My Lords, in moving Amendment 3, I shall also speak to the rather daunting-looking number of amendments in this group. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, referred in the first group to debate on the Bill in the other place being deficient. It is interesting that, last week, the Institute for Government released a study stressing how much better and stronger scrutiny of Bills needs to be in the other place. The debate we are about to have will perhaps set an example of what the other place could and should have been doing with the Bill, before it came to us.
We already introduced this in the last group with Amendment 2 from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, but here we are looking broadly at the wide range of ways in which this Bill might be applied to different groups of plants and animals—or not, as the case may be.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, in responding to the Minister’s comments on the earlier group, said that it appeared that the Government were
“going gung-ho for all markets”.
That is a fair summary of what we are presented with on this issue, which is interesting, because the debates and the presentations we have heard from Defra have all been talking about food, farming, food security and dealing with the climate emergency. In those Defra press releases, we do not see discussions of prettier roses or more colourful plant foliage, yet it appears that that is being proposed. The detail of this Bill, except for in talking about marketing of food and feed, does not really talk about food and farming at all. We will come later to a group focusing on the question of inserting a clause about public good, which is one way that the actual claimed benefits of the Bill could be inserted, at least indirectly.
The single beneficiary of the Bill is—sometimes this sneaks out—the biotech industry. It is written to support the Government’s industrial innovation ambitions, not to support food, farming or the food security of our population. This is among the many faults that were picked up by the Regulatory Policy Committee; the Bill fails to understand where what it is proposing intersects with farming, food production, food businesses and consumer interests. These concerns are also echoed, in somewhat less clear language, by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and the Constitution Committee.
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It needs to be said at some point—and this is probably the point to do it—that we have a great plant breeding sector in the UK and the majority of its work
is not focused on genetic engineering as it is a relatively small, specialist area. An interesting example is Wakelyns agroforestry, which is doing pioneering and innovative work on developing races of wheat and other grains. Diversity is built within the race of a crop, such that you keep using those seeds again and again with variety built in. That is an agro-ecological approach to farming that, as the Government will sometimes acknowledge, is what we actually need.
Despite the number of amendments in this group, they form a clear set of choices that are laid out before your Lordships’ House. I begin with Amendment 3, in my name, which would exclude animals from the provisions of the Bill and simply restrict it to plants and—I am going to assume—fungi. In the interests of not getting too diverted at this point, I am not going to revive a detailed debate I had at great length during the passage of the Agriculture Act, but fungi are not plants. This is something that perhaps the department might like to look at before we get to Report, or I might feel unable to avoid writing in something that would make the Bill scientifically accurate. There is also a great deal of discussion now about producing food in vats, which brings up the issue of bacteria and protists. This suggests that the Bill might not be as future-proofed as the Government like to claim.
My Amendment 3 would exclude animals and restrict the Bill to plants and possibly fungi. I shall begin with a briefing from 13 animal protection organisations, including the RSPCA, the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, the Humane League, Animal Aid, Animal Defenders International and OneKind. They say that the Bill, by including animals, is
“a backwards step for animal welfare … increasing the risk that animals will be regarded as ‘things’ that can be modified for human convenience. This is contrary to the recognition of animals as sentient beings in the new Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022.”
That is a kind of philosophical approach, although it is interesting that in the earlier group, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, raised similar concerns from the briefing from the British Veterinary Association, which I have not seen.
To move away from the moral arguments, I think that we need to look at the practical ones, which, again, were raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, in the last group. The Nuffield Council 2016 ethical review of genome editing pointed out that if we change the genome of an animal to reduce the likelihood of it being infected with one disease, we may then think that we are able to crowd the animals much closer together in much worse conditions. But, of course, that is opening the way both for bad treatment of animals and to other diseases. We only need to look at what has happened with avian flu, which is very clearly before us at the moment. It is believed to have started in intensive agriculture, has now spread into our wild populations and continues to decimate our heavily crowded, factory farmed poultry.
One of the other claims about animals, which we hear in the Government’s press releases et cetera, is that we will get higher levels of productivity from them, but it is worth looking at what higher levels of productivity have already done—there are so many accounts of this. Broiler chickens grow so quickly that their legs cannot bear them, and their hearts simply
give out, not being big enough to support their flesh. Hens have been bred to lay over 300 eggs a year, which means that they draw on their own bone calcium to produce the eggshells. To produce milk for her calf, a cow would normally produce 1,000 litres of milk in 10 months’ lactation, but dairy cows are now bred—this is through conventional breeding—to produce 10 times as much as would be natural. Unsurprisingly, that contributes to issues such as lameness, mastitis and reproductive disorders. We have done all those things with conventional breeding. Is applying to animals techniques that will increase their productivity really the direction in which we should be heading? I posit that it is clearly not, and many of the expert commentators have drawn attention to that.
We will come back to this, but, in their briefing, the 13 leading animal charities point out that the Bill’s protections for animal welfare are too weak and are very broadly drawn, and it is unclear how they would operate in practice. I make no secret of the fact that my starting position is that I am utterly not in favour of the Bill, but I put it to those who wish to promote it and see it go through, addressing the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Winston, that the public reaction to the Bill would be far more favourable if it covered only plants.
I will offer an alternative option and pick up some points from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch. Amendment 7, which I put down as an alternative option, says that it would be only plants or animals relating to agriculture. On what the Government are talking about, I point out that the George Eustice press release that I referred to earlier said that
“we can breed crops that are more nutritious, resistant to pests and disease, more productive and more beneficial to the environment, helping farmers and reducing impacts on the environment.”
That relates to agriculture, not those terribly decorative roses or that lovely foliage for hedges. The Defra chief scientific adviser, quoted in the same press release, said that the purpose of the Bill is “to build better crops”. That is how all this is being sold.
I neglected to thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman, Lady Jones of Whitchurch and Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, for supporting my Amendment 3. I also offer copious thanks to the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Bakewell, who put down a huge number of amendments, from Amendment 15 onwards, consequential on my Amendment 3. They deal with the Bill in a level of detail that I simply did not have the capacity to manage, and I sincerely thank the noble Baronesses for that.
I will note the other alternative options. Amendment 4, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Hayman, would say only “farmed” animals, as would Amendment 6 in a slightly different form. The very important Amendment 5, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, would explicitly exclude companion animals. I was talking about what we have done to productive animals such as dairy cows. Given what traditional breeding has done to some breeds of dog, for example, and the kind of life that it has given them, I have very little doubt that the
British public would think that the gene editing of companion animals should be absolutely excluded from the Bill.