That this House takes note of biosecurity, and the threat of infectious diseases for human, animal and plant health, in an age of globalisation and climate change.
My Lords, after that I think I had better get a move on. First, it is a pleasure to welcome the Minister to the House and his new role; I wish him well and look forward to working with him. This is a major topic, so it is something of a baptism, but I hope fire will not be involved. I also thank all those who put their names down to speak; I am very grateful indeed. Finally, I draw attention to my declarations in the register.
In 1624, when John Donne wrote
“No man is an island …
Every man is …
A part of the main”,
he could not have imagined how prophetic that might be—although perhaps not in the way he intended. The movement of humans, animals and plants, and of animal and plant products, is now at a speed and scale that John Donne could not have imagined. We now exist in a global village, potentially shared with global pathogens. In 2001, the then director-general of the WHO, Gro Brundtland, commented rather less poetically than John Donne that
“with globalization, a single microbial sea washes all of humankind”.
Of course, the same is true for animals and plants.
This debate has a very broad scope, including human, animal and plant infections, and that is deliberate, in view of the interrelatedness of many of the issues, as recognised in the One Health concept. This debate is about biosecurity in the United Kingdom, so it concerns the threat of geographic spread of pathogens and pests to the UK and also of their potential establishment in the UK. The former can be very serious, even without the possibility of the latter, but if both conditions are met—spread, incursion and sustained transmission, as in Covid-19, foot and mouth and ash dieback—the consequences can be catastrophic.
Climate change is one driver of changes in infectious disease geography. A major recent review concluded that over half of infectious diseases of humans can be aggravated by climatic hazards. This is particularly relevant not only to the spread of pathogens but to their establishment as transmitted infections in new locations if vectors such as insects and ticks are involved.
While some pathogens are spread by the movement of free-living wildlife or invertebrate vectors such as insects, most human, animal and plant pathogens are spread by human-mediated transport, which means that they can travel vast distances in very short times—frequently shorter than the time it takes for their signs and symptoms to become apparent, which is very significant. The scale of global movements is now huge. In 2022, 224 million passengers passed through UK airports. In 2021, we imported food from 161 of the 195 recognised countries in the world. In 2022, we imported 18.6 million forest trees. Animal products can be in the UK in less than 12 hours from countries such as Mexico or Thailand.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Trees. He is a distinguished Member of this House and this is an important topic. I might tend to disagree with some of what he said—probably because of my slightly different job as a horticulturalist. But I certainly join him in welcoming our new Minister. He knows that he has a hard act to follow, but all of us who heard him at Question Time on Tuesday will know that he is a fine appointment.
I must declare my interests in the register, but I think my background in the horticultural and farming business is probably more important. I shall concentrate on horticulture, hoping to show that international co-operation is the most important way in which we can deliver biosecurity.
Perhaps I might be excused some personal history. I left school at 17 and went to work in the family bulb-growing and farming business. I was ambitious for its success. I went to work in the Netherlands at a nursery and bulb farm. I learned an important lesson—they were very good at their horticulture. Although they were competitive and entrepreneurial, they worked together and shared, even across borders.
Which brings me to the substance of this debate. The sciences were what I knew about, and it became clear that science lay at the foundation of biosecurity. Discovering the cause of pests and diseases was also its remedy. Eventually, as the result of my interest in science and the regulation of commerce, I chaired the European Bulb Committee, which was set up in Brussels to advise on the integration of horticulture within Europe, its regulatory framework, co-operation and product biosecurity across what became the European Union.
However, here comes the rub. Without doubt, Brexit has hindered this trade, particularly with the Netherlands, in both additional bureaucracy and costs. Biosecurity is about international co-operation. Nothing demonstrates this better than plant breeding, in providing new varieties to protect against evolving pest and disease pressures. It is an expensive business: up to 25% of a plant breeding business’s income can be spent on R&D, according to the British Society of Plant Breeders. It is also a risky business: roughly half of plant breeding research is focused on disease resistance and tracking the genetic battle between plants and disease. This battle is why the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act, which we passed in the previous Session, has been so important.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Trees—he is my noble friend; I hope that I am allowed to use that term—on securing today’s important debate. I welcome those Members who are here to take part in it. Frankly, I wish that we had more debates of this kind in the Chamber. I will do my best to bear in mind what was said earlier about the time limit. The introduction from the noble Lord, Lord Trees, was masterly and comprehensive. I wish the Minister well in his maiden speech at the Dispatch Box.
