That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Science and Technology Committee Don’t fail to scale: seizing the opportunity of engineering biology (1st Report, HL Paper 55).
My Lords, I am delighted to introduce for debate the Science and Technology Committee report entitled Don’t Fail to Scale: Seizing the Opportunity of Engineering Biology. I am looking forward to hearing the contributions from others to the debate, and particularly to the response on behalf of DSIT from the Science Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, when I am hoping we will hear of some progress.
I thank all committee members past and present who participated in the report. This was my last report as chair of the committee, and I am pleased to note that my noble friend Lord Mair, the new chair, will speak later. As ever, much, if not the majority, of the preparation and the quality of this report is down to our excellent committee staff, the clerks John Turner and Matthew Manning, the policy analyst Thomas Hornigold and the committee operations officer, Sid Gurung. We were also very fortunate to be supported by a POST fellow, Benedict Smith.
The inquiry started in May 2020 and published its report in January 2025, with the government response following in March. The inquiry heard from approximately 30 witnesses in person and published 53 pieces of written evidence. Contributors included engineering biology academics, companies, international witnesses and the Government themselves.
What was our motivation for this inquiry? Engineering biology is a rapidly developing field involving the use of tools of synthetic biology to solve practical problems. We chose to conduct this inquiry for two reasons. The first was the promise of the technology. In recent years, our ability to sequence, edit, analyse and synthesise DNA has developed very rapidly thanks to CRISPR machine learning and handheld DNA sequencing. This unlocks applications for synthetic biology in areas such as energy, medicines, manufacturing, agriculture and materials. Biotechnologies could allow us to replace fossil fuels as the feedstock for the production of chemicals and plastics or enable better recycling of rare earth metals from electrical devices. Both could be very important steps in moving towards net zero and to a sustainable, more circular economy.
Everyone seems to be focused on cyber and AI these days, but we must not forget that most technological development requires at some point physical products or actual stuff as well as capabilities in cyberspace. Engineering biology provides us with tools to manipulate atoms in physical space, a critical capability to address many of our key global challenges in sustainability, climate and health.
Secondly, this is an area that the Government have already identified as a priority for the UK. Indeed, it is one of DSIT’s five critical technologies, and the UK has historically had strength in these areas thanks to our life sciences sector and early investments in synthetic biology. The committee agrees with the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, and the Government that this is an area with huge growth potential for the UK. But our inquiry found that the rest of the world is catching up with us and, indeed, potentially overtaking us.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Brown—on this committee I like to think we are all noble friends—and to thank her for the way she led us through an exceptionally interesting inquiry. I endorse all the comments that she made about our staff and advisers, some of whom are present today.
I thank all our witnesses—I think there were about 30—and am grateful for the evidence that we received; there were about 50 submissions. It is important for the science community outside this House to understand that we really appreciate the effort they make to provide evidence for us and the expertise they bring to bear. Their contributions enrich the House and enable us to have a better understanding of an area such as this which is fast-moving and full of enormous potential. I, for one, as a member, learned a great deal over the course of our inquiry.
It is interesting to me that this is a precursor debate for the debate we are going to have in due course when our current inquiry gets published and is eventually debated. The reason why we have embarked on our current inquiry is precisely because this country is often a leader in discovery. We are pretty good at spin-outs and start-ups, but we are failing at scale-ups, hence our subtitle.
It is a pleasure to see the Minister present for this debate, because I, for one, would like to feel that he thinks that a committee such as ours and reports such as the one that we have produced are designed to help him, as a Minister, to argue the case within the Government, and are seen as constructive. I might add that it would also be helpful to have a Treasury Minister here because in future we will need a change in the Treasury’s mindset if we are to make real progress in the crucial role of scaling up. I hope that, at the very least, the Minister will be able to confirm today the £2 billion of funding over 10 years promised by the previous Government, although, to be honest, even that will not be enough. We need co-ordinated and sustained work across government, and that is not easy.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and all the members of the committee on an excellent report. I very much agree with its key theme of the scale-up challenge, which is one of the big obstacles to turning our great science and innovation into substantial, successful companies. I declare my interests as co-chair of SynBioVen, which invests in a set of synthetic biology companies, and as the newly appointed chair of the Regulatory Innovation Office. I will briefly explain the perspective of the Regulatory Innovation Office on this report, especially focusing on paragraphs 106 to 135, which touch on regulation.
