Climate Change: Food Supply Resilience

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

As the noble Baroness says, I am extremely supportive of on-farm reservoirs. They are very important, which is why we have announced funding of up to £15 million through Defra to build on-farm reservoirs as part of the drought package. We have also offered two rounds of water management grants so far. That has provided £8.8 million of funding towards management, including for the construction of reservoirs. We are speaking to MHCLG about a number of issues where we need to improve planning and make it more reactive to requirements.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, to adapt to future climate and weather, we must develop new genetic varieties of the crops we grow. Gene editing will be a powerful tool to enable this. When I recently visited the Wellesbourne research station, I saw field trials of gene-edited soya plants that will be suitable to grow in the UK. Corteva, the company running these trials, is passionate about the fact that our legislation is more permissive and proportionate, and particularly beneficial for research and development. When negotiations to finalise the SPS agreement are reached, can we be assured that we will protect the advantages we have compared with the EU system?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear me say that I cannot comment on the negotiations, which are taking place ahead of the summit, but we hope to have a date finalised soon. But I can assure the noble Lord that we understand the importance of this. It has been critical to the work we have been doing to have that flexibility. We are discussing very seriously with the EU how we can protect what we are doing in this area.