I know that noble Lords have received useful briefings from organisations with an interest in this broad subject. I thank them all. I pay tribute to the valuable briefing from our own House of Lords Library and the briefing produced by POST in April last year. I recommend that today’s readers of Hansard should consult them all.
I want to use my time to convey some of the points raised with me by the Royal Society of Biology, in particular its science policy team. The House will know that the Royal Society of Biology is the major scientific society covering the biological sciences; I should draw the attention of the House to my entry in the register of interests as a fellow. The RSB submitted evidence to the UK Biological Security Strategy in 2022 and to the Emerging Diseases and Learnings from Covid-19 inquiry in 2023.
It is the view of the society that, in responding to threats to UK biosecurity, government policy-making should take into account all available evidence from all available sources, whether environmental or concerning human or animal health. Frankly, we cannot take a piecemeal approach to biosecurity because, if you do not consider the issue in the round, the risk is that you displace one problem with another. Action on one specific front is not going to be enough. The Government should optimise the use of evidence synthesis so that our society and its ecosystems, its health systems and the food, feed and fuel—even the construction material production systems—that we rely on are able to avert and be resilient to disease, biological attacks and other biological risks.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate; as ever, he was very thought-provoking. I add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Trees on not only his excellent and thorough introduction but on securing this very important debate. I also welcome the Minister and wish him good luck in his maiden speech.
I start by declaring my interests as set out in the register, in particular as chair of the UK Squirrel Accord. I am heavily involved in the complex issues surrounding the difficulties caused by invasive alien grey squirrels destroying our native broadleaf trees. In May 2023—here, I go back to something that the noble Viscount just said—the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, said that
“you cannot have net zero without talking about trees”.—[Official Report, 22/5/23; col. 598.]
I am sure that everyone in the Chamber today would agree with that. At the same time, many sources have concluded what the UK Squirrel Accord knows to be true: the biggest threat to our broadleaf woodlands is the grey squirrel. They ring-bark trees aged between 10 and 40 years, making them susceptible to a host of pathogens and thus killing many and damaging much, if not all, of the rest in affected plantings. This greatly reduces the yield and quality of the timber. This has resulted in many landowners and managers in England simply not planting the native broadleaf trees that are needed as a significant part of our net zero strategy.
The UK Squirrel Accord is the coming together of 40 organisations of the United Kingdom to address this unpleasant truth. It comprises the four Governments, their nature agencies, the main voluntary sector bodies and the principal private sector players. The accord has not only ensured good communication among member bodies but allowed scientific research to be commissioned together. Quite a lot has been achieved in laying the groundwork for a major initiative in reducing the number of grey squirrels—in large part, through the use of fertility control.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and to throw in some good news about grey squirrels, which is the increasing spread of pine martens. Early evidence shows this to be having a positive impact, in reducing grey squirrel populations through natural means. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Trees, for securing this crucially important debate and for his expert introduction to it. I join others in welcoming the Minister to the Front Bench and to your Lordships’ House; I am sure that in the future we will have many debates discussing driven grouse shooting, but not today.
We are speaking in what is now an age of shocks. We have the climate emergency and the collapse in biodiversity, and we have choked our planet in plastic and other novel entities such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals. Our biogeochemical flows are hopelessly out of balance. We have exceeded so many planetary limits. Within that environment, diseases present far more threats than they have in the past. Biosecurity is now a much more pressing issue. In bringing the Green approach to this debate, it is really important to stress the precautionary principle and the sense that what will protect us ultimately is a healthy natural world, healthy people and a healthy environment—the One Health approach, which has already been mentioned several times. If we think about many of our plants, we find that we have bred them in ways that have removed their natural protections. We need to have a diversity of crops and to look at natural ways in which we can manage the threats that are presented.