Our job as the Regulatory Innovation Office, reporting to the Minister—who I see in front of me—is to try to ensure that the regulatory regime promotes innovation in new technologies and does not act as a barrier to their use, to try to come up with granular and practical advice, to think not just about regulations but, often, standard setting, which can be even more important in the early stages of a technology—one of the advantages of being so good at science and tech is that we should have a place at global standard-setting meetings—and to be very aware of the importance of public understanding, public engagement and attitudes to risk. The committee had some specific proposals on the regulatory regime, and I will touch briefly on three of them.
First, in paragraph 107 there is a discussion of what one can call only the obscurity and secrecy surrounding the Engineering Biology Regulators Network. There is a moment in the report where Angela McLean, the Chief Scientific Adviser, says that she does not know who is a member of this august network. In the past few months, led by the Minister for Science, that has all changed. We now have public information, which should of course be available, about the members of the Engineering Biology Regulators Network. That is not just a list of names, but a proper account of the 12 key regulators involved and a brief account of what each does in this area, with an email address and a contact address for each one. A start has been made to make the Engineering Biology Regulators Network more publicly accessible, although there is more to do. We do not yet have the coherent taxonomy of what all the different regulatory bodies do that the committee called for, but now that we have this group and it is functioning and publicly known, we can use it as a core network to spread understanding of the different roles of the regulators. There is more to do, but we are making good progress.
My Lords, I welcome the committee report. It is a case study in how it is not enough to lead in an area of technology—that is easily lost without a joined-up strategy and harnessing the role of procurement. This is elaborated in chapter 2, with quotes from Dame Angela McLean that
“a purchase is worth 10 times a grant”,
and from the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, that it is easier to sell products to overseas Governments than to the UK Government because of UK procurement rules. It is still very hard for smaller companies to be considered at procurement stage, despite the new rules. The system, including the resource demands, remains against them.
Worse than that are the extensive pre-procurement phases of innovation grants. Designed to draw in innovative companies, they then have the lifeblood sucked out of their intellectual property, removing their competitive edge for any procurement stage or commercial exploitation, forced to hand it to competitors or incumbents. I drew this to the attention of the House in the science and technology and economy debate on 31 October 2024, and I have to tell the Minister that, despite his endeavours, if anything, it has got worse.
The point and principle at issue is that many, if not most, pre-procurement phase terms of reference and/or contracts and full procurement contracts require the purchaser—that is the government department, quango, commercial catapult or Innovate sponsor—to be granted a free, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable licence, with full sublicensing rights to anybody, to the intellectual property, including any necessary background technology. This is then made available to others at the procurement stage or later renewal of contracts.
Anyone who knows anything about intellectual property will understand this undermines the innovative company’s position, not just in later tendering to government but for wider commercial exploitation. Competitors have free licences without having invested in research, and it undermines the ability to attract investors and scale business. The Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys is very concerned about this issue and has set up a committee to gather evidence. As the key relevant professional body, I suggest the committee looks to CIPA for expert evidence going forward.
My Lords, I greatly appreciated taking part in this Science and Technology Select Committee investigation into engineering biology and extend my thanks to my noble friend Lady Brown for such excellent chairing of this report. The committee heard from many witnesses across industry and academia, and a number of clear themes emerged. I am going to focus my comments on one area that is close to my experience and expertise, and that is barriers from lack of opportunities for skills training.
Three areas of concern were raised by the witnesses. First, there is the training of the next generation of academics to lead the science. One of the problems with engineering biology is that, as a subject, it does not fit neatly within any undergraduate programme. Rather, it requires its researchers to have a knowledge of biology, biochemistry, chemistry, engineering, medicine, computer sciences and even earth sciences. As a result, we are relying almost entirely on PhD and master’s programmes to bring together those skills to then be able to apply them. Herein lies the problem.
There is currently really poor provision for engineering biology doctoral training programmes compared to other strategically important topics. In 2024, only two new doctoral training programmes were announced in engineering biology compared to 13 in AI. The situation is even worse than this because, if you drill down, as I did yesterday evening, the number of places advertised at Oxford on the engineering biology DTP for next year was six, while the number for AI—I am sorry, but the noble Lord next to me is probably leading one of them—is 38. We can immediately see what the issue is here. Essentially, we need greater provision for PhD places. Will the Minister tell us whether there are plans greatly to expand the training offers at doctoral level beyond that that has already been promised?
