Kerry McCarthy
MP for Bristol East · Labour · United Kingdom
“We see that in four main ways: physical risks, including floods, wildfires, droughts and storms; transition risks as economies move away from high-carbon industries; nature-related risks affecting food production and natural resources; and systemic risks, where shocks spread rapidly across sectors and markets.”
“The glaciers of the third pole function as Asia’s water tower, feeding major river systems that support nearly 2 billion people. When rising temperatures accelerate glacial melt, the consequences extend far beyond the mountains.”
“Following the heatwaves and wildfires across Europe this summer and the destruction caused by the glacier collapse and catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet, the message is becoming impossible to ignore: the consequences of climate change and environmental degradation are real, not some distant future threat.”
“Personally, I cannot see that Rosebank is compatible with meeting our climate objectives, but I recognise that the process should be followed. Green Alliance has reported that the gas being wasted in the North sea would be enough to heat 570,000 homes.”
“I too worked in the financial markets, although I think I have done a better job of hiding it in my 21 years in Parliament. I was more on the debt market side. In fact, I am so old that I was part of the salvage operation for Barings bank when it went under. That brings me to the right hon. Gentleman’s point about regulation.”
“My hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that I very much agree with the point that he just made. We have some excellent, innovative businesses in Bristol that came up through the Science Creates innovation hubs and attracted private capital.”
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“We have seen planning applications, for example, for huge pig farms where there have been lots of concerns about the impact on the local environment. One of the problems is that although those planning applications can be rejected on the grounds of the environmental impact—slurry leaking into the soil and the water supply, for example—they cannot be objected to on animal welfare grounds. There are quite a lot of examples of that happening. I have also been to chicken farms with high numbers of chickens kept in close confinement and a high turnover, as it takes 28 days to bring a chicken up to market weight. My concern is that if gene editing allows us to accelerate that process even further, the sheer number of animals involved could lead to welfare concerns.”
“I like to think I have a very good relationship with the National Farmers Union and Minette Batters. The vast majority of farmers want to do the right thing, but looking at some of the red tractor farms that are meant to be higher welfare and seeing what is being uncovered as a result of people going and filming, we cannot be complacent. The red tractor mark is meant to be a badge that consumers can trust to mean higher welfare, but there are many examples where they do not seem to have met those standards. That is proof that something is going wrong in the system.”
“When we discuss clauses 11 to 13, I might raise some examples of where I am concerned about animal welfare standards. I do not think the farm animal welfare codes are particularly effective. There was concern about seven years ago that the Government wanted to put them on a self-regulatory footing. I need to check what happened with that, because there was public outcry about self-regulation on that front. The Government did a complete U-turn, but I am not sure whether they have tried to do it by stealth in the time since. I have a mental note to check what has happened to that since I played a leading role in trying to stop it being moved to that footing. There have been undercover exposés filmed at certain farms about the way some animals are treated.”
“That is a fair point. Hopefully we will come to that when we get to clause 17. To conclude, Joanna Lewis at the Soil Association talked about this “unhelpful trajectory”, and how that is in conflict with the Government’s goals on the sustainable farming transition. She says: “We therefore need to ensure that we are not accelerating that trend through carte blanche deregulation.” — [ Official Report, Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill Public Bill Committee, 28 June 2022; c. 56, Q92.] I agree. She goes on to say that there is an opportunity to put good governance at the heart of the Bill, and to get that public interest test in there, which I support.”
“Once that figure is discounted, we see that little money is going on the most important measures that should be being put in place to deal with emissions. Several people mentioned the need to insulate and retrofit homes, which would simultaneously slash emissions and bring down energy bills. That should have been an urgent national priority as energy costs soared. As has been said, if we invested in that, it would bring down energy bills year on year.”
“We have seen that day-to-day spending in BEIS has increased by 71% since the last supplementary estimate. That has mostly been driven by this increase of £11.6 billion for the energy bill support scheme. As has been said by several people, including the right hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) and the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, this is not a net zero measure unless it is linked to ending investment in fossil fuels, which we know it is not. I expect that we will shortly hear criticisms on that front. It was quite damning how the right hon. Member for Kingswood said that it was simply not true to say that this is a net zero measure. He talked about using false figures in our accounting; I thought those were strong words, but they are true.”