During Covid, we were all acutely aware of the phrase, “No one is safe until everyone is safe”. I very much fear that, since then, the acknowledgement that we need a healthy world, and humans to be able to be healthy all around the world, has really slid off of the agenda. Of course, the cuts to the official development assistance have certainly seen the UK doing a lot less. Vaccine inequality is one of the issues that absolutely needs to be put on the agenda here. One statistic that might shock your Lordships’ House is that, still, in low-income countries, fewer than 25% of people have had even a single Covid vaccination. That is despite all the wonderful scientific discoveries and the effort that was made. The effort has not been shared around the world, which is a huge problem for us all.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness and to speak in this debate. I declare my interest as chair of Peers for the Planet and should perhaps declare an interest as a vice-chair of the All-Party Group on Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases. I share that honour with the noble Lord, Lord Trees, who introduced this debate so effectively and comprehensively that none of us should go over six minutes in our contributions, because there is no need to repeat the devastating analysis he gave of the risks to the UK. I will focus on the risks that come in response to climate change, particularly of vector-borne diseases, which are so susceptible to changes, sometimes very small, in climate.
I remember talking to physicians in Texas many years ago about their concern at seeing locally transmitted cases of dengue. These had never been seen before in Houston but were growing in response to different climatic changes and, of course, population changes. The noble Lord, Lord Trees, said that no man is an island—that is the phrase we always use—but, these days, no island is an island either. We cannot protect ourselves totally by putting up barriers to the importation of these sorts of diseases. I believe that means that, while we are focusing today on the risks to the UK, we have to understand that the burden of many of these diseases and their increase is being felt not in the future for the UK but in the here and now in parts of Africa and Asia, where they are spreading.
That makes me ask the Minister—who, like everyone else, I welcome—to perhaps say something when he replies about the support we are giving in other countries, as part of a global responsibility for health and as self-protection for this country in not putting barriers up, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, was saying, but taking away the threat of that disease importation and the threat caused by the other health effects of global warming and climate change that lead to instability, mass migration and refugee problems, of which we have a very Eurocentric view. There are huge refugee problems caused by the effects of climate change in areas other than the ones that we are talking about in this debate.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Trees, on securing this debate, introducing it so comprehensively and demonstrating its importance. The Government’s Plant Biosecurity Strategy for Great Britain says:
“Since our departure from the EU, the number of plants and plant products entering Great Britain that require inspection has increased significantly”.
I want to explore why, what those inspections will involve and how effective they are likely to be.
As I understand it, before we left the EU in January 2020, we relied on plant passports for higher-risk plants. These were issued by growers who themselves were subject to inspection from time to time. Henceforth, all consignments that used to come with a plant passport must be accompanied by a phytosanitary certificate issued by the exporting country’s plant health service. We also recruited 200 extra inspectors, presumably to carry out our own additional inspections. Does this requirement for increased inspection reflect a new and enhanced threat?
The Forestry Commission says that there seems to have been an increase since 2002. Indeed, there has been one new outbreak affecting trees every year, although there were far fewer before that date. As far as I can see, there is no evidence of any recent acceleration, but I may be wrong. When new controls were announced as coming in shortly, the Government cited African swine fever and another disease, whose name I forget. I certainly see signs in France and Italy about the danger of African swine fever. If there are specific threats, should the checks not be focused on those? Is that the intention, or will we spread the checks more widely?
Are we introducing these controls simply in retaliation because the European Union applies its SPS rules to us? We know that its SPS rules quite often go beyond what is required for health and are somewhat protectionist in their intent. If so, I would counsel against that. Tit for tat is always a bad approach. We should threaten to do things only if it is part of a bargaining strategy with a realistic prospect of us reverting to a situation of mutual recognition, which we had before leaving.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, and to join others in congratulating my noble friend Lord Trees on his excellent introduction to this important debate. I also join others in welcoming the Minister and look forward to his maiden speech. I should declare that, among my interests in the register, I am a scientific adviser to Marks & Spencer.
In recent decades, this country has experienced four major farm animal disease outbreaks caused by breaches in biosecurity. First, there was mad cow disease, or BSE, in the 1990s. Here, the deregulation of the manufacture of meat and bone meal and the consequent lapse in biosecurity allowed the disease to spread within the cattle population. The infective agent, the prion protein, could pass on the disease via meat and bone meal because the rendering temperature had been reduced.
Secondly, there was foot and mouth disease in 2001. This epidemic was the result of inadequate biosecurity and monitoring. It originated from infected imported pork products fed as pig swill, and it spread rapidly throughout the country because of movement of livestock. MAFF was slow to recognise the scale of the problem and to implement appropriate biosecurity measures.
