EU Membership: UK Science

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, like others, I commend my noble friend—indeed, my noble kinsman—Lord Selborne for his very skilful chairing of this report. Like the noble Lord, Lord Fox, I thank the other members of the committee for putting up with my strange interventions from time to time.

I will focus on regulation and its impact on innovation; in particular, the first item of the Government’s response to our December report. The Government say in that response that, thanks to UK influence,

“the EU has changed its approach to regulation”,

and that,

“Brussels is now more focused on reducing burdens for businesses”,

and,

“recognises the need for innovation-friendly regulation”.

I am sorry to say that I disagree with this and I see few signs of it. On glyphosate and neonicotinoids, on GM crops and GM insects, on data mining and digital technology, on snus and vaping, on great crested newts and long-eared bats, on stem cells and gene editing, on biomass burning and diesel—on many, many matters—I see Britain losing opportunities to bring in safer, cleaner and greener innovations because of our interpretation of rules promulgated in Brussels. As a result, we are not just unhelpful but counterproductive and are making things—environmental problems, health problems and economic competitiveness —worse. We are overzealous in applying the precautionary principle so as to effectively outlaw safer new innovations to the advantage of less safe existing technologies. We refuse to distinguish between hazard and risk, so that chemicals that are safer than coffee—even though they are never ingested, like coffee is—are banned. We are indecisive, slow, cumbersome and sometimes in hock to big companies and their desire to create barriers to entry.

I stress that I am not against regulation that makes the world safer, I am against regulation that makes the world more dangerous. My opposition is not ideological but pragmatic. I am calling for regulatory reform, not deregulation. For example, we are using more insecticides today in farming than we would have done if we had adopted genetically modified crops—that is undeniable given the evidence from the rest of the world about how BT crops have reduced the need for insecticides. Being in the EU, therefore, has been bad for bees and bad for birds.

The EU is about to make the same mistake, I fear, over the even safer and even more organic technology of gene editing. As Nature magazine put it in an editorial recently, the EU is,

“habitually paralysed whenever genetic modification is discussed. Two years ago the European Commission requested all member states to hold back on giving the all-clear on gene editing while it considered its options. Now its hand is being forced, ever so slowly, by the referral of the issue by France to the European Court of Justice … last October”.

A decision on that case is not expected before 2018, while America roars ahead with this technology. If this is innovation-friendly regulation, we can do better.

Then there is data analysis, where EU red tape is handing a competitive advantage to other continents. Lenard Koschwitz, director of European affairs with Allied for Startups, recently said that,

“post-Brexit Britain could draw data analytics start-ups. We currently see countries including China and Singapore doing away with barriers for text mining. Why not the UK also?”.

More generally, we should listen to the wise words of Sir John Bell, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University. Writing in the Financial Times last August, he said:

“Britain is more inclined towards a relatively liberal risk-based regulatory environment that allows fields to move quickly—to reflect on ethical issues but not to over-regulate. The EU, by contrast, has a record of deep regulatory conservatism, attempting to legislate and control many aspects of science that are not deemed here in the UK to present a significant danger”.


He concluded:

“A failure to implement sweeping changes to regulation and its institutions in the UK would be to miss an important opportunity. We need light touch regulation similar to Switzerland so that Britain can become a global leader in life sciences, data, genomics, regenerative medicine and other innovation-based fields”.


In the hearings for this report we heard similar responses in evidence. Dr Beth Thompson of the Wellcome Trust told us that,

“we are discussing where we might be able to tweak legislation or look for advantages for the UK”,

so,

“there is real potential that we can use the UK as almost a testbed to try new regulatory approaches and within a more robust framework be more experimental”.

Sir Michael Rawlins of the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said:

“We could be swifter than the EU. Right at the very end it is not the European Medicines Agency that gives marketing authorisation; it is the Commission en collège, and it takes 67 days on average. Someone I know very well in the pharmaceutical industry told me that each day of delay for a pharmaceutical marketing authorisation costs the company about $1 million. That is $67 million gone waiting for the Commission to decide to meet en collège”.


When we leave the EU we need an innovation principle, alongside a sensible version of the precautionary principle. It should state that all regulators must take into account whether the enforcement of a new rule would stifle innovation that could be beneficial. So in replying, I ask my noble friend to assure us that, in contrast to the message delivered by the response I quoted at the start of my remarks to our December report, he agrees this is a time for boldness, in regulatory reforms as well as in every other respect.