My Lords, I thank the committee and the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, for their careful, detailed work and informative introduction. I have two points to make, about the general approach and about risk. I am taking a different, rather more sceptical approach than we have heard from speakers thus far.
First, to start with a traditional metaphor—fitting for me as a carpenter’s daughter—if you only have a hammer then everything looks like a nail. I understand that the committee may not have considered this within the scope of its inquiry, but I note that it did not consider which problems and issues are appropriate for synthetic biology solutions, and which need different approaches. If we are to avoid silos and have joined-up, systematic government, we need government and Parliament to think about prioritisation, funding, and even rhetoric and policies, as well as about what problems and big crises our societies face and whether synthetic biology is the best way to tackle them. Human time, talents and money are all scarce resources. They need to be used well and not in dangerous directions or into dead ends.
I will revisit these issues with my fatal Motion on the gene-editing regulations next Tuesday but, to use an example to illustrate my point, ScienceAlert yesterday published an article titled:
“Scientists Engineer Bacteria to Make Soils and Crops ‘Glow’ Different Colours”.
It quoted an MIT researcher explaining that
“adding two different bacteria … could, in effect, make fields glow red when pollutants take hold and green when nutrients are high”
so that
“it might respond to metals or radiation or toxins in the soil, or nutrients in the soil”.
We are talking about messing with the genetic make-up of bacteria and letting them loose on the world to know whether a field is contaminated with heavy metals or whether you have applied too much fertiliser.
My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and her superb chairing of the committee and this inquiry. I also pay tribute to our wonderful staff, without whom, I have to say, I would have found it very difficult to write this speech.
I ought to declare my interests. I chair both the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the Whittington Health NHS Trust. I am also a non-scientist member of the Science and Technology Committee, but I have a passionate belief in the need for the public at large to be engaged in the exciting—and enormously valuable to the UK—advances in scientific research, where this area of engineering biology plays such a strong role and where the UK has been a world leader for decades. However, we so often fail to tell the story.
We have done astonishingly well in the area of engineering biology, as well as in its predecessor disciplines of microbiology and biochemistry, but we are remarkably good at keeping quiet about it with the wider public. The committee was told that UKRI is funding some public engagement efforts and that DSIT has done a survey of the public’s knowledge and understanding of engineering biology, but that really is not enough. Public awareness is distressingly low. If the Government really foresee the bioeconomy taking off in consumer-facing sectors such as agriculture, we need to ask whether they are putting enough effort behind the regulators—the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, raised this—in terms of public engagement, resourcing such engagement and assessing their ability to communicate with the public about the implications of the products that they are creating.
The debate that took place on GMOs is an object lesson in how not to do it. We were and are remarkably successful in altering the DNA of plants and animals in ways to improve productivity or to resist disease. Our use of gene therapy, including using viruses as vectors for introducing genetic material into humans as a cure for diseases, is really exciting and life-saving, yet there is still a surprising amount of negativity. A quick Google search provides many examples of apparently reasoned objections. It seems that some sections of the public are far from convinced.
My Lords, I too was pleased to have been a member of the committee that produced this report on an important issue that was so ably introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge. I declare my environmental and higher education interests, as listed in the register.
I shall touch on two issues that may not have been touched on by others. First, our report emphasised the need to scale up, and scale up fast, if we are not to lose our place in world markets. There has been a range of estimates of what size of scale-up is possible, but it is not clear from many of them on what basis that has been calculated. One could say that visionary—but perhaps on occasions rather wild—claims are made about engineering biology replacing, for example, all fossil fuel-based materials, which would be a massive transformation.
We have not yet seen enough examination of what it is that is being engineered. What are the feedstocks? It is clear that our ability to depend on feedstocks grown or produced in this country is to some extent limited, particularly for those feedstocks that rely on production on the land. The Government have just finished consulting on a land use framework for England, which was needed to ensure that wiser choices are made about competing land uses. Engineering biology would be another competing pressure for land on a huge scale, if some of the visionary ways forward were made reality. That is land that is finite on this small island. Of course, major growth in engineering biology could potentially take up the whole harvestable land surface, which will be in competition with food security, timber supplies, biodiversity, housing, the view—practically any other land use that you care to mention, and I name but a few.
