Draft Genetically Modified Organisms (Deliberate Release) (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2022

Jo Churchill Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 General Committees

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Jo Churchill)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the draft Genetically Modified Organisms (Deliberate Release) (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2022.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary. The draft regulations were laid before the House on 20 January 2022. The Government’s 25-year environment plan sets out our continued commitment to protecting and restoring natural resources and to supporting sustainable agriculture. This statutory instrument will help to ensure that we have the regulations that we need to address that.

As a country, we are internationally renowned for our scientific excellence in genetics and genomics. We want our scientists and researchers to be at the forefront of exploring what technology has to offer. The draft instrument uses existing powers under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 to simplify the process of research and development in plants that have been produced by genetic technologies, such as gene editing, where genetic changes could have been developed using traditional breeding methods. It will help us to adopt a more scientific and proportionate approach to the regulation of gene editing, allowing our bioscience sector to test the benefits and safety of new products by simplifying the system, while ensuring that checks and balances are still in place.

Gene editing can improve sustainability and productivity in agriculture by helping farmers to grow plants that are more nutritious and need less fertiliser. The existing regulations are more than 30 years old, and are outdated and restrictive. Over the past decades, advances in genetic technologies have been rapid, but the regulations have not kept sufficient pace to allow us to benefit from advances.

Last year, we ran a consultation on the regulation of genetic technologies, receiving nearly 6,500 responses. All were considered carefully. We sought advice from independent scientific experts, the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, ACRE, which concluded that gene-edited organisms do not pose any greater risk than organisms produced through traditional breeding methods.

The draft instrument will remove certain technical barriers to research and development, such as processing applications, advertising and post-trial monitoring. It will simplify the need for the Secretary of State to give consent on an individual basis. The territorial extent of the instrument is England and Wales, but the application of the SI will be England only. We conducted an impact assessment that is available on legislation.gov.uk.

To be clear, the draft instrument is for non-marketing research and development purposes only. We want to ensure that we are moving forward carefully. The change operates within our existing robust regulatory framework on GMOs and field trials. Any commercial cultivation of such plants will still need to be regulated in accordance with our existing GMO rules. In addition, our established GM inspectorate, run by the Animal and Plant Health Agency, will continue to act as an inspecting body of GM field trials, including the ones enabled by this SI.

I am most grateful to the Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for its consideration of and report on the draft instrument, to which we have responded. I want to be absolutely clear that the gene-edited plants captured by the SI will not contain DNA from different species; they will have precise targeted changes made to their existing DNA. That means that they are considered gene edited, rather than genetically modified. Traditional breeding methods could be used to develop the same plants, but with less efficiency. This will allow us to optimise the benefits faster and with greater ease.

Across the world, other countries are surging forward. We need our scientists and growers to be part of this future. The draft instrument is the first step in our scientific but cautious, step-by-step approach to enable the benefits of gene editing to be realised and to help us to adapt to the impact of climate change, to reduce emissions and to help meet our ambitions in the 25-year environment plan. Indeed, Professor Dale Sanders from the John Innes Centre said that

“Defra’s announcement today is a step in the right direction”,

as

“Gene editing offers an opportunity to revolutionize our food systems.”

In a second step, we will be seeking primary powers to review the regulatory definitions of a GMO to exclude certain organisms produced by gene editing and other genetic technologies from GMO regulations. That will be followed by a review of our approach to GMO regulation more broadly.

Unlocking innovation in genetic technologies will help to harness nature’s genetic resources to make our farming systems productive, sustainable and resilient. We have seen first hand how useful technologies such as CRISPRs—clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats—can be in the medical field, particularly in the rapid roll-out of vaccines and the treatment of cancer. This first step will help to emulate the success of those benefits in agriculture, and will take us a step further towards the goal set out by the Prime Minister of our becoming a science superpower. As such, I commend the draft regulations to the Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jo Churchill]

I thank the hon. Member for Cambridge and my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness for their contributions. I hope to canter through the questions from the hon. Member for Cambridge, but if I have not fully covered them, I will write to him. I set out in my opening speech that we will seek primary powers as we go forward. I urge him to have a little patience and wait for the Queen’s Speech, when he should be availed of more information as to the timings we hope to have. I am, though, grateful that, through his myriad questions, he showed his underlying support for our industry and for allowing farming to be unleashed.

Many countries around the world have taken the investment of those who are looking into this technology area and flown with it. That is why we have less than 5%—I think it is 4.8%—of the investment in CRISPR technology in agriculture in this country. We should make sure we can drive that investment forward for the 400 researchers who work in this area and for the 20% of capital investment that is spent on research into our seeds and agriculture, so that we can benefit from our advances in this area. That is exceedingly important.

Gene editing can help us to grow crops that are more nutritious, beneficial to the environment and resistant to climate change, disease and pests, which the hon. Member for Cambridge said he appreciated. We also need to support our international reputation of scientific excellence in genetics. This statutory instrument is a cautious first step in our new approach to gene editing. It will help us to take steps towards building international collaboration in science and technology.

[Graham Stuart]

Is it not so important that, first, we get this right—the hon. Member for Cambridge was right to highlight questions in that respect—and secondly, that we send a signal to the industry, which is going to be so important in tackling the issues my hon. Friend has raised on the future of humanity, that the UK is open for business, is going to be led by science and will have a regulatory regime that is friendly to business and will allow us to be a major centre for tackling some of the biggest threats facing mankind?

