Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 31st October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner]

My right hon. Friend, as always, speaks good sense. He is absolutely right; with focus and a proper attempt to meet the challenges we face, it is remarkable what can be done. But this needs leadership and, as ever, it is missing.

Let me turn in detail to the public interest test and our amendment 3. The potential benefits of gene edited crops include creating plants resistant to extreme weather conditions and diseases, which could reduce the need for pesticides and create higher yields to address rising food insecurity driven by climate change and other factors. Genetic editing could also be used to improve the nutritional quality of food. For example, giving farmers the tools to beat virus yellows without recourse to neonicotinoids is a prize worth having.

However, we must recognise that any new technology also carries risks: risks of unintended consequences; risks of technology being misused; and risks of commercial pressure being exerted in ways that might not be for the benefit of the wider public. Those are all risks that must be properly recognised and addressed, because unless public and investor confidence is maintained, research will stall and opportunities will be squandered. Unfortunately, the Government’s blind faith in the market means this is a laissez-faire, minimalist Bill, which does not come close to an effective regulatory framework to guide and oversee the work of researchers and developers.

Amendment 3 would therefore require that a gene edited organism has been developed to provide one or more of the public benefit purposes listed, if it is to be released into the environment. The amendment neatly recycles much of the wording in section 1 of the Government’s own Agriculture Act 2020, which lists the public goods that can be funded. We are simply applying the same approach to the development and use of gene editing technologies. We believe they should be used only where that is clearly in the public interest, including, for instance, in protecting a healthy, resilient and biodiverse natural environment; mitigating climate change; improving the health or welfare of animals or plants; and supporting human health and wellbeing.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

During the Bill Committee, we heard that one of the potential benefits of these innovations was a possible reduction in the overuse of antibiotics on farms, because we would be able to breed things that are more resistant to disease. Although I welcome that, does my hon. Friend share my concern about the comments on antibiotics made by the new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), when she was briefly Health Secretary? Is he concerned about her seemingly relaxed attitude towards these entering the food chain and the impact on public health?

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention. She is absolutely right; people should not be careless about antibiotics and that was not an approach to be encouraged at all. I share her concerns.

Amendment 3 would strengthen the Bill by harnessing the good that can be created through such technologies and ensuring that they are not developed and used for purposes that would not deliver beneficial outcomes—surely that is an objective we can agree on across the House. We believe that would take the Bill much further forward in establishing the kind of regulatory framework that really would place the UK in a leading position. That sits alongside our new clauses, which would establish a single, robustly independent regulator, along the lines of the very successful and genuinely world-leading Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. That regulator does not just approve an application, but tracks, traces and checks over time. That is an important and very different approach, and one discussed in Committee by expert witnesses.

Our new clauses would ensure that Ministers’ decisions on gene editing are properly guided by the environmental principles set out under the Environment Act 2021, and that there is no regression from the environmental standards agreed in the trade and co-operation agreement, which is pretty important when it comes to trade issues. Our new clauses would build an environment in which the UK really could attract the worldwide talent and investment in gene editing research and development that we all want to see.

On animal health and welfare, I turn to our amendment 4, which I am delighted to see has been endorsed by Compassion in World Farming and 12 other animal protection organisations, including the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation. The amendment would require a range of animal health and welfare factors to be taken into account by the Secretary of State when deciding whether to issue a marketing authorisation for a gene edited animal. We appreciate that gene editing can be used in the same way as “traditional” selective breeding to produce fast growth, high yields and large litters, which, sadly, we also know are capable of causing suffering in farmed animals.

Clearly, we have existing legislation to protect animal health and welfare, but the concern is that we should be very clear at the outset that we do not want to see gene editing used in ways that make it more possible for animals to endure harm and suffering. As the Nuffield Council on Bioethics put it,

“animals should not be bred merely to enable them to endure conditions of poor welfare more easily or in a way that would diminish their inherent capacities to live a good life.”

Some researchers aim to use gene editing to improve disease resistance in livestock. Of course, that could be hugely beneficial and could help to reduce the serious harm caused by the overuse of antibiotics, for instance. It would be hugely beneficial if we could find ways to tackle porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome in pigs or avian flu. But the public would not want to see gene editing used to allow animals to be kept in poorer, more crowded, stressful conditions by making them resistant to the diseases that would otherwise result.

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Leipzig University has explored the possibility of changing the eggshell colour so that a male egg can be identified much earlier and sentient beings are not hatched and then killed. I think precision breeding techniques could phase out that very bleak practice of killing day-old male chicks, which is a clear part of the laying hen system.

[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.