“I think the hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami) talked about how businesses need the confidence to be able to invest, how they need a sense of direction from the Government and how they need to know that they will be backed up. We heard from the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee that the global situation requires a rapid recalibration of the Government’s strategy, and that waiting for the right technology to turn up is not a strategy in itself. Again, that is a plea for a clearer sense of direction from the Government. He said—I hope I am quoting him right—that the Government prefer to delay substantive action to a future date, post election. We might find that comes a bit sooner than we were expecting when he made those comments, but let us see. I would certainly say that the time for action is now.”
“It is not just the Climate Change Committee saying that the Government have fallen short. The Public Accounts Committee report published at the beginning of March said that the Government still have “no clear plan for how the transition to net Zero will be funded”, or “how it will…replace income from taxes such as fuel duty…and…has no reliable estimate of what the process of implementing the net zero policy is actually likely to cost British consumers, households, businesses and government itself.” It went on to say that the Government have “too often pursued stop-start strategies which undermine confidence for business, investors and consumers in committing to measures which would reduce carbon emissions, especially when some green alternatives are still significantly more expensive than current options.” We heard that from a few speakers.”
“As we have heard, last week the independent Climate Change Committee delivered its annual verdict on the Government’s climate strategy, or what there is of it. I think the Chair of the Select Committee let the Government off a little lightly in his quote from that report, which was an absolutely damning read. It talked about major failures in delivery programs and stated that “we are not seeing the necessary progress”, and “the Government is failing in…its implementation”. It also said that the current strategy will not deliver net zero. The committee concluded that the Government have credible plans for achieving only 39% of the emissions reductions required. This comes less than a year after COP, when we still hold the COP presidency and ought to be showing international leadership.”
“I am mightily relieved to see that the Minister is still in his place. I hope he manages to hang on until 7 o’clock; he might find he is the last man standing on the Government Front Bench. If he does want to tell the House about his resignation when his time comes, rather than tweeting it, I am sure we would be delighted to be the first ones to know. There are times when we speak in this Chamber and we feel that the eyes of the world are upon us. I think it is fair to say that this is not one of those occasions, but it is an important debate, and I thank the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, for securing it. I wish there was a bit more to discuss.”
“People want to upgrade their homes to bring down bills, they want to buy electric cars that will be cheaper to run as well as more environmentally friendly, and they want to make greener choices about what they consume, but the Government have to step up to support them in making this transition. That means recognising the urgency of the situation, putting climate action at the heart of every spending decision—on homes, energy, transport and more—and doing a lot better than the Government are doing now.”
“Another 0.5% of GDP could be saved by moving away from costly fossil fuels rather than fracking for more, as the Department appears determined to do. Wise investment would lead to lower bills for consumers, good green jobs and sustainable economic growth. It is not just right to tackle climate change; it will get us out of this cost of living crisis. Labour will treat this issue with the seriousness it deserves by investing £28 billion a year to tackle the climate emergency, grow the green economy and get cheap green technologies into people’s hands.”
“It is good that people are choosing to make the shift, but they need support from the Government to get from A to B; anyone who has an EV knows the perils of trying to find a public charging point when they need one. Energy intensive industries such as steel are still crying out for investment to help them to make the transition to low-carbon manufacturing. The Government seem to be running scared of investing in climate action. They can only see the cost and they are blind to the opportunities. The Minister should remember that the Climate Change Committee estimates that even without factoring in the benefits of green growth or the impact on public health, reaching net zero will cost less than 1% of GDP.”
“Although we are flattered that the Government eventually saw sense and adopted our idea of a windfall tax, the way that they are going about it is all wrong. The Government are simply not going far or fast enough to tackle the climate emergency. There has been no investment in the gigafactories that we desperately need to boost production of electric vehicles in the UK. That is about not just producing batteries here but ensuring that we retain the car manufacturing that is essential to many of our communities. That investment would also create 30,000 good green jobs in the process. The installation of EV charging points is still moving at a snail’s pace, like some of the cars, with only 830 public chargers installed last month and the need for at least 270,000 more by 2030 to keep pace with demand.”
