UK-EU Summit

Jack Rankin Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jack Rankin (Windsor) (Con)]

I start by paying a small tribute to the Government because just last week they passed secondary legislation, albeit made possible by the Conservatives’ groundbreaking Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023, that will mean more resilient crops, further food choices and enhanced food security. Although it might pain some of them, Labour Members have to admit they are making some use of the hard-won Brexit freedoms secured by the Conservatives. Why would we give them away? The example I have used might seem somewhat niche, but this is exactly what a modern industrial strategy focused on technology, productivity and the future looks like, and in doing this, we have a head start on the continent, which is now fumbling to produce regulation of its own in this area.

We should be going further still. Gene editing has the power to reduce the impact of animal disease and stop pandemics in their tracks. Researchers at Imperial College London and the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, are now close to making breakthroughs on bird flu-resistant poultry using gene editing. The Government must introduce secondary legislation for farmed animals, as they have done for plants.

I visited Imperial’s Silwood campus in my constituency. The students there are doing incredible things. When they make breakthroughs, our regulatory framework should allow us to nimbly make use of them, but there is a very real risk that with next week’s reset the Government could kill the progress with the sanitary and phytosanitary agreement they are negotiating.

Companies at the forefront of the agricultural industry have raised concerns about this reset, and I know that my colleagues, in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), and the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and the all-party group on science and technology in agriculture have done the same. This is a rare—and much needed as those on the Government Benches hammer our farmers—competitive unique selling point for British agriculture. Reports suggest that this Government will make concessions on SPS to give them more bartering power on other issues, setting a precedent for the wider agricultural relationship with the EU, bending over backwards for an establishment that the British people voted to reject. We would also be signing up to rules we have no power to influence. There were good reasons to leave the EU and good reasons to stay in the EU, and reasonable people could and did disagree, but there is no good reason to leave and opt into rules over which we have no say. That is the worst of both worlds.

Under Switzerland’s agreement with the EU, it must align with almost all the EU’s food safety demands and replicate any further regulatory changes made in the future. That agreement may well be in the best interests of the Swiss but it would not work for Britain. Every time we want to diverge in a way that could benefit the British people, we would have to supplicate to those in Brussels once again. Carve-outs are possible, but we all know what tends to happen when the Prime Minister negotiates. When Labour negotiates, Britain loses. A reset deal with a deep SPS agreement would be short-sighted, perhaps offering a quick boost in the near term but taking the wind from the sails of longer term, game-changing investment that is starting to flow in.

We need to maintain a competitive advantage to supercharge investment in areas like the Thames valley, where we have a world-leading life sciences sector. So I warn the Government not to chain Britain to the economic anchor of the EU and the dead hand of its precautionary principle regulators, especially when last week’s secondary legislation on precision breeding is such a clear example of what regulatory autonomy for an innovative UK could do for us.