Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill (First sitting)

Kate Green Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Deidre Brock]

Q Something occurred to me when I was looking at the Bill again last night. Do you feel that you have sufficient capacity to be able to cope with the extra responsibilities that you are taking on? Have the Ministers given you further guarantees that you will be supported in that?

Professor May: That is a very good question. It is hard to predict based on the estimation of what might be coming to our desks. On the one hand, the Bill will remove a tranche of products that would otherwise have been assessed as GM products. We already regulate GM products, and there is the capacity. On the other hand, the purpose of the Bill is to stimulate development in this area, so we may end up with a lot more applications, in which case we are going to need additional resource. We have taken steps in that direction, including recruiting independent experts in this area to provide scientific expertise, but if there were a large volume of applications needing consideration, we would need additional support.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Q Good morning, Professor May. To return to the discussion that we were having a few moments ago about information for the consumer, to what extent does the Food Standards Agency have a role in providing general public information and education? If that is not the role of the FSA, who should be doing it and how important is it?

Professor May: Our statutory mandate is to protect consumers and represent their interests as they pertain to food. That includes a communication role ranging from allergy alerts and food withdrawals through to a more nuanced understanding of the food system—food security, food poverty and those kinds of questions. At the moment, we do a fair bit of public communication around issues that we know consumers are interested in. Precision breeding, on which we have done some work, is a good example. An explainer on what genome editing and precision breeding are, and what impact they might have, is available on our website, for example.

We do a limited amount of work with schools—particularly in some regions of the UK—mostly on food hygiene. There is an opportunity to do more to explain to people the honest truth about food, and to help them to make decisions about safety and their purchasing decisions in that space. There is always room to do more. There is a lot of consumer interest in this class of foods, and I anticipate that we will do more to make sure that people have the facts about it that they will want.

[Kate Green]

Q To what extent would it be your responsibility to intervene in the event of misinformation? We are particularly concerned now about online misinformation.

Professor May: That depends very much on the type of misinformation. Local authorities usually enforce in that area. When a product is not what it says it is, for instance, it gets seized or withdrawn from retailers at local authority level. We issue alerts, and we have a national food crime unit that is very actively involved in looking at deliberate crime in the food sector, including people selling things that should not be sold or that are misrepresented. We also do quite a lot in the detection and enforcement of large-scale issues, including supply chain problems, incorrect labelling and so on.

In the case of precision breeding, it will clearly depend on what Parliament decides, but if there were a regulation on labelling, we would need to look carefully at how that responsibility goes out to the different regulators. We would undoubtedly have a view, and we would issue information for local authorities to enforce on what should and should not be on a label.

[Daniel Zeichner]

Q I have two sets of questions. First, I want to go back to labelling, because I have been mulling over your response. Is the objection to labelling the two apples that you cannot, at the moment, have a test to tell them apart? Is that, in principle, the reason for not labelling, or is there another reason?

Professor May: That is exactly right. As the legislation stands, you might introduce what is called a single base pair chain—a tiny, one letter change in the DNA code of that apple. Those single letter changes happen all the time. If you have a field of apple trees, they will all be slightly different, even if you cloned them all initially, so we would not be able to take that apple, sequence the DNA and definitively say, “This one was created by someone using genome editing, and this one just turned up by chance in the field.” As you cannot tell those two apples apart, if there were a label on one saying “Precision bred” and a label on the other saying “Not precision bred”, I could not, as a scientist, say that that was true. That therefore raises questions in my head about why you would have a label if you cannot be sure, in the first place, that what it says is true.