My Lords, it is a privilege to open the Second Reading of the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill. I declare my interests as a farmer.
Science, research and development are at the heart of igniting the United Kingdom’s economic recovery, boosting productivity, creating new jobs and improving people’s quality of life. The United Kingdom is a world leader in genetics and genomics. With this Bill, we are supporting scientists to harness the huge potential locked within the DNA of plants and animals and will make sure that plants and animals developed using precision breeding are regulated proportionately to risk. We will also introduce a new science-based authorisation process for the food and feed produced from them and ensure that appropriate safeguards are put in place to regulate precision-bred organisms.
I am proud to present the exciting and vital opportunity that the Bill offers farming and the environment. It will give farmers options for greener, more resilient and more productive farming in the face of climate change and global challenges to world markets. Precision breeding has the potential to develop plants and animals that are more resilient to weather and resistant to disease and less reliant on chemicals such as pesticides and antibiotics.
This year we have seen England endure one of the hottest summers on record, leading to drought declarations in many parts of the country. Farmers have faced lower yields, higher fertiliser costs and challenging conditions for animal welfare. We do not have time to hesitate when it comes to ensuring that the right varieties and breeds are available to farmers to help them face volatile markets and a changing climate.
I will give noble Lords an example of how the Bill could help increase food production from a crop on which 2.5 billion people are dependent. At the John Innes Centre in Norwich, leading researchers have used precision-breeding techniques to identify a key gene in wheat that can improve traits such as heat resilience while maintaining high yield. This development could help address issues of rising temperatures not only at home but abroad.
The genetic technology Bill will create a new proportionate regulatory environment that will encourage innovation to help us adapt to the impacts of climate change. Many would say that this is long overdue. It is not an overstatement to say that precision-breeding technologies such as gene editing have the potential to revolutionise farming. Science has moved on from where we were 30 years ago, and this should be reflected in our legislation so that we can harness the benefits of these technologies.
I know that some noble Lords may have concerns regarding the safety of precision breeding. On that front, I hope to provide reassurance. For thousands of years, we have been breeding crops and animals to domesticate them and select desirable characteristics. Using the potential of animal and plant DNA in breeding programmes has resulted in safe and trusted products. Precision breeding is the latest in this line of breeding techniques which utilise this same resource. Under the Bill, an organism will be considered precision-bred only if it could have occurred through traditional or natural processes. Therefore, precision breeding allows us to introduce beneficial characteristics that could have occurred through traditional breeding, but much more precisely and efficiently.
In putting forward the Bill, we are choosing to follow the science. The scientific advice from independent scientific experts and our expert Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, or ACRE as I shall refer to it, is that organisms produced through precision-breeding technologies pose no greater threat to the environment and health than their traditionally bred counterparts.
The Bill sets out four key policy objectives which would enable the proportionate and science-based regulation of precision-bred organisms, while still making provision for appropriate safeguards for precision-bred plants, animals and the food and feed derived from them. The first objective is to remove plants and animals produced through precision breeding from the regulatory requirements governing the environmental release and marketing of genetically modified organisms, also known as GMOs. The key difference between precision breeding and genetic modification is that genetic modification produces organisms containing genes from a sexually incompatible species that could not occur naturally or by traditional breeding. The current GMO legislation will continue to govern these organisms.
Secondly, the Bill will introduce two notification systems: one for precision-bred plants and animals used in research trials, and a second for the marketing of precision-bred plants and animals. The information collected from these notification systems will be available on a public register on GOV.UK, which I hope will give noble Lords confidence in the transparency that the Bill provides.
The third objective will be to establish a proportionate regulatory system for the marketing of precision-bred animals to ensure that animal welfare is safeguarded. I understand that some of your Lordships may have some concerns regarding the inclusion of animals in the Bill. The Government are committed to maintaining our already high standards in animal welfare. That is why we are planning to take a step-by-step approach, facilitating the commercial use of precision-breeding technologies in relation to plants first, followed by animals later. We will work closely with industry, animal welfare NGOs, scientific advisers and other stakeholders to design the next steps.
To ensure that animal health and welfare are safeguarded, under the Bill anyone wishing to place a precision-bred vertebrate animal on the market will have to submit an animal welfare declaration, which will be assessed by an animal welfare advisory body. These measures are designed to safeguard animal welfare and ensure that the health and welfare of relevant animals will not be adversely affected by any trait that results from precision breeding.
I hope noble Lords are reassured that the measures in the Bill will not only safeguard animal welfare standards but have the potential to improve them. For instance, in research by Imperial College London, the Pirbright Institute and the Roslin Institute, we have seen the potential to use gene editing to produce chickens that are resistant to avian influenza—a disease that noble Lords will know is currently having a devastating effect on wild birds and poultry farming in this country.
The final policy objective will be to enable the establishment of a new science-based pre-market authorisation process for food and feed products developed using precision-bred organisms. The Food Standards Agency will design a new framework that is more proportionate to the risk profile of precision-bred food and feed products. This authorisation process will build on five key principles: safety, transparency, proportionality, traceability and building consumer confidence.
The Bill has the potential not only to unlock benefits for the economy, as the size of the global market for technologies such as gene editing is predicted to rise to over £7 billion by 2026, but to unlock benefits for farming and to address the impacts of climate change and to reduce food waste. Tropic Biosciences is an example of the innovative, smaller bioscience research companies that the Bill will benefit. It has recently developed a non-browning banana using precision-breeding techniques. Given the fruit’s high perishability, this innovation has the potential to reduce waste, which helps both the environment and consumers. It is exciting to think that the Bill will support investment in both Britain’s leading research institutions and SMEs such as Tropic. As we move to align with our international partners and harness the benefits of these technologies, we are enabling the development of foods enjoyed at home and abroad.
I am looking forward to what I am sure will be an enlightening debate. I beg that the Bill be read a second time.
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