Draft Veterinary Medicines and Residues (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020 Draft Aquatic Animal Health and Alien Species in Aquaculture, Animals, and Marketing of Seed, Plant and Propagating Material (Legislative Functions and Miscellaneous Provisions) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2020 General Committees

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Mundell, and to be with the Minister again today. There is something rather important about the statutory instruments before us. I am not sure that anyone thinks that considering them is soporific because most Members, in my experience, are quite keen on knowing what they will have for tea later. Somewhere down the line, this could well affect what we find being served up in the Members’ Tea Room, so it is important stuff. [Laughter.] I will come to it—do not worry. I also have a direct interest in the sense that I chair the all-party parliamentary group for life sciences. I have many life science researchers in and around my constituency, so I know quite a lot more about this issue than I did when I came to Parliament a few years ago, and it is important.

Paragraph 2.2 of the explanatory memorandum explains what the instrument does, which is pretty much what the Minister said:

“In England and Scotland, the Residues Regulations prohibit the use of certain substances as growth promoters and provide for a surveillance programme for residues of veterinary medicines…Regulation 470/2009 establishes maximum residues limits for pharmacologically active substances in foodstuffs from animal origin.”

That is, of course, quite salient to many of the debates that we have had in recent times. Paragraph 7.2 states:

“The policy objective is to maintain existing laws.”

We agree with that overall objective; the question is whether it will be achieved. Paragraph 7.3 talks about

“light touch regulatory controls on medicines that are approved in Northern Ireland and not Great Britain and that move from Northern Ireland onto the Great Britain market.”

Could the Minister elaborate a bit on what those light-touch regulatory controls actually mean?

I am grateful to the British Veterinary Association, whose members obviously deal with such matters on a day-to-day basis, for giving us some advice. The BVA said:

“In the medium term there may be concerns about the availability of medicines in Northern Ireland. Today, medicines are often shipped from the EU and warehoused in GB. They are then moved in smaller quantities to NI. Friction in the Irish Sea could make this difficult. For example, there could be a requirement for batch testing once medicines enter Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is a small market. Similarly, if there are additional costs associated with sending medicines to Northern Ireland companies may choose to exit the Northern Ireland market.”

It is therefore very important that we get this right. I am frequently accused by Ministers of being unduly pessimistic about the future, so here is a note of positivity from the BVA, which says that

“an agreed approach had been reached on a phased process for implementing medicines regulation in Northern Ireland up to 31 December 2021, providing the additional time needed”.

That is good news, and it came from the Ireland/Northern Ireland Specialised Committee, which apparently met on 5 November, but it leaves some longer-term questions in the air. The BVA concludes:

“The concern is that there may be a requirement for a standalone authorisation process for Northern Ireland. As a result of the small market, this could see medicines companies choose to forgo the market.”

It is important that we get these things right in the future.

I am also grateful to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in the House of Lords, which often does excellent work in this area. There is some correspondence between that Committee and Friends of the Earth, which had asked very detailed questions that the Department answered. It showed me the level of complexity in all this. With the best will in the world, I am not sure that any of us has the capacity, knowledge or time, frankly, to dig through the levels of complexity to be absolutely sure that nothing has been either overlooked or, if one were being unduly negative, passed through the back door in some way. The questions from Friends of the Earth certainly bear looking into. I will not trouble the Committee with the fine detail of each part, but I would be grateful if the Minister wrote in response to one or two of their points.

There is a detailed legalistic discussion about whether the analysis of animal product samples is subject to two pieces of legislation, one of which is removed in the first SI. The Department argues that it is replicated elsewhere, but I do not think Friends of the Earth are entirely convinced by that, though I am not in a position to judge.

The second question is more serious. Friends of the Earth argue that within the regulations there are so-called reference points for action. That essentially means points at which the standards are reconsidered. There are some to come in future, prompting a discussion between Friends of Earth and the Department as to whether we would replicate that process. The answer from the Department is only that we are committed to maintaining high standards. Frankly, that is not an answer. I would read that answer to mean that there is no guarantee, which potentially weakens the position we would have been in if we were not taking this course of action. On that basis alone, it gives me cause for concern.

What gives me more concern when I think about what might be in the Tea Room later—or many years hence—are maximum residue levels. That is the vexed question of what is still left in the animal when we come to eat it. There is a complicated series of questions posed about whether to shift to an administrative process rather than a legislative one. I would argue that the Department has not put our minds at rest on that process. That again suggests a potential weakening of our protections.

Some may ask why any of that matters. I will quote my good friend, the learned Lord Whitty, speaking in the House of Lords. Members will appreciate that much of this has been discussed before, when we were going through the process last year. Lord Whitty put the case very well. He said:

“MRLs are ultimately there to protect the human and, in some cases, animal consumer. They are there for a health reason. It is very important that we do not go backwards. The withdrawal period specified in the EU legislation—the period since the animal last received those medicines—is important to preserve but does not exist in the same way in other jurisdictions around the world. If we are entering new trade agreements with, say, America or Brazil, they will be operating on different systems. We must be careful.”

Lord Whitty asked that we check on one particular protection. He said:

“The Americans portray hormone injections as medicine but they are really there for growth.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 March 2019; Vol. 796, c. 301GC.]

I suspect the Minister knows where I am going with this discussion, as all roads in these debates tend to lead ultimately to chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-fed beef. My concern is that deep in the intricacies of the legislation there are potential back doors opening to allow lower standards. That is something the Opposition are not prepared to allow.

The other SI deals with a range of issues. As the Minister said, it covers seven policy areas: seed, plant and plant propagating material; aquatic animal health; transmissible spongiform encephalopathies and animal by-products; livestock; zoonotic diseases; pet travel and the use of alien and locally absent species in aquaculture. That is very wide ranging and there is some question about how those issues are grouped. Some of the things we are discussing this afternoon were previously grouped with some of the things we discussed this morning, which adds to the confusion, I am afraid. No one ever said this was going to be easy.

I gently suggest that anything relating to spongiform encephalopathies and salmonella will cause politicians of a certain age to be on alert. Of course, that dispute ran for years and years. It strikes me as astonishing that people talk about how easy everything is to sort out when we spent a decade having an argument with the European Union, with all those “Dad’s Army” posters on the front of The Sun and all the rest of it, over one item of dispute. Goodness knows what lies ahead, but that is for another day, sadly. These are important issues and they need to be resolved properly.

Finally, I come to the subject that probably concerns the most people: the pet travel issues. As the Minister said, these SIs touch on that. As I understand it, something like 300,000 pets come into the UK at the moment. There are some concerns about those numbers and about puppy smuggling. Anything the Minister might want to say about that would be welcome. I again welcome the work of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in the House of Lords, because it has asked some serious questions about that, and again I will refer to the Government’s answers. It is all about which direction we are going in, basically. We can make our decisions, but it is not so easy for us to take pets into the EU. The EU is apparently now considering our application to be a Part 1 listed third country, and the Lords Committee rightly said:

“We note that it is not clear at this stage what the process and requirements will be for moving pets from GB to Ireland via NI after the end of the”

transition period. Anything the Minister can tell us about that would be extremely helpful.

The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee also asked about the practical impact of having separate regimes in areas such as TSEs and zoonotic diseases. DEFRA’s explanation was:

“Changes for goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will be kept to an absolute minimum”—

oh, joy—

“but there will be a requirement for export health certification. A new Trader Support Service, available to all traders at no cost, will be established to provide wraparound support”.

Frankly, that is the same old magical thinking and we are not convinced by it. On that basis, we are not convinced by either of these pieces of legislation, but we will divide the Committee only on the first.