This Bill comes in a week when food, how we produce it and what it does to us and how food production impacts our planet have been at the forefront of public debate. The Bill was an opportunity to tackle one of the great issues of our time, but instead of rising to that challenge, I am afraid that the Government have flunked it. There was a minimalist response on Monday, when failing to set out a proper food strategy for the future, and a minimalist response today on setting up the right structures to enable innovation to flourish. That is disappointing, but perhaps not surprising. These issues require a long-term view, and an understanding and appreciation of the wider public good. This Government are now reduced to slogans designed to get the Prime Minister to the end of next week. The country deserves better, and many on the Government Benches know that.
Let me set out the position on this side of the House on an issue of significance for the future. Let me start by thanking the many serious people from learned societies and institutions who have done the thinking and spent time briefing me and my team as we grapple with some very big issues. As an example, I wave the weighty report from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, “Genome editing and farmed animal breeding”, which runs to many hundreds of pages. I can recommend it to Members—it is actually a very good read. Unlike this Bill, which takes the narrowest possible approach, it stood
back and asked the bigger questions about our food system, our treatment of animals, where traditional selective breeding has brought us, how we might approach novel foods, and the great changes that we may see in just a few years. The Royal Society criticises focusing narrowly on just one technology and argues for an outcomes-based approach.
There was a big opportunity, but a weak and disintegrating Government could not take it. I understand that, so I turn to the proposals that we have before us, which are a start. For reasons that I will explain, however, they risk having the opposite effect from those intended. Unless public and investor confidence is maintained, research will stall and opportunities will be squandered. Although we will support the Bill’s progress today, we want to see it significantly strengthened and we will propose an array of amendments in Committee, which I genuinely hope the Government will consider carefully.
The Opposition start from a clear principle: we are pro-science and pro-innovation. We want to find ways to maintain and improve the efficiency, safety and security of our food system while addressing the environmental and health damage that the modern food system has caused. That is the challenge that Henry Dimbleby set out in his national food plan, which the Government were unable to meet in their proposals this week.
With that challenge, there is an opportunity for the UK to create a world-leading regulatory framework that others will follow, but sadly this Bill is a rushed job—too thin on detail. With that lack of detail comes a risk, because the public need assurance that those new technologies are being used for the public good, not just for narrow commercial advantage. We have no doubt about the possible benefits. We understand the pressures that are put on farmers when we rightly say, as has been cited, that they cannot use neonicotinoids because of the harm they cause to pollinators. If gene editing can be used to safely ward off virus yellows in sugar beet, that is a definite good that we want to see proceed as quickly as possible.