“As the Chair of the EAC said—I seem to be quoting him a lot, which is a tribute to his excellent speech—CCS is not a magic bullet. We are simply not there yet; there is huge potential, but we cannot magic it out of thin air. There has to be a strategy to get us into a position to make use of it. There are many things that the Government could do if they were worried about the costs of going green. They could scrap the plans to provide a huge tax break for investment in fossil fuels in the upcoming Energy (Oil and Gas) Profits Levy Bill, which we will debate next. The way that that is envisaged at the moment means that the Government will provide 20 times more in taxpayer incentives for investment in fossil fuels than in renewables.”
“I would welcome that, provided that it started in Bristol East rather than Bristol North West—we will work our way round to him eventually. If Bristol is getting some money for that, I want to be first in the queue. There are other examples where the now ex-Chancellor seemed keen to claw back green spending wherever he could. The plug-in grant for electric vehicles was scrapped just weeks ago. The planned landscape recovery fund to rewild our countryside was recently gutted from £800 million a year to £50 million over three years. In these estimates, we see a £76.8 million reduction in funding for carbon capture and storage, despite the Climate Change Committee highlighting concerns last week about the Government’s support for the sector.”
“The right hon. Gentleman is correct. We should be looking at long-term solutions, not short-term fixes. When the next rise in energy bills comes in the autumn, people will quickly discount that money. They will obviously be grateful to have had some money to help towards their bills, but they will not feel as though they have benefited a lot. Insulation, however, would mean that they had something to see them through future years. As I said, housing should have been a priority. Properly retrofitting homes would significantly reduce the 20% of UK emissions that come from buildings, as well as cutting bills. That is why Labour has pledged £6 billion a year to retrofit 90 million homes in a decade. My neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), talked about a national street-by-street programme.”
“I understand the hon. Gentleman’s arguments, although I do not agree with them, but has he an alternative proposal for helping people to bring down their energy bills? I am sure that many of his constituents are deeply worried about how they will make ends meet, particularly with the next increase in bills coming this autumn. How does he suggest we help them?”
“I think that is probably fair, but that needs to continue to happen as we move the geneplasm around the world and connect populations. The number of stock is an interesting question. PRRS is very infectious, so once you have got it into a farm, it does not matter if there are 10 pigs or 100 pigs in the farm; the whole farm is probably going to get it. The way that you look at it is that the barrier to entry into the farm is more important than how many pigs are in the farm. That is why we continue to refine biosecurity practices.”
“I get what you are saying about the farm animal welfare codes, although they are not very well adhered to—there is a separate debate about that. If this would permit more animals to be kept in intensive situations because the virus would not spread, does that not leave the door open to people to argue that that is the path we should be going down? Dr Lewis: I appreciate the question. We can look at this in a couple of ways. Just as pure history—as I say, it was my pet project with my PhD—the PRRS virus was originally identified in two separate locations at the same time. One was in North America—Minnesota—and one in Lelystad in the Netherlands. It was pretty much simultaneously defined in Europe and the United States. Did the movement of animals globally—breeding stock and so on—facilitate the global spread?”
“Q On a similar point to Clive’s, I note what Dr Rice said about the virus coming from outside, but from my reading of the syndrome, it spreads by direct contact between animals, as well as by natural breeding, artificial insemination and a variety of other things. There is the concern that the more animals you have in one place, the more likely it is that the disease will spread. I note that the syndrome was first identified in the States in the late 1980s, and now it has spread worldwide in most swine-producing countries. I would be interested to know your take as to why it has spread to that extent. Is it because there is more intensive farming, in the same way that we saw with things such as bovine TB?”
“Q It is not so much numbers, but if you have a smaller number of pigs, they tend not to be kept in such close proximity. Dr Lewis: My final point would be that if we look at gene editing, or genome precision breeding on the other extreme, one of the reasons why we keep animals inside is to protect them from disease, whether it is flu or PRRS. One different way of looking at it is that the use of precision breeding technology could facilitate the extensification of agriculture. Professor Whitelaw: You have to remember that a virus does not choose which animal it is going to infect. It will infect an animal in whichever farming system it is in. This technology, equally, can benefit all farming systems.”