The third disease, bovine TB, has been an ongoing problem in this country since the 1980s. Here, there are two biosecurity issues: the transmission from wildlife, primarily badgers, to cattle and transmission from cattle to cattle within and between farms. Although the randomised badger culling trial showed that the latter is more important than the former, in the past 13 years emphasis in policy has been placed on killing badgers rather than on measures to prevent the spread of the disease among cattle. The fact that the comparative skin test for bovine TB in cattle has a sensitivity of only around 50% in field conditions means that there continues to be a hidden reservoir of infection in our cattle population.
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A good example of the effect of host movement and infection spread to the UK is with respect to dogs and dog pathogens since the abolition of quarantine for rabies control and its replacement with rabies vaccination in 2000. This has had the effect of vastly increasing the number of dogs coming into the UK every year from around 5,000, which had previously spent six months in quarantine, to now in excess of 300,000 arriving within a matter of hours. We are fortunate that this has not yet resulted in any epidemic disease in dogs, but we have seen an accumulation of novel, previously exotic infections in our UK dog population. The latest of these is Brucella canis, a bacterial infection that is transmissible dog to dog but is also zoonotic—that is, transmissible to humans—which is a matter of particular concern.
With regard to plants, the effect of imported tree pathogens has been particularly devastating. A whole generation of British children has grown up who have not seen a full-grown elm tree, as a result of the ravages of Dutch elm disease, imported with elm products from Canada in the 1960s. This has been followed by the import of ash dieback disease affecting ash trees, which it has been estimated will cost us something like £15 billion to clean up and deal with.
Finally, with regard to human health, a number of infections are regularly reported in immigrant communities, such as malaria and TB, which fortunately do not spread easily in the UK, but some infections, of course, particularly respiratory viruses such as the virus causing Covid-19 and flu viruses, can spread rapidly from travellers to the resident population, with devastating consequences.
What of current threats? With apologies to Donald Rumsfeld, there are infections we have had in the past and might have again in the future, such as foot and mouth disease, which might be regarded as the known knowns. There are also infections that we have not experienced in the UK but which we are aware of and recognise that they present a new threat. African swine fever in pigs is a good animal example—perhaps a known unknown. Of course, there are unknown unknowns: infections yet to emerge from wildlife or plants, or newly evolved drug-resistant pathogens, escapees from laboratory research or creations of bioterrorism.
In humans, a major disease risk yet to reach the UK is the mosquito-transmitted dengue fever virus. This has spread north and west in continental Europe—from eight to 13 countries just in the last 10 years—and has caused locally acquired infections in the Paris region: as close to the UK as that. Transmission in the UK would require its mosquito vector to be established, but conditions are already favourable in the south—for example, around London.
In animals, avian influenza is a major current problem. That presents particular biosecurity challenges since it is introduced into our domestic and wild bird populations by migrating birds. African swine fever, which I have already mentioned, is a disease that has been expanding its range in continental Europe. It is carried by wild boars and causes serious disease in domestic pigs. It survives in meat products for many weeks, or even months, so there is a very real threat of its introduction to the UK through the 1 million tonnes of pigmeat we import annually, the vast majority of which comes from Europe.
In plants, our ambitious goals for the reforestation of the UK, which include planting 30,000 hectares of new woodland annually, are threatened by a host of tree pathogens that could spread to the UK. We risk losing more trees than we can possibly plant. For example, in 2020-21, more than 1,300 hectares of larch trees had to be felled in Wales to control a pathogen causing severe larch dieback. That was more than twice the area of new larch tree planting that year.
What is being done about these risks? The Government are to be congratulated on publishing the UK Biological Security Strategy in 2023. What progress has been made in enacting the commitments made by the Deputy Prime Minister, Oliver Dowden, in the other place in June 2023? Other developments have included the replacement of Public Health England with the UK Health Security Agency. A number of other different organisations and academic groups have been established or have evolved in response to biosecurity challenges. Time forbids me to mention these in detail.
Ironically, while, after Brexit, we now have the legal ability to regulate importations from continental Europe, we have not yet fully used those powers, although our proximity to Europe and our still substantial trade links mean that it is a likely source of a number of animal and plant pathogens. For example, there has been a recent outbreak of antibiotic-resistant salmonella in humans in the UK as a result of the importation of infected poultry products from Poland. This emphasises the importance of the new import inspection capability—the so-called border target operating model, or BTOM, which has been much delayed. Can the Minister say when BTOM will be working at full capability and with adequate human resources, especially of veterinary surgeons?
