been produced using an F1 hybrid technique or bombarded with radiation, or that it has undergone polyploidy induction or somatic hybridisation, or that a chemical such as colchicine has been involved. But if you asked people in the street whether they wanted such techniques to be labelled, they would almost certainly say yes, which is why they answered “yes” to the labelling of gene-edited products. Of course they did. But we need to be led by the science on whether these products are actually different if we are going to put a statutory labelling requirement in place, and the product is the same as in traditional breeding.
For instance, if I devised and produced a particular potato by editing its genes, and someone else, because they had been working on it for 20 years or so, produced a similar potato by traditional means, what would be the difference? It would be scientifically impossible to tell the two apart. ACRE would grant them both a licence and the FSA would pass them both as perfectly safe to eat. So, a label that distinguishes one from the other could be misleading and would not do our labelling system any favours. Incidentally, that view is shared internationally. Canada, the US and Japan do not require labelling for precision-bred products.
I believe it is the product that matters, not the technology used to produce it, provided that all the safeguards and breeding processes are strictly adhered to—and we are obviously going through these regulations very carefully, covering the breeding process for both crops and animals. They are already amazingly strict. As someone said in the Commons, do we label or license everything produced by 3D printing, just because someone could make an unlicensed gun with it? No—let us license the gun and not the 3D printing process.
It might be helpful to have some breeding details here—and I apologise as I am slightly retreading ground that I touched on on Monday. The point is that any wheat used to make bread is going to be several generations away from any gene editing, and obviously, ACRE and FSA get involved long before a seed reaches the marketplace. But, as I said on Monday, if a company edited a wheat to improve its milling quality, it would then have in-house testing for off-target characteristics, which would take about three or four generations—three or four years. Then, there would be a further two generations—two years—of statutory testing. Then, the variety gets recommended listing, and there would probably be another one or two years of multiplying up the seed for the farmers’ marketplace. It is a very long process, and I am not sure that the final crop of wheat could be called genetically edited as such. It is six or seven generations down the line.
Very few flour producers, especially the smaller ones who make for specialist local bakers, will have the capacity to separate this new variety. So what about your local high-quality village baker, who probably does not even have a wrapping for their bread and puts it straight onto a shelf? You can tell I am talking about my own local baker here, because that is exactly what she does. She will probably have to put up a general notice above the door of her shop, saying that the products sold in that shop may contain flour that is remotely descended from a gene-edited plant.
Incidentally, on Monday, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned Jabal, which is a new drought-resistant durum wheat which has just been produced by ICARDA, one of the UN CGIAR centres. She rightly indicated that it had been produced by scientists and farmers, and had been developed between 2017 and 2021. It is true that it was produced by ICARDA—with INRA, incidentally, which is the Moroccan agricultural research organisation—in 2017, and that between 2017 and 2021 it, and four or five other varieties which were produced at the same time, were tested with local farmers. The scientists, I may say, did not actually favour Jabal. They favoured another one which had better drought resistance, but it was a short-strawed variety and the farmers preferred the long-strawed variety because that is what they feed to their animals. For once, the scientists listened to the farmers: it does not always happen, I may say.
Anyway, the farmers chose Jabal and soon, I gather, in two or three years’ time, when it has undergone all its public tests, it will be released for farmers to grow; in other words, some six or seven years after they first started trialling it. But the time we should really be focusing on in connection with this Bill, of course, is the pre-2017 period, when the various seeds were actually being developed. I do not know whether your Lordships have ever been to a plant breeding centre. A few years back I went to the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, where they breed barley, which is very important for the Scottish economy—for whisky. They have 700 varieties of barley, all lined up, in their greenhouse, and maintain those 700 different varieties each and every year, because they do not want to lose any of them. Then they hybridise each of them. I am not a statistician, but I cannot quite imagine the number of crosses you can make from 700 different varieties of barley: it is going to be huge, probably in the millions. But they do this. Say you are looking for a particular characteristic, such as drought resistance: you hybridise it and look at it, breed more hybrids with another hybrid and so on, and go on through the procedure, and then, probably some 10 to 15 years later, you will find you arrive at something that is a leap forward. Then, of course, you have to go through all the tests.