“To go back to Katherine Fletcher’s point, I think it is vital that there is something in this Bill to protect animal welfare, because the current legislation, as I said, has really very little on breeding, which is why we have all these problems. If this Bill is going ahead—I know it is—let us at least have some good, well-crafted animal welfare protections.”
“Q This will possibly have a one-word answer. We have heard quite a few witnesses say that the farm animal welfare codes are sufficient in terms of regulating some of our concerns bout welfare. This question is particularly for Professor Campbell and Mr Stevenson. Do you think they are adequate? Peter Stevenson: No, the codes do not address breeding issues in any very clear way, other than sometimes through a broad principle to say, “Yes, be careful how you breed in order not to harm animal welfare.” We have a huge amount of legislation in this country, but just one or perhaps two provisions that deal with breeding, and they are so broadly worded that they have never had any impact on the harms done by selective breeding.”
“The purpose of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 is to look at policy across all policy areas and see whether due regard has been paid to the effects on the welfare of animals as sentient beings. The welfare advisory body is something that the Animal Sentience Committee would look at when it was making that assessment. I still think it is really important to have this overarching body that will look at policy right across the board. To me, they are all separate entities that complement one another.”
“Q Could I just press a little more about the Animal Sentience Committee side of things? We are now in the position where there is the welfare advisory body under this legislation, the Animal Sentience Committee and all the licensing regimes under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. Do you think it would be better if this was all merged into one organisation? We also heard about the codes that apply in terms of farm animal welfare, some of which is legislative and some of which is guidance. Is it not all a bit messy? Penny Hawkins: No, I do not think it is messy. The Animal Welfare Centre of Excellence, which will bring all these committees together, will ensure co-ordination.”
“Q Do you not worry that things would get lost in the mix, and that something might be seen as the responsibility of one body and then be overlooked by another? Penny Hawkins: No, I do not believe they would. I think there is a suitable framework in place to ensure co-ordination that I think will work.”
“Q May I ask about liability? I hope this is within your remit. What happens if an organic farmer finds that there is contamination? Does the Bill provide any mechanisms or safeguards for people who might want to resist going down this path and are affected by it? Dr Edenborough: Very minimal safeguards. I think you are talking about the potential release of an edited genome. What happens if it breaks out into the wild and then, for example, goes into the field next door?”
“Q Contamination was always the concern with GM. Dr Edenborough: That could be a real mess. To prove it, you would have to have some sort of genetic marker, because you would have to prove causation, but then you would also have to prove damage and it might be difficult to do that.”
“Q But if your organic product has an organic trademark, in terms of the badging—there are rules about importing and exporting organic produce—that could potentially harm their ability to apply for organic certification. Dr Edenborough: Yes.”
“Q But you are saying that it might be quite difficult to actually assess whether it had affected the product in that way. Dr Edenborough: It ought to be relatively easy to prove causation, because there ought to be a genetic marker, but damage is nearly always the hurdle in negligence cases. If somebody says, “I’ve lost everything,” the question is how much they have actually lost.”
“Q If you have a field of organic crops that could be contaminated, you would not necessarily know the extent to which the produce had been contaminated. The certification is based on what you have used on the field, how you have farmed and so on, so you would not know if something had affected it. Do you see what I am saying? Dr Edenborough: Well, there would have to be evidence that there has been contamination, and that evidence would have to be predicated on a sample.”
“Q It might be quite difficult to quantify the extent to which— Dr Edenborough: It is all worked on probabilities. You would not test every grain of rice; you would test a few thousand and extrapolate. That is the way that all damages cases work.”
“The use of precision breeding technology to develop traits that have concurrent animal welfare, environment and economic benefits has to be what we are moving towards. This sort of edit, where you are knocking out a myostatin gene and allowing for faster fillet growth, just is not on our radar. On the specific point about changing fillet characteristics, if you were perhaps trying to use gene editing to modify, for example, the fatty acid profile of the fish, with potential health effects for humans—hopefully it would target positive health effects—there might be an argument for it there. But I do not see the need with the sort of traits we are focused on and targeting; I do not see that the product would be any different, other than having the favourable trait of disease resistance, for example.”
