My Lords, I declare my current interest as co-chair of Peers for the Planet and past interests as a trustee of several international development charities and as Minister of State for what was then MAFF for two years, with responsibilities for the issues with which this legislation deals.
All those interests lead me to support the policy development the Bill embodies. As the Minister explained in his clear and cogent introduction, it is a narrow and considered approach dealing only with gene editing and not with the wider issues of genetic modification. Most importantly, it sets out processes for risk assessment, scientific scrutiny and appropriate regulatory regimes. Those issues have all been discussed in this debate. They are all issues where I am sure there will be proper deliberation in Committee and where there may well be room for improvement.
This Bill gives us the opportunity to get it right this time. We did not get it right 20 years ago, and that has meant that we have not made the progress we could and should have made in areas of real importance.
So I hope that the Minister responsible for the Bill does not come out of his time in office with the scars on his back that were described by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and that I certainly still feel, from the days when the atmosphere was so febrile in relation to GMOs that it was almost impossible to have rational debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, who is not in his place, said, the media coverage and the manipulation of language—I cite the famous “Frankenstein foods” phrase—made it impossible to step back and debate important issues. I remember the day that I had to order the destruction of 1,000 hectares of oilseed rape because of the “contamination” of a tiny amount of GM oilseed rape that would have been admissible for any other sort of seed. The day started with John Humphrys on the “Today” programme and ended with Jeremy Paxman on “Newsnight”, and those were never good days if you were a junior Minister.
What was awful was the sense that the debate was out of control and that it was impossible to have an argument in which different points of view could be expressed and some sort of synthesis of them could come together. Part of the problem was a focus on technology as being, in and of itself, a force either for good or for evil. There was also a lack of concentration on, and therefore of a proper assessment of, the risks of the application of that technology in particular circumstances, and a lack of focus on a risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis of the application that was being considered. I was reminded of this when the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, spoke about the precautionary principle, which could be invoked to stop absolutely anything. This is the only time in my life that I have made up a joke: “Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it had never heard of the precautionary principle.”