Given the scale of the surveillance challenge regarding imported goods or the movement of live humans, animals and plants into the UK, it will be essential to harness and further develop modern technologies for detecting pathogens and identifying high-risk situations. What are His Majesty’s Government doing to support and encourage research and development of high-throughput, high-technology biosurveillance tools to provide a metaphorical biosurveillance door through which all risk items pass?
Another important element is raising awareness—in the public, as well as in industry and commerce—of the challenges of biosecurity and, where relevant, the importance of travel vaccination. In 2018, the House of Lords EU Committee produced a report on the effects of Brexit on biosecurity in animals and plants. It highlighted the example of Australia and New Zealand, which have a highly effective biosecurity arrangement achieved through both legislation and public awareness. Can the Minister highlight what His Majesty’s Government are doing to increase public awareness of biosecurity threats?
While globalisation has brought great economic benefit, there is a cost to it—namely, the almost inevitable financial catastrophes from breaching our biosecurity, some of which I have outlined. These events can severely affect other attempts to improve human, animal or plant health, improve the environment and enhance biodiversity. We are spending millions in taxpayers’ money coping with the catastrophic impacts of imported diseases once they arise. Should we not be investing more in measures to try to prevent those happening? A major recent review of the costs of the global Covid-19 pandemic, and of global measures which might help prevent or reduce the inevitability of further pandemics, concluded that the associated costs of pandemic prevention and response efforts would, for 10 years, be only about 2% of the total cost of the global Covid-19 pandemic—estimated at between $8 trillion and $15 trillion.
Given that trade is a vector for pathogen transfer, on the same principle as for the environment where the polluter pays, should not those who benefit financially from trade have to bear some responsibility when biosecurity is breached? The EU Committee report of 2018 commented that the facilitation of trade post Brexit must not be allowed to compromise the UK’s biosecurity—a matter of considerable and continuing concern.
In conclusion, there is no doubt that there are very significant risks to the UK’s health security for humans, animals, plants and indeed the environment, and plenty of evidence that these risks are increasing because of climate change and globalisation. Although it may be difficult—indeed financially, practically and politically impossible—for us to prevent the emergence of infectious disease threats in other parts of the world, we do have the ability to try to reduce the risks of incursions of infectious diseases into the UK while allowing, as far as possible, unhindered trade. Just as we are increasingly recognising the importance of energy security and food security—the latter of which may be imperilled by the introduction of new animal and plant pathogens—I suggest we should equally recognise the importance of biosecurity.
However, as the British Society of Plant Breeders has pointed out, regulatory separation between us and our trading partners in effect doubles the cost of registration and delays testing, trials and certification, which are all part and parcel of making sure that the remedy is effective. Noble Lords will see that I am of the view that we need to find ways of working together again, trusting our differing and diverging regulatory systems, if we are successfully to deliver resilience and responsiveness to present and future disease threats—both at home and abroad—and to provide the biosecurity and trade that the world needs.
By construction materials I mean, for example, wood. The health of trees is of huge importance, especially when considering the threats from overseas; mention has already been made, quite rightly, of ash dieback. I think this is one of the reasons why Members have taken quite an interest in the recent Bill to facilitate the CPTPP: because of the biosecurity risks that arise from trade in that part of the world. For example, a bacterium called Xylella fastidiosa—I hope I pronounced it right—has not yet been detected in the UK but is known to have been responsible for major outbreaks in Europe. It causes disease and plant death in more than 650 plant species, including crops such as plums, cherries, almonds, blueberries and rosemary. Other hosts include tree species such as oak, elm, ash and plane—all of which, as we know, we have here in the UK. Stricter measures are necessary, especially at our borders, to prevent the import of biosecurity risks.
Another risk that we should take extremely seriously concerns the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in animals, which is all too prevalent in parts of south and south-east Asia. I shall return to this in a moment.
It is fundamental that the evidence base used by the Government to decide their policy incorporates the One Health principles and that these are incorporated into future policy-making decisions. This is an important point that I would like to emphasise. The One Health principles are an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems. It recognises that the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants and the wider environment—including ecosystems—are closely linked and interdependent. The Government must co-ordinate their efforts with funders and other stakeholders to enhance and incentivise One Health research and education. They must also integrate One Health into their evidence base and take it into account alongside their long-term strategy to tackle current and future threats. One Health policy must not be solely human and animal focused but should encompass as broad a range of aspects as possible, including plants and other organisms, environmental factors and the interactions between these.