“The R&D we are involved in is targeting gene editing to tackle issues such as resistance to sea lice in the salmon, resistance to a viral disease called infectious salmon anemia, resistance to a viral disease called infectious pancreatic necrosis—those are the targets of our research and development. In the foreseeable future—I could also go further than that—I do not see that we would be doing something similar to what you suggest in our breeding programme. We are able to improve growth and fillet characteristics through the process of routine measurement, family selection and scientifically based breeding programmes. It is quite straightforward to do it that way, and therefore it just would not be a sensible target for the technology in our case. We also see the public acceptance and customer preferences.”
“Should it be marketed as something that is different? Ross Houston: Good question. I was using CRISPR and gene editing as synonymous—it is a gene edited product in Japan with the red sea bream. Those early examples are interesting, because they are markers that show that the regulatory environment is changing in countries such as Japan and some of the Americas. From our point of view, what we are doing here is running very advanced scientifically based breeding programmes. We are keeping 300 families of Atlantic salmon. With them we are pedigree recording, recording the genotype in each year, and recording lots of measurements relating to growth, disease resistance and fillet quality. We are doing that routinely, all the time. We are monitoring the important traits of our fish.”
“Q I was reading earlier this week about how in Japan they have been using CRISPR to change Japanese sea bream. I think the technicality is that you end up with bream that have 20% more meat, because it knocks out a protein that means muscle growth is supressed. Basically, there is less muscle in the fish and presumably more fatty meat—if that is what you call it on a fish. You mentioned the impact on human health earlier, and you mentioned allergies—that was with CRISPR rather than with gene editing—but to what extent do you see us getting to a situation where the finished product, the fish, is so changed that it is nutritionally a different product? To what extent do you think we would need labelling for that? Allergies are one thing, but I wondered about it from a nutritional point of view. People are often told to eat fish.”
“I do not want to promise too much, but clearly breeding, as I said, offers some of the big solutions in the future. It is those sorts of solutions that we perhaps cannot quite see yet but that may well help us to be much more sustainable in what we do.”
“Q Would gene editing give us the ability to grow things in this country that we currently cannot? I am thinking particularly of the situation as we adapt to climate change. Is it the case that there are there crops that, because of weather conditions, soil conditions or whatever, do not flourish in the UK, but where this would mean we might be able to enter those markets in the future? David Exwood: A key example might be soya beans. The current situation is that people have tried over a number of years to grow soya beans. Clearly, it is desirable to grow more of our own homegrown protein, but given that that is quite difficult, it is the sort of opportunity that this technology could give us—the opportunity to make varieties better adapted to our climate, so that we can grow such crops.”
“When we were doing our consultation of our members on the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs consultation last year, we had scientists come and talk to our members, including a wheat scientist from the John Innes Centre, who explained the science he was doing and the potential for that to address some of our members’ challenges. We have seen in the food White Paper the reference of protein crops and finding ways to get sources of plant-based protein. Some considerable investment in R&D is required in order for that to become a greater commercial proposition for growers in this country.”
“Based on that, if research funders see that there is a route to market eventually for the science that they are funding, that will increase the investment in research and development. Of course, the statutory instrument passed a few months ago will enable and make easier the R&D for these particular technologies, which is a good first step. Then, if we have a clear route to market, that will be a further incentive to explore those funding streams. Of course, with funding comes greater capability, because research organisations are then able to recruit the best researchers.”
“Q Is the UK is geared up for research into that side of things? We do not put an awful lot of money into food research and research on crops. I do not want to put words into your mouth. It is one thing for the opportunity to be there. Do you think that we are actually geared up for making the most of the opportunities? Dr Ferrier: We have really excellent scientists. We have some really world-leading plant science organisations here. An example is NIAB in Cambridge, as Daniel Zeichner will know very well. The scientific capability is certainly there. Obviously, it needs funding, and increasingly research funding is seeking to enable impact from research—impact beyond the academic world, but on society and the economy.”