[Jo Churchill]

I thank my hon. Friend for the vast experience he brings as a former Trade Minister. Having recently been on a trip to the Dubai Expo, where I talked about some of our agri-innovation opportunities and we looked at how different societies around the world can beat some of the challenges of ensuring food security, I could not agree with him more.

I wish to reassure the hon. Member for Cambridge, who took some time to articulate how he was not satisfied with the framework in respect of both guidance and investors. The rest of the GMO framework remains unchanged and will do so until we consult in the future, as I set out.

Let me turn to the scientific criterion for the “higher plant” equivalent to plants that could have been produced by traditional breeding methods. The composition of genetic material in individual plants of the same species is subject to high levels of natural variation and selection, which plant breeders have exploited for centuries. Our understanding of plant genomes and the accompanying advances in technology have increased significantly since the previous legislation and enabled scientists to utilise variation more efficiently by making precise changes to the plant’s DNA. Such changes are equivalent to those that could have been achieved by traditional breeding methods. That is what we mean by the classification of a “higher plant” in the provision.

[Daniel Zeichner]

I hear what the Minister says, but the submissions from a range of learned organisations suggested that it is rather a difficult distinction to make. That is the nub of the argument, which is why the ACRE guidance is so important. Will she address that?

[Jo Churchill]

Yes, I will indeed. The guidance will help those who conduct the field trials. ACRE is currently in the process of developing the guidance that will help developers who use genetic technologies such as gene editing to make the plants that they want to grow and test in the field for research purposes.

I can provide a summary of the guidance, if that will help. Developers will need to know whether their plants are exempt from GMO restrictions on the basis that they meet the criteria for qualifying higher plants, as defined in the SI. The guidance makes it clear that notification is required in all cases, so I push back at the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion that it is not required. The guidance demonstrates which type of genetic changes can result in higher qualifying plants and highlights examples to illustrate how key criteria on natural processes and traditional methods and selection might be applied. The guidance provides further detail for cases that do not fit into that precise description. We make it clear that developers can always seek a view from DEFRA if they are unsure. As the hon. Gentleman said, if the EU is not currently consulting, it will be shortly, and will move along a similar trajectory.

I think I have covered investment, other than to say that the legislation will unlock private investment because we have some of the greatest scientists and they have been leading some of this work. It is important that we do not hamstring them. Argentina began to regulate GE more proportionately to risk in 2015 and approved 22 new products for research and development purposes—we are only talking about research and development—between 2016 and 2019. We have had only three come forward since 2017. This SI is all about enabling our developers and scientists to move forward.

The hon. Gentleman asked about protection against cross-pollination and the potential impacts on the organic sector. I refer him to the fact that we have 30 years of experience of genetically modified field trials and thus far there has been no evidence that pollen, seed or other plant materials capable of reproduction from GM field trials have affected businesses in the UK organic sector. When researchers notify DEFRA of a field trial, they have to confirm that they will put in place measures to minimise the possibility of reproductive material from the qualifying higher plant that they are to trial affecting commercial crops. The scientists involved are keen to ensure that they are looking only at the results of that trial. Arguably, it is as important to them as to those who surround them that the trial is done in a competent scientific way so that they can rely on the data it gives them.

[Daniel Zeichner]

I quite accept the point that the Minister is making, but of course the difference is that for the past 30 years people have known where those things have been happening, there have been containment measures and they could make necessary adjustments. The key difference now is that they will not know.

[Jo Churchill]

There will still have to be a notification of where the trials are ongoing. Arguably, we are talking about looking at traditional breeding methods. We go back to what I know the hon. Gentleman and I will disagree on; however, this is about proportionate risk, and the fact is that we have been doing this for some 30 years. That adds to the bank of knowledge to reassure us that we are safe in the knowledge of moving forward with this very proportionate small step to ensure that we can optimise in the marketplace what we are trying to do, which is to support the plant-breeding sector. As I said, it spends 20% of annual turnover on R&D activities, and it is incumbent on all of us, given the positives that can come out of this, to support it.

In the past three years, we have approved through DEFRA three field trials involving GM or GE crops: camelina plants to produce omega-3 oil; a brassica to lower the level of sulphur-containing compounds, which although beneficial, at higher levels can cause adverse effects in livestock, such as reduced feeding and growth; and a wheat that, when used in food production, results in lower acrylamide, which has been found to be carcinogenic.

Development of GE products can take up to 10 years. In my opening speech, I laid out that we are progressing at a measured and proportionate pace in order to get this right. My intention is to get this right. That is why I can assure the hon. Member for Cambridge that, as we move forward, the consultations into the broader GMO framework will take place. We propose to come forward with primary legislation; that will give him and others the ability to challenge, as we do in this place, to ensure scrutiny.

Moving forward with the broader approach to the regulation of technologies such as gene editing, we recognise the strong public interest to which the hon. Gentleman alluded, but we also recognise that there are gains to be made. He mentioned many of the submissions but he did not mention the one from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, which alluded to the benefits. Many others also highlighted the benefits. We will be taking this step by step. Our approach to regulatory reform will be measured. We want a proportionate, science-based regulation that protects people, animals and the environment.

The UK agriculture sector now faces a situation in which it must do more with less. We must provide nutritionally high-quality food while reducing our use of water and energy, all in the context of a changing climate that makes food production through existing methods more difficult. As I outlined, the changes introduced by the statutory instrument will help researchers and scientists to harness the benefits of genetic technologies with greater ease. I therefore commend the draft regulations to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the draft Genetically Modified Organisms (Deliberate Release) (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2022.