There are different types of threats to UK biosecurity. It is vital that the funding for and prioritisation of zoonotic diseases do not detract from resources focused on the continuing threat of other pandemics. Emerging infectious diseases in plant populations can seriously jeopardise food security, biodiversity and the natural environment, with serious health and economic consequences. Insufficient biosecurity measures have increased the risk of pandemics across species, including what you might call the silent pandemic of antimicrobial resistance, as well as hampering the treatment of current and emerging infectious diseases. I hardly need to tell your Lordships that AMR remains a major threat that faces us all. If we cannot keep one step ahead of nature’s ability to adapt and develop resistance to antibiotics, we will go straight back 200 years to the early 19th century, when a cut on your knee could lead to infection and death; to be more up to date, treatments that we now have for HIV, as well as hip and knee operations, would be too risky to attempt and deaths would soar as a result.
My time is coming to an end so I will finish by saying this: this biosecurity debate is one side of a coin that has climate change on the other. It will benefit us all if we understand how important that is because we have lots of threats facing us in this country, and biodiversity loss and climate change are two of the most important.
This exciting research is being led by the Animal and Plant Health Agency, or APHA, which is based outside York. It includes strands on the fertility control substance itself, the hoppers that will be used to distribute it, and, most importantly, the rigorous computer modelling that underpins the rollout strategy. The research phase is now in its fifth year, which will give way to the landscape trials phase and then a licensing phase, before the rollout. The Minister has ministerial responsibility for APHA, and the Defra family and APHA have been very helpful and involved in the accord since it came into being. Does the Minister agree with the essential proposition that fertility control research represents the outstanding near-term option as a key weapon for grey squirrel control?
The APHA research has been funded in part by the Defra family, but just over £1 million has been raised from private UK individuals and trusts. I thank very much those people. Some of these generous donors have also brought the welcome offer of help in the large-scale field trials, when the time comes. I hope that it does not seem ungrateful to the Minister to observe that much larger sums of government money are being spent in other individual areas of disease and invasive alien species. Given the central need to deal with this issue, for net-zero reasons alone, I urge the Government to consider upping the resource that they devote to it.
Before I close with some specific asks, I congratulate APHA on what it has achieved so far in the research. It is a remarkable institution, filled with dedicated and expert staff. There are various areas where the Government can help. One is around the speed and cost of the licensing process that we are about to undergo, both for the hoppers and for the substances that will be left behind in them. Another is around increasing the co-ordinating resource that the UK Squirrel Accord has available for the next phases. We have been correctly resourced in people and monetary terms up to now, thanks to much generosity from the 40 accord members. However, there will be a step change in what we need to do going forward, and this needs more resource. The Forestry Commission recently came up with an important part of what we need in the field, for which I warmly thanked it. However, we need a small amount extra at the centre. It will take a lot of effort at the centre to deal with further planning, engagement and the education of people up and down the country, and there are a number of other issues as well. If we have a bit more resource now, we will make a better job of dealing with the squirrel. Will the Minister agree to meet, as an introductory thing, to discuss these matters?
It is tempting to think, as we have already heard and will hear a great deal more, that biosecurity means that, essentially, we have to put up walls to keep these threats out. Of course, that is something that we have to do. Mention has already been made of food security. Traditionally, from this Government and others, there has been a belief that we do not have to worry about producing our own food because we will just import it from around the world. That is a huge risk, as has already been referred to in the example of African swine fever, given by the noble Lord, Lord Trees. It is a security issue for all of us, to make sure that we do not import more food that is necessary. What if we build those walls to keep out biosecurity threats? Take the example of flooding: the risk with the flood wall is that, if it is overtopped and built too high, the impacts are very great. When we talk about biosecurity, we have to think about the security of the whole world.
We also have to think about the security of our own environment from the One Health approach. We still do not have the UK national action plan for the sustainable use of pesticides. If we are thinking about a healthy environment in the UK, that is crucial. If we think about a healthy environment around the world, so many actions in the UK are having massive impacts. Many Members of your Lordships’ House are champions of efforts to prevent deforestation. Deforestation is a crucial contributor to damage to the idea of “one health”, through the spread of human, animal and, potentially, plant diseases.