So ICARDA has been working for maybe up to 15 years to produce this Jabal wheat and its four or five contemporaries before you get to 2017. If there are 700 barleys, there are over a thousand wheats. But the whole point of the Bill is that the advantage of gene editing is that you can do that process in possibly two or three years, not the 10 to 15 years it would normally take. It is complicated, and not actually very easy. Do not forget that the wheat genome is actually much bigger than the human genome. I believe the human genome contains 3 billion DNA letters, while bread wheat has 16 billion. That is a big difference. But—and this is the key point—whether it is gene edited or not, they all have to go through the testing period of five or six years and five or six generations before they can be released.
When it comes to animals, as I explained on Monday, with the intergenerational gap of, say, two years and nine months with a cow, or four years with a salmon, even if you have some miracle breed on the stocks ready to go the moment this Bill becomes an Act, it is still, with all the necessary testing, going to be the mid-2030s before such a product turns up in a shop. Breeding improvements in a species is a very long-term process, even with gene editing.
On the traceability front, I can do no better than to quote the evidence given to the House of Commons committee by Professor Whitelaw, who works for Roslin. He said:
“When it comes to traceability … genome-editing technology generates the equivalent of what is naturally found. Every animal born carries 40 de novo mutations—
that was a new one on me—
“and genome editing adds another one to that list. Without having an audit trail of individual animals, you will not be able to identify one genetic change from another. It is impossible to categorically say, ‘That is caused by genome-editing technology rather than a natural mutation.’ Therefore, the audit trail of an animal or product will not be based on the molecular analysis of that animal; it must be based on something else.”
Another witness, Dr Craig Lewis, told the committee that
“if we look at the pig industry in the UK, it is more done on a … lot basis. For example, normal practice … is to use pulled semen at a commercial level for a terminal sire, so—
and this is an important point—
“even within a litter, you might have three … sires represented … so individual animal traceability in the UK pig industry … does not really exist.”
How can one label a sausage produced in one of those litters as gene edited with any degree of confidence? I do not think one can and, as I say, we could be bringing the whole labelling system into disrepute. I completely understand the desire for transparency, and it is only after much thought and research that I have arrived at my conclusions. I just do not think labelling would be valid or, for that matter, achievable with any degree of certainty. Furthermore, I do not actually believe it is necessary. I support the view taken, as I say, by Canada, the US and Japan to not require labelling for precision-bred products.
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I can assure noble Lords that this is not some sort of Cross-Bench conspiracy, but I am afraid to say that, although I can see the arguments, I too do not support the idea of labelling precision-bred products.
I have three principal arguments, some of which have been touched on, but I will nevertheless repeat them. The first is to do with enforceability. As we have heard, and indeed my noble friend Lord Cameron said a few moments ago, there is no chemical test that can distinguish between a precision-bred organism, whether it is a plant or an animal, and one that is produced by conventional breeding. So trading standards officers or public analysts would not be able to do what they would normally expect to do: take a product off the shelf and subject it to a chemical test to justify or assess its authenticity.
We have heard quite a bit about traceability and my noble friend Lord Cameron pointed to some of the difficulties with traceability in the livestock industry. But also, it is important to remember that in the food industry traceability works on a one up, one down principle. That is to say, you are buying a raw material to put in a product and you check that the person who is selling you the raw material claims that it is what it is on the tin. But that chain can often be very long. You are buying grain that has been produced in Argentina and there is a long supply chain from the farmer to the transport to the dock to the transport in the ship to Liverpool; the cargo is unloaded in Liverpool and then it is transferred through many stages before it finally ends up in the Warburtons bread factory. The one up, one down system is by no means fool-proof—which is why to really check what something is, you need to have an analytical test to back it up. A regulation that is unenforceable is a bad regulation.
Secondly, what are consumers supposed to do with the information? Of course, if you ask consumers whether they want to have precision breeding on the label, they will say yes. I know from my time at the Food Standards Agency that almost whatever you ask people about they will say “Yes, we’d love to have it on the label”. But you also have to remember that other surveys show that only between one-quarter and one-third of consumers ever read the label. So many people who say they want it on the label do not actually look at it. If it is supposed to allow people who are worried about technology to avoid PBOs, as my noble friend Lord Cameron has said, why not label products which have been produced as a result of mutagenesis with ionising radiation or chemical toxins?
