My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Winston, and, indeed, our very acute Committee chair. I will speak to my Amendments 11 and 86 in this group. It is a great pleasure to follow the House’s acknowledged expert, who set out very clearly the major problems with this Bill and, indirectly, made the arguments for the two amendments I am presenting here. It is perhaps worth starting with my Amendment 86, which amends the Short Title of the Bill, leaving out “Precision Breeding” and inserting “Genome Editing”. I am very happy to debate whether that should be “gene editing” or whatever, but I think the noble Lord, Lord Winston, clearly set out the reasons why we should not be debating a Bill called “Precision Breeding”. As he said, there is no such thing as precision in biology.
There are many areas of science in which “precision” is appropriate and extremely useful. We think about elements of physics and mechanical engineering, say, and talk about going down to millimetres, micrometres, nanometres. We can look at how those might change when the temperature changes, for example. All of those things will be eminently, entirely predictable. That is true of physical properties, but it is not true of biological properties, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, clearly set out.
I covered this issue extensively at Second Reading, so I am not going to go into it at great length, but essentially, precision breeding is an advertising slogan; it is not a legal description. I do not believe that an advertising slogan should have a place in the title of a Bill. Interestingly, when it was put to me that I should seek to amend the Short Title, a technical expert said to me, “You will never get that through the Clerks”. In fact, it went through without a murmur. I think there is a real awareness that this Bill is not properly titled.