Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill

George Eustice Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 31st October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kirsty Blackman]

I cannot answer a question about the conversations that the Scottish Government and the UK Government have had on this matter, because I am not aware of exactly how those conversations have gone. What I am concerned about is the significant amount of produce that we export to the EU and the fact that the Bill poses a risk, for example, to the export of Scottish salmon. That is because the Scottish Government will lose some of their competency over this due to the internal market Bill and to the way that this framework is laid out.

Should amendment 1 from the Green party be pushed to a vote, the SNP will support it. The paucity of evidence is particularly acute in relation to animals. The Bill also risks violating the intention and application of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, passed for England and Wales earlier this year. The RSPCA has highlighted the fact that the public would not and do not support that.

New clause 8 relates to the labelling of food or feed produced by precision-bred animals. Eighty four per cent of people polled consider it important that all GE products introduced for sale in the UK are labelled as such, and only 8% do not consider that to be important. We are disappointed, therefore, that the UK Government no longer plan to consider requiring labelling for these products, despite the Minister saying in January 2022 that they would look at the matter. This will have a double impact in Scotland, because, even though the Scottish Parliament does not currently permit the marketing of these products, consumers will not be able to make an informed choice due to the lack of labelling requirements.

Mr Deputy Speaker, now is not the time for this Bill to pass. The UK Government have failed to make the case for “why now?” and have failed to ensure that the devolved competencies of the Scottish Parliament are respected as they seek to push through this legislation.

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

As the former Secretary of State who introduced this Bill on Second Reading, I rise to express a little sympathy for amendment 4—not so much sympathy that I would vote for it if it went to a Division tonight. Nevertheless, I believe that it highlights some important issues that are worthy of further consideration.

First, amendment 1 proposes removing animals altogether from the scope of the Bill. Undoubtedly, using gene editing on animals raises complex ethical issues, along with the animal welfare dimension, and it was during such discussion when the Bill was being drafted that I considered excluding animals from the Bill. However, I want to explain to the House why, after reflection, I decided that we should include them.

First, from my experience in government and, indeed, in this place, there is always a tendency to put off things that are difficult or complex and to kick the can down the road, but the right thing to do is to grapple with these complex matters and chart a course through them. Secondly, when considering some of the issues that we might be able to address through precision breeding, it became clear to me that, if this technology was used properly, we could actually enhance animal welfare in certain areas. When I first became a Minister in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Beak Trimming Action Group set up by the last Labour Government was concluding its work. Beak trimming, using infrared beak tipping on day-old chicks, is required particularly for free-range systems, because otherwise there may be injurious pecking of laying hens. Through that work, we concluded that, while there were things we could do such as paying special regard to the feeding regime, it was against the welfare of those birds not to carry on the beak trimming.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kerry McCarthy]

I am very pleased to hear what the right hon. Gentleman says, as I have spent quite a lot of time trying to convince people that that does happen to day-old chicks. Is it not the case that some other European countries have introduced legislation on that point, so it is not necessarily linked to genetic technology? I think they have acted to prevent so many chicks being killed.

[George Eustice]

What a number of countries have done—the UK was in the vanguard of this—was to move away from maceration of day-old chicks towards the use of carbon dioxide and argon gas as a means of dispatching them. However, I think we could accelerate the process of identifying the eggs through the use of genetic technology.

Dehorning cattle is another mutilation that we would like to phase out over time. Progress has been made for some breeds on polled cattle—that is, cattle born without horns, so that we do not have to use a hot iron, albeit under anaesthetic, to de-bud them. Again, it is difficult to perfect without precision breeding techniques, but if we had that technology, we could have more polled cattle and reduce the need for conventional dehorning of cattle, or even pave the way for a regulatory change to prevent it.

There is also the prospect of breeding more resistance to diseases. In the dairy herd some selection is already done for natural resistance to bovine tuberculosis. It is limited in its ability, but if we had the technology, we might be able to go further.

At the moment, the Government plan to phase out and remove badger culling is predicated on a lot of confidence that a cattle vaccine will be viable and deployable, but it would be helpful to have additional tools in the box, and resistance to TB could be one of them. Of course, we are about to face another very difficult winter when it comes to avian flu, and this technology might have some application there.

However, my sense when I read amendment 4 was that whoever drafted it had had one sector in particular in mind—the broiler chicken sector. There is a genuine concern that the production speed of broiler chickens, reduced now to around 32 to 33 days, is so fast that they are having all sorts of leg problems, and we might be able to make some changes there. That is a legitimate point, because while we might say it has improved the welfare of a broiler chicken that it is bred to finish within 32 days, we might say it is in its welfare interest to ensure that it does not have leg problems. There is a second question, which is whether it is the ethical and right thing to do to produce a chicken within 32 days rather than, say, 37 days, in which case the welfare problem goes away.

A less obvious and less talked-about situation might be commercial duck production. We know that ducks need and want open water—it is part of their physiology and the way their beaks work. However, many commercial duck producers do not give ducks access to water. I have come across vets who will argue that it is in the interest of ducks not to have access to water, since that can spread disease and that is not in their welfare interest, but that goes to the root of the issue with animal welfare. We can either see animal welfare in the conventional five freedoms sense—freedom from pain, hunger, thirst and so on—or we can see it in the more modern sense of a life worth living.

The amendment does not work, because the more we put into an amendment the more we inadvertently exclude. If we accepted an amendment that proscribed certain things but missed certain things, at a future date a breeder might bring a judicial review and say, “Well, this wasn’t covered by the Bill and everything else was.” Therefore, we would not be future-proofing the importance of animal welfare.

