Contribution
My Lords, in following the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, I echo her concerns about the labelling of GMOs, and I look forward to the Minister’s answer on that. I am afraid that I somewhat disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, regarding the rights of the nations of these islands. They surely should have the right and ability to say that they want healthier food and the right to set higher standards for food than England may choose to.
Coming to the general point, I find it a little surprising that we have heard considerable celebration about reductions in red tape at a time when there are grave concerns among the public about the safety of our food supply, particularly the impacts of ultra-processed foods, which contain many of the substances that will be covered by these regulations, and in a society that has huge problems with the overall level of public health. Surely it is better to have so-called red tape than for people to become ill as a result of the food that they buy without knowingly putting themselves at risk.
As the Minister set out so clearly—I thank her for that—there are two chief changes here. The first is to remove the requirement for reauthorisation for certain products every 10 years. These are products that have previously been identified as high risk, which is why they are on the list: feed additives, and food and feed containing GMOs or smoke flavourings. We are taking away actions to monitor products that have been regarded as high risk. Secondly, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, we are removing parliamentary scrutiny by not requiring SIs. Building on what she said, will there be an accessible list somewhere that can easily be found by Members of the House and members of the public?
When we do not have the automatic 10-year authorisation, what will happen when an issue arises? I do not think that this has been covered very clearly at all. How will the Government alert the House to that issue? We have seen this happen in many areas before, and I expect that NGOs and researchers in universities would come to an individual Member of the House and they would have to batter away at trying to establish the issue, how big it is and what is happening. However, we and the NGOs have only limited capacity. How will the Government keep us and the public informed about what is happening when this starts to be an issue?
I thank the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for a very comprehensive piece of work on this SI. It is seven pages of quite detailed scrutiny, which contain a considerable number of expressions of concern. The committee is concerned that the Explanatory Memorandum did not fully explain the mechanisms to detect and monitor the risks in absence of a renewal process, which essentially addresses the issue I just raised about how we know.
Some of the discussion is about what happens in the testing of products if technology and our understanding change. We are in a period of rapid, massive change in our understanding of the operations and the biology of the human body. I have talked in other contexts about microbiotoxicity, where products impact on the human microbiome. That is a sentence that would not have made any sense 10 years ago, which reflects how fast our understanding of human biology has changed. We are just starting to get into understanding the virome—I recently hosted an event on phages—the bacteria and fungi in our body and how they interact with viruses and food. It is a very complicated and fast-moving area.
I have focused on the Food Standards Agency, which has a total of 1,582 members of staff in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. As the Minister has said, it is struggling with the number of applications that it is getting and, essentially, it does not have enough staff. If that is the case and there is this flood of new applications, how can we be reassured that attention will be given to things in that “Already done, don’t really have to think about it” pile, particularly when there are so many other biosecurity risks facing our country?
I declare that my comments have been informed by Beyond GM. It highlights that the Government Chemist, which is part of DSIT and hosted by the Laboratory of the Government Chemist—which is now, curiously, a privatised organisation—
“expressed the view that the renewals process”
needs to make sure that it has
“necessary scientific checks on the currency of validation methods”.
This is not just the biology changing but the understanding of our testing.
Finally, I offer a reflection on what we have seen happen in so many areas of public safety related to chemicals. Teflon is not a food additive, although it is an additive that has been unintentionally put in our food. PFAS were discovered in the 1930s; by the 1970s, companies including DuPont and 3M were aware of the risks and hid them. It was only in the 1990s that regulators and the public started to become aware of them. We have to be aware that we cannot trust giant multinational companies to declare to the Government and identify when a problem first starts to emerge. This has to be done by people acting for public good, not for private profit.