“If we are able to speed that process up through precision breeding, those negative outcomes may occur more quickly. The passage of this Bill has pointed to those problems in animal welfare and made them clearer, and made it necessary to deal with them quite explicitly before we can enact legislation about precision breeding for animals. That is not because the science is different but because the existing regulation around animals differs from that needed around crops. That is why the instrument is set up as a secondary instrument, so that there is time to fully consider and deal with the animal welfare processes before that is changed in law.”
“You may have answered that in response to my colleague and said that it needs more time, but how do you see that in terms of the desire for increased yields and increased production on farms? Is there not an argument for not including animals in the Bill while this further research takes place? Professor Henderson: Scientifically, the application of these technologies to cross to livestock or other animals is identical in terms of the changes it can cause. It can mimic the impact of breeding more efficiently, effectively and rapidly. In the livestock and animal area, this has identified more clearly a problem that was already there and the fact that we know, with respect to animal welfare, there are some negative outcomes that come from traditional breeding processes.”
“Q Continuing on the animal front, we know that some animals, such as pets, including some of the brachycephalic dogs, are bred to have traits that are not desirable from a health point of view. There is increasing concern about the popularity of pugs, French bulldogs and creatures like that. On the farm animal side, you have poultry that is bred to an immense size and cows where the milk yields are going up year on year—they are bred to produce more than they would naturally. What do you see as the parameters of that? How will the Bill protect animal welfare? Because of the popularity of those dogs, breeders may make use of the new technology to breed even more extreme examples. Would that be desirable? How can we prevent that from happening?”
“We have to be really careful about what it is that we are seeking to achieve here, and I think we have to look, in terms of welfare, not only at disease resistance but at longevity, quality of life and ability to withstand other disease impacts.”
“If we continue to drive it, we are effectively supercharging its physiology, and therefore it will ultimately not be able to live as long. Using cows as an example, if you go into a collecting yard or a cubicle shed, you will see the cows breathing really quickly, even though they are lying down, because their physiology is going so fast. What we are effectively doing at the moment is turning what was a very low-input, low-output animal into a Formula 1 car. Unsurprisingly, they do not cope with it and they fall over. What we are doing now in terms of genetically editing is stepping that up a whole other gear.”
“We have to be really careful when we start talking about disease that we do not start messing with something but then find that we end up with a whole lot of unintended consequences in terms of opening the animal up to other disease implications. Ultimately, we will just end up on the same old wheel of trying to continually firefight because the animal is going down with disease. On the yield aspect, again, we can keep saying, “Oh, well, we can genetically breed them to produce high yield,” but what we find is that the longevity of the animals is massively impacted. These cows that can produce 12,000 or 15,000 litres of milk do not live very long because, unfortunately, cows are just not designed to do that. We have to be really careful about what we consider to be a farm animal and what it is there for.”
“Roger Kerr: In terms of the disease-resistance issue, we have to be really careful about how we approach this. What we have seen, albeit through the use of antibiotics, is the reduction of disease. Again, unfortunately, I am referring back to the dairy industry. We have seen farmers driven to reduce cell counts in dairy cows to a point where the cow’s immune system has been suppressed to such a degree that the more virulent diseases come in, because there is not the natural, more benign flora around any more. Therefore, you have cows going down with E. coli and other things, which is killing them. We have seen this continual drive to reduce the immune system and reduce the cell count. What we have found more recently is that allowing the cow to have a more natural immune system actually allows it to live a longer and healthier life.”
“This is how it is going to become a higher welfare system that also delivers for climate, nature and health. This is the role we want to see gene editing play in that context.” I know that you will be hearing evidence from Compassion in World Farming on Thursday, and I know that amendments will be proposed to try to make sure that there are additional tests—which could be linked to the Secretary of State’s powers, secondary regulation or the role of the welfare advisory body—on whether these traits are going to focus on yield, litter size and fast growth and cause lasting harm to the welfare of the animal. Also, are they going to perpetuate, facilitate or enable a farming system that is very detrimental to the welfare of animals? Those are the amendments that will be coming through from animal welfare bodies.”