However, that is where guidance could work. After Second Reading of the Bill, I asked our officials to give some thought to the idea of guidance, which might give organisations such as Compassion in World Farming and people such as Peter Stevenson, who is very thoughtful on these matters, the reassurance they need in the absence of a legislative change on the face of the Bill, which is difficult to do. The Minister may find that there is some guidance helpfully drafted—or it may be that it was not drafted, but it is not too late, because the Bill has time in the other House.

Will the Minister consider whether this issue of how the animal welfare body should approach its task and how it should assess the impacts on animal welfare could be dealt with in a non-statutory way through guidance. He and his officials will have to issue terms of reference anyway to the animal welfare body, which is likely to be a sub-committee of the Animal Welfare Committee, and it would not take much to set out some parameters for the things we want it to bear in mind when making assessments.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I will not speak for too long, but I want to address a couple of the amendments and some of the issues affecting the Bill overall.

I will start by being extremely critical of the European Commission—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Indeed. Most of us in this House think that science is broadly a good thing, or certainly at least neutral; it is a case of what we do with it. One of the things that has irritated me most about part of the Commission over a 20 or 30-year period is its knee-jerk objection to science in this area and the idea that there can be a moratorium not just on the application of knowledge, which is an issue, but on the very knowledge and research in the first place. That troubles me greatly. We should weigh all issues up and make wise, evidence-based decisions.

On the one hand, I welcome the Bill and I certainly welcome and support science-based approaches to technologies such as genetic modification and what the Government refer to as precision breeding. They have the potential to deliver a major improvement in productivity and on the environmental front, reducing the impact of farming. Genetic modification can have a positive impact by allowing us to address pest and disease pressures on crops and farm animals, and so reduce our reliance on fertilisers and pesticides; that helps more broadly in the fight against climate change. Genetic modification also provides opportunities for us to meet global need, including the food requirements of the global poor. However, there are problems with the Bill, and reasons why I would support the Government being more open to amendments from the other place, and especially to amendments 3 and 4 tonight.

Let me mention some areas in which the Bill is weak. It does not solve the intellectual property and commercial issues surrounding genetic modification technology. If we allowed science to be better used in farming, for the reasons we have set out relating to the environment and the quality and scale of production, but ended up making farmers, particularly tenant farmers, entirely beholden to the commercial interests of large, multinational agribusinesses, that would be an outrage. That is not what farmers in this country want; they want science applied, and they want freedom. They do not want to be pawns in a multinational game. That major area of concern is not addressed in the Bill.

The Bill is also light on the details of the new regulatory requirements for crops and animals. I accept that animals should be in the scope of the Bill, but we are transitioning from a very high regulation system to a relatively low regulation system. The lack of detail on how the new system will work makes it hard to support the Bill.

Amendment 12, tabled by the right hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), would prevent the Secretary of State from authorising a new product if scientific evidence indicated

“that the precision bred traits are likely to have a direct or indirect adverse effect on the health or welfare of the relevant animal or its qualifying progeny”.

Lack of detail on those kinds of situations makes it hard for us to go into the Aye Lobby and support the Bill this evening. Editing a pig’s genes could, for example, make it resistant to disease—that would obviously be a welcome advantage of this technology—but the Bill must not be a shortcut that allows pigs to be reared in less hygienic, more crowded conditions. Again, that issue is not covered. Animals’ welfare must not only continue to be protected but be continuously improved.

We do not want all the effort that has been put into the high standards in British farming to be wasted as a result of a back-door watering down of standards; but if there was such a watering-down, it would be part of a pattern, I am afraid. It would fit the pattern of the trade deals that are being designed and agreed to. The deals with Australia and New Zealand in particular basically throw away the high standards we have developed. It is not only that it is morally right to have those standards; they make the provenance of our produce important, make it high-quality, and give it high ethical value. What a desperate shame that free trade, which is a good thing, should be done so badly that our farmers are thrown under the bus, have their livelihoods threatened, and cannot take advantage of the benefits that free trade ought to provide. If the Bill is part of a deregulatory framework, or part of an agenda that seeks to unfairly disadvantage British farmers or throws the standards that they have developed under the bus, that is unacceptable. Unamended, the Bill forms part of a pattern of this Government throwing our farmers to the wolves.

Farmers do not benefit from the application of science envisaged in the Bill if they do not survive the transition from the current payment scheme to the new one. Reshuffle upon reshuffle has followed on from great uncertainty, which the Government introduced in September when they indicated that they might be prepared to rip up the environmental land management scheme. There are many problems with that scheme, by the way; the fact that only 1% of eligible farmers have applied for the sustainable farming incentive shows how poorly the Government are rolling out a scheme that most Members agree with in principle. The worst thing the Government could do is rip it all up; the best thing they could do is invest in protecting the £3.5 billion supposedly ringfenced for ELMS and allow the process to take place, so that farmers survive. Farmers will be in no position to protect our environment, produce our food or apply the science that the Government want them to apply if they do not survive.

In short, we strongly support the principle underlying the Bill, but we strongly urge the Government to consider the amendments before us this evening, and those that will undoubtedly be tabled in the other place, to improve regulation, safety and animal welfare, and protect farmers from the damage that could be done to them if they end up being the pawns of multinational global enterprises. I would hate the United Kingdom to end up a mirror image of the European Commission, which regulated to such an extent that applying science was impossible. Alternatively, the Government may deregulate to such an extent that it is hard to defend the science, and that would be a real shame for all of us who genuinely care about the application of science in farming.