I had a meeting yesterday on this and will in future be bringing to your Lordships’ House the idea that, in all our companies and supply chains, there needs to be a duty to prevent environmental damage and human rights damage. Those things are also a biosecurity issue, and we need to see this in a holistic way. In thinking about the whole issue, and looking at the themes, I think diversity is the key to health. One of the things that we are seeing is the great microbial extinction—something that has come to scientific attention only in the last year or two. That is a real threat to the balance we have, and to the rise of diseases, as we have taken away beneficial microbes.
I could mention many diseases here but I will finish by focusing on the threat that is presented to all our health and to animal health from factory farming. We have already talked a great deal about antimicrobial resistance. I believe that it is this threat that will demand the end of factory farming. However, when people talk about factory farming, they are usually thinking of it being on land, but in UK salmon farming we have seen a significant increase in antimicrobial use—it is broadcasting antibiotics into the sea to spread around the world. Such behaviour has to stop.
We should never forget the health effects of pollution. The burning of fossil fuels, leading to the pollution of the atmosphere, particularly in cities, is thought to cause 7 million premature deaths annually. The air quality in areas of cities, not just in Europe but in India in particular, can be catastrophic when they then have extreme heat events. We have to recognise that heat stress, pollution, flooding and drought—all those effects of climate change—have profound effects on health.
It was significant that last year’s COP 28 was the first COP with a whole day relating to the health effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. It brought forth a declaration, signed by 143 countries, agreeing that they needed to facilitate collaboration on human, animal, environment and climate health changes, such as by implementing a One Health approach addressing the environmental determinants of health, strengthening research on the linkages between environmental and climatic factors and antimicrobial resistance, and intensifying efforts for the early detection of zoonotic spillovers. I hope that the Minister can say what we as a country are doing to implement that declaration.
Will the controls be a significant burden on trade? I understand—and I am grateful to the CEO of Fera for this information—that in 2021 a quarter of a million consignments were notified to the PHSI, 30,000 were tested and 6,000-plus were found to contain pests, with more than one pest or problem in some, so there was a 2.5% success rate, as it were, in those consignments assigned. In future, will we be testing a far greater number? Are we expecting any great increase in effectiveness as a result, or are we doing it simply because, as is so often the case, regulators have a natural desire to increase their powers and budgets? Some of the lobbying I have received certainly has a whiff of that about it.
Let us suppose that what is being proposed and introduced is necessary, will be effective and will not induce a great extra burden on our businesses. In that case, we should all welcome it as a great Brexit benefit—something we could not have done while we remained a member of the EU.
The fourth disease caused by problems with biosecurity, referred to by my noble friend Lord Trees, is avian flu. As he said, this poses a particular problem because it is spread by wild migrating birds. What lessons have the Government learned from these four major problems that we have faced in recent times? Have those lessons been enshrined in Defra thinking and in policy for the future?
I will now briefly look to the future. The risks, as my noble friend Lord Trees expressed so clearly in his introduction, include a mixture of unknowns—for example, mutations of pathogens, just as BSE may have arisen from a mutation of the scrapie agent—and other risk factors that are known and more predictable. We have already heard about these: international trade, wildlife reservoirs, climate change, drug resistance and animal husbandry, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.
I will ask the Minister about two aspects of planning for the future. The first is early warning. The Government have a programme to monitor pathogens called PATH-SAFE, described in their literature as
“a three-year project to develop a pilot national surveillance network, using the latest DNA-sequencing technology and environmental sampling to improve the detection and tracking of foodborne and antimicrobial resistant pathogens through the whole agri-food system from farm to fork”.
Can the Minister update us on the progress of that project?
My second point about the future is import controls, already mentioned by a number of speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. As we heard, since Brexit there have been no border checks on imports from the European Union, but the new risk-based approach to inspections, the border target operating model, which has been delayed five times, will finally kick off at the end of this month. It will go through a series of phases in April and October until its introduction is complete. The model relies heavily on documentation rather than physical inspections. What proportion of checks will be physical, rather than looking at pieces of paper? Will port health authorities have the required resources to carry out paper and physical checks?
This applies only to legal imports, and illegal imports are likely to pose much greater risks to biosecurity. We know from the experience of Dover Port Health Authority in October 2022 that there are major consignments of illegal meat coming in from eastern Europe and, importantly, there are still ongoing imports of bush meat from Africa—which is completely unregulated—that could carry major disease risks. What is the Government’s estimate of how much illegal bush meat and other meat is imported into the UK and what is being done to bear down on that and enhance our biosecurity?