Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I would like to add that I am very keen to get out of the pram with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—I think it is a very good idea. I want to make a few remarks about food. The regulations that we have about food, most of which have happened in Europe, are about protection. In fact, we do not get enough of it. So I am completely dismayed that everything in this Bill says that there can be no further strengthening of regulations.

At the moment, the food companies are allowed to kill us slowly. They cannot kill us quickly. In other words, if you walk into a high-street fast-food restaurant, you are not going to drop dead. But, if you lived on food from that high-street fast-food restaurant, you would probably drop dead, or at least have diabetes, or be in ill health by the time you were 50 or 60 and living a bad life because of bad food. So we need more regulation.

I agree with so much of what has been said tonight, but in my few minutes, I want to give your Lordships an idea of how much relates to food, farming and public health that we are possibly going to throw out of the window. This is about antibiotic use on farms; it is about harmonised testing; it is about the banning of the use of hormone growth promoters; it is about the import of meat from animals which have been treated with hormone growth promoters. People are now beginning to understand what this does to the human body—it ain’t pretty.

All food safety laws, including the maximum containment for BSE monitoring; setting maximum residue levels for pesticides; lists of countries allowed to import meat; health marks on meat; labelling of beef; country of origin labelling on food—remember the horse meat scandal—preventing river pollution from agricultural activity; training staff to perform these checks at borders; increasing border controls and emergency measures for the entry of certain goods; as well as the huge one about the transportation of animals, which has been something we have worked on with the EU and we have done well here. Any suggestion that we would lower our animal welfare standards in the pursuit of capitalism and a quick buck is, quite frankly, disgusting. Rules on the production and labelling of organic produce are also possibly going to be sunsetted. And, by the way, who came up with the idea that sunset was a verb?

I will quote the Food Standards Agency, because it has an extremely brilliant new chair, Susan Jebb. She said:

“In the FSA, we are clear that we cannot simply sunset”—


she used it—

“the laws on food safety and authenticity without a decline in UK food standards and a significant risk to public health”.

The task ahead of us to go through these rules is very challenging and it inevitably means that we will have to deprioritise other important work. Is this what we want? We do not have a great food system at the moment; I have banged on about it long enough. We now stand looking at an even worse one and making good people, such as Susan Jebb, go through basic laws. Please, let us find a way, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, to get out of the pram and stand up to this outrageous business.