I can, however—and perhaps this speaks to the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock raised—have reason to label the effects of a PBO. For example, if precision-breeding were used to create tomatoes with more lycopene, if no fungicides were used in growing potatoes, or broccoli had more omega-3, there would be a reason to label those, because it would affect the way in which the consumer might wish to use the product. But those benefits do not need mandatory labelling because producers and retailers will do it anyway. You can buy eggs in the supermarket labelled as containing enhanced omega-3. Similarly, standards such as organic foods, Freedom Foods and Rainforest Alliance foods are labelled without the need for regulation because there is a marketing advantage.
Labels are already overcomplex. Although, as I say, people will always ask for more, cluttering up labels with more information will make it more difficult for those who have to read the labels for crucial information —for example, to avoid allergens. If you add extra labelling, you are just making it more difficult for people to read the crucial things.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response and all the noble Lords who have contributed to this absolutely crucial debate—in particular, the noble Lords opposite who put so much into it. Given the hour, I will park the debate about Jabal wheat for the moment; perhaps we can have that debate over the Long Table sometime and continue the discussion.
I want to say something very serious and, I must say, concerning. The Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, both said that it is impossible to identify whether something has been gene edited. I have no doubt that the Minister is operating on the advice that he has received, but I am afraid that that is simply untrue. It is a great pity that the noble Lord, Lord Winston, is not in his place; I will attempt to channel him because he would undoubtedly say this better than I am going to.
As an example, I refer to a 2020 article in Theoretical and Applied Genetics by Biswas, Rong et al. Its title is “Effective identification of CRISPR/Cas9-induced and naturally occurred mutations in rice using a multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification-based method”. Let me translate that into English. This article shows how you can identify both the intended and unintended impacts of the use of CRISPR-Cas9, as well as any other mutations that occur independently of the use of CRISPR—in rice, for example.
That is just one example from 2020. Let us look at another example: a commercial practice called the real-time PCR method. I think we have all become familiar with PCR tests during Covid. I have no reason to disbelieve it so I cite what the commercial company says: that this method detects
“what is probably the most challenging class of gene edits—a modification of just a single letter in the genetic blueprint”.
This is the simplest change possible and it is detectable through a PCR test—something with which we are all highly familiar.
Lord Krebs (CB)
Does the company claim that it can tell whether that single base pair change was produced by genome editing or by mutation? If so, how?
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
I am sorry; I cannot speak for that company. What I can refer to, because I was just talking about it, is the rice article to which I referred. As I said, the article refers to—we need the noble Lord, Lord Winston—the multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification-based method. I would be happy to provide a reference to both the noble Lord and the Minister. The article says that this method can definitely determine whether the impacts of CRISPR-Cas9 are intentional or unintentional, or whether it is something that has happened independently but at the same time. So there is at least one method here, in a respected peer-reviewed journal, that sets out how this can be identified.
Further, I point out that the US Government this year announced a collaboration to develop
“an initial set of computational tools that assists trained analysts to identify genetic engineering in a next generation sequencing data set. It makes it possible for scientists to detect engineered DNA at scale”.
That is a US Government project happening this year. Any claim that this is all impossibly difficult and cannot be done simply does not stack up. If the noble Lord, Lord Winston, was here, I am sure he could cite many more cases, but the evidence, I think, is clearly there.
I want to pick up some of the points made by the noble Lords, Lord Krebs and Lord Cameron of Dillington. First, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said that we cannot have extra labelling: there is not enough space, and it is too confusing. If we pick up an average packet of something in the supermarket—say, a packet of pasta—it will have some very large branding on it and a small space dedicated to nutrition and other information. Possibly, we need less space for the branding. Very little packaging has insufficient space for extra information of the kind that consumers want.
The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, made some points about random mutagenesis techniques and other techniques that he used, and said that they are not labelled. There may be an argument that they should be labelled, but putting that to one side, the fact is that comparing genome editing to those kinds of techniques is comparing apples and pears. Basically, gene editing can access and amend parts of the genome that are protected from naturally occurring or induced mutations. This is something that perhaps we have not brought out in previous debates, and we might want to explore it further on Report. There is a difference between the parts of the genome that can be accessed by these different techniques.
I have dealt with a lot and am aware of the hour. It is clear there is a strong demand from many sides of the House for this labelling and a strong demand from the public. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment, but I have little doubt that we will return to this on Report.