My Lords, like other noble Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and other members of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, for their work on this report. I entirely support the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, in her assertion that we must, wherever possible, try to achieve political consensus and public buy-in, as she put it. I am grateful for the generally positive views across the Chamber on this Bill and our attempts to ensure that we are getting this right. I have listened very carefully to what noble Lords have said.
We are considering the committee’s recommendations. The Government are drafting a response to the DPRRC report, and we will publish our full response, in the usual way, way ahead of Report. In the meantime, I will take this opportunity to set out some more detail around taking these powers and how we intend to use them.
We expect that, when Clause 4 is brought substantively into force, the content and information required in a release notice would be the same as that in the Genetically Modified Organisms (Deliberate Release) (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2022, which Parliament agreed under the affirmative procedure earlier this year. However, precision breeding is a rapidly developing area. Indeed, we hope that the Bill will stimulate domestic research and development in this field. It is therefore important that we can adjust our requirements for the form and content of the notice and any accompanying information. Any updates to requirements are likely to be technical or administrative and are needed, for instance, to keep pace with technological developments.
The regulations I mentioned, which enabled qualifying higher plants to be released provided the requisite notice has been given to the Secretary of State, have been in place since April 2022. Various research institutes have already taken advantage of this legislation to inform the Secretary of State of their qualifying higher plant releases. For the marketing of a precision-bred product, a different notification would be required, as this will need to contain detailed technical information that enables the advisory committee to provide a report to the Secretary of State on whether it considers the organism to be precision bred. The criteria for this assessment are already laid out in Part 1 of the Bill. For example, descriptions of any genetic features resulting from the application of modern biotechnology and their stability will need to be provided. As with the release notice, we will need to be able to make technical and administrative adjustments to reflect technological developments.
I turn now to the amendment to Clause 18. This amendment would remove the provision on setting up a register, so there would be no requirement for a public register of precision-bred organisms, as well as the delegated power to prescribe the information that must be published on such a register. I want to assure noble Lords that a list of matters which could be included on the register is set out in the Bill. This list includes, but is not limited to, information relating to the release and marketing notices, reports from advisory committees and enforcement notices. In the interest of transparency and public reassurance, this clause enables information concerning a wide range of matters relating to precision-bred organisms to be made public. We consider that specific details of the information to be entered on to the register are an administrative matter, though we will reflect on the comments made in the DPRRC report on this clause and respond to the committee’s concerns in our full response in due course.
This clause is similar to the power in Section 122 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, which enables the Secretary of State to prescribe by regulations the information to be entered on to the GM register. Therefore, the level of scrutiny we have provided for in
relation to the information to be entered on to the public register regarding precision-bred organisms would be comparable to the equivalent provision for GMOs. I hope this provides noble Lords with the assurance they need ahead of our written response to the DPRRC report.