My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments in my name in this group.
Amendments 178 and 181 suggest an additional scope for the power to get information. We should look at activities which affect the UK and not just at those that take place in the UK. A lot of these food supply chains are international and many of their activities and decisions take place outside the UK—indeed, all that may happen in the UK is that some goods turn up and are dropped off at someone’s warehouse, with all the information about where they have come from, what they are and what the resilience of the food chain is being held outside the UK. So it seems to me that we should have the wording “activities affecting the UK” rather than “activities in the UK”.
These amendments also extend the power to get information to Clause 17, which is on food security. We say that we will do a lot of things with information there, but I cannot see that we have given ourselves the power to get the information we need, which again is likely to be held outside the UK in many cases.
Amendment 185 argues for a wider definition of persons “closely connected” with the food chain and lists a number of activities that are fundamental to a food chain but are not presently listed in the Bill.
Amendment 183 comes back to the plants and fungi of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. It is not clear to me that the present wording in Clause 22(2)(c),
“any creature or other thing taken from the wild”,
includes plants. Clearly there is a substantial trade in plants and fungi taken from the wild, which ought to be comprehended in this Bill. I entirely sympathise with the irritation of the noble Baroness at fungi being subsumed into “plants”—but in a House where male embraces the female, perhaps this is a fault that we are used to.
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