My Lords, I am very glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, who gave us a further excellent example of the expertise brought to this House by so many noble Lords in support of the Bill. I also support the Bill and I very much welcome it. I look forward to the further speeches to come, not least the maiden speech by my noble friend Lord Roborough. I do not want to hold up the House too long, because I do not bring the scientific expertise that so many noble Lords do.
However, I have taken an interest in this issue since I was first elected to the other place in 1997, when I was involved in the Plant Varieties Bill, not least because of my own constituency interest. As with my noble friend Lord Lilley, in my constituency, when I was first an MP, we had the Plant Breeding Institute. We still have in my old constituency the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, and I thank the people there for the conversations that I have had with them over a number of weeks about this Bill and its implications.
In a sense, I approach this from the standpoint not of the science, but of the policy. I was very much against the view taken early in this century that genetic modification by its nature should be resisted rather than be embraced. The point was to embrace it and
regulate it in ways that gave us great confidence. However, there is an essential point in this Bill that was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs—who is not now in his place, but he will doubtless read it—and I thoroughly agree with him. It is in Clause 1(2)(c), which says that an organism is precision-bred if
“every feature of its genome could have resulted from … traditional processes, whether or not in conjunction with selection techniques, or … natural transformation.”
If one thinks back to the point at which so much of our public debate about GMOs was distorted, the distinction was because that which is the result of gene editing, which is essentially adding pace and precision to what would otherwise be achievable through natural transformation or traditional breeding, was being conflated with transgenics. This Bill is absolutely right in principle because it separates those two things out so that we can look carefully to ensure that we are regulating proportionately.
That is why—if I may just add this point in response to the speech with which I otherwise agreed from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch—I do not agree with the point made by Daniel Zeichner in another place and the Labour Party that we need a new and separate regulatory function. So far as I am particularly concerned with plant varieties, we have a perfectly acceptable regulatory mechanism with the specific authorisation requirements, broadly speaking, set out in this Bill, allied to the existing use of the recommended list—the national list—and the related authorisation. That should give people confidence.
It does not give people confidence to have a separate regulatory function and a separate regulatory body in order to arrive at a decision in relation to something that is, in fact, indistinguishable as a product. If people think there are two separate regulatory processes, they think there will be two separate, distinguishable products. In that sense, the Labour Party’s proposals, which were not accepted in the other place, were wrong. They would not have given the public confidence; they would have raised public concerns. That would have been a mistake.
My final point is very much to agree with my noble friend Lord Jopling about the importance of this in the context of our relationship with EU regulation. I am a remainer and I would have stayed and fought the argument, but we did not win this argument about genetically modified organisms with our EU colleagues. I remember in particular having debates with my colleagues and friends in the European People’s Party, who had what amounted to an ideological—one might almost say theological—objection to the use of GMOs, which, because of the conflation with gene editing, has prevented us making steps in this direction and having a regulatory structure for it.
As we change this, we should try to avoid regulatory divergence from the EU, which I want us generally to avoid, but in this particular instance we should continue to argue that we are doing things the right way. Frankly, it is time for the European Union to think about whether it, too, bearing in mind the advantages and the progress that has been made in gene editing, should distinguish between transgenics and gene editing of this character and should change European regulation.
Here we are, only a few days after the United Nations declared that there are 8 billion people in the world and that there are going to be 9 billion. If we are going to feed people, use fewer pesticides and synthetic fertilisers—as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, rightly said—and achieve the kind of progress that we need to make, not least in plant varieties, I very much support the Bill. I hope it will be of benefit not only to British industry, which is very important in my part of the world in East Anglia, but, equally, across the globe in terms of enabling us to feed the planet.
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