My Lords, I thank the Minister for his answer and everyone who has contributed to this short but very dense—I think that is the appropriate adjective here—debate. I cannot help feeling that, should we revisit this on Report, as I suspect we may, we will need a couple of IP KC specialists to hand it over to, rather than leaving it to be tangled with by those who are not legal specialists in this area. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport, nailed it: it feels like this has not been properly worked through, and it certainly has not been explained to the Committee. That is exactly where we have arrived at.
I will put some more questions to the Minister, because I am wrestling with this. I freely acknowledge that I am not an IP law specialist, by any means, but how can something that is patented be natural and traditional? Those two things are simply incompatible in law, and certainly in public understanding. That is what my amendment addresses, and I do not believe the Minister has dealt with that issue.
More specifically and concretely, and perhaps easier to answer—although I understand if the Minister wants to write to me—he referred to some of the tangles that had occurred previously with GMO technology. Seeds had blown from one field to another, and a farmer who had not even planted the patented crop found themselves in legal difficulty with its owner because they were illegally growing the seeds, even though they did not want them. Some of them may even have been organic farmers, who definitely did not want those seeds. Can the Minister assure me that we will not see this situation arising with so-called precision-bred organisms in the UK, particularly plants in this case—I am not sure we are talking about animals as much? Also, what happens if a genetic trait cross-breeds with or appears in a weed? Who is responsible for that? Is the owner of the intellectual property responsible for what happens with the weed?