Importing feedstocks on a substantial scale would also pose challenges. It could leave us subject to external shocks, as we have seen already in recent years. Alternative sources of feedstocks lie in the materials that we already use being repurposed as part of the circular economy. That may, for some engineering biology activities, be a fairly secure and valuable part of our use of materials at the moment, but we need to see the circular economy strategy so we can judge whether it takes into account the potential of engineering biology and takes it forward as part of the circular economy scene.
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Our report proposed urgent actions that the Government needed to take to address this issue. The Government’s response, while positive in some areas, describing ongoing policies, deferred a lot of details to the spending review and the publication of the industrial strategy, but our overall message is one of urgency. Increasingly, it is one of some anxiety over how science funding will fare in a tough spending review ahead. The Minister himself highlighted that there is a small and closing window of opportunity to realise the benefits to our economy that these technologies can provide—otherwise, we will find ourselves using the products of engineering biology developed elsewhere.
Our report made recommendations around strategy, skills, regulation, infrastructure, investment, adoption, governance, safety and public acceptability. Noble Lords will be pleased to hear that I will address only some of those points now and leave others, particularly details around scaling up, where the committee has a new inquiry, to be covered by other Members.
On funding, as the Minister we ask the Government to recommit to the previous Government’s target of £2 billion over 10 years. That is not a vast sum in the context of an accelerating global race and the potential benefits of gaining a leading position in some key areas. Let us take biofoundries, for example. These are facilities that allow biotech researchers to prototype and test their ideas rapidly. In 2019, there were 16 facilities worldwide, five of them in the UK. Just five years later, there were 36 facilities worldwide, and still just five of them in the UK. UKRI told us in written evidence that it had funded approximately £700 million in synthetic biology research since 2007. We heard that, in Shenzhen in China, $750 million has been spent on a single biofoundry. We urgently need to see a serious commitment to funding engineering biology R&D, or falling behind will not just be a matter of risk; it will be a matter of fact. However, the Government’s response did not make this commitment, and we must wait until the spending review and DSIT’s ability to allocate its budget. We hear that the Minister is developing plans for long-term R&D spending, which we welcome. Inconsistency is one of the things that allows us to fall behind—but will he be able to commit today to this funding target, or at least let us know when we can expect more details?
On infrastructure, as a result of what one witness described as a “batteries not included” approach, the biofoundries are funded through cost recovery from the researchers who use them and subsidised by the universities that host them. We heard that, in many cases, this makes them too expensive for researchers and start-ups to use; with universities facing their own financial crisis, that is not a sustainable situation. The Government have a manifesto pledge to introduce 10-year funding for key research infrastructure, so can the Minister confirm sustained support for research infrastructure like biofoundries, and that that will be part of this pledge?
Will the Minister also commit to mapping and supporting the existing infrastructure across the university sector and the catapults, including the Centre for Process Innovation, or CPI, to help lower barriers to access? In due course, the sector will need scale-up infrastructure to compete with offers available in Europe and elsewhere. The UK Science and Technology framework said that the UK would have a
“long-term national plan for research and innovation infrastructure”.
Could we have a progress update on this? The Government Office for Science has produced some good research about the sector’s infrastructure needs. Will it be acted on, and can we expect announcements of new research infrastructure for the sector?
A strategy is clearly critical. The Government need a plan for engineering biology as part of their industrial strategy. The committee welcomes the intention to have an industrial strategy that identifies critical technologies that the UK should support. It will also need to mobilise significant investment, in challenging fiscal circumstances, really to move the dial on growth. However, the current consultation suggests that the strategy will focus on eight very broad sectors, of which engineering biology could fit into at least four—“life sciences”, “digital and technologies”, “advanced manufacturing” or “clean energy”—while DSIT’s investment in the area suggests that it could also fit into “defence”. We think it important that there is clarity on how critical foundational technologies such as engineering biology will be supported by the industrial strategy. We need reassurance that they will not get lost because every sector thinks that one of the others is picking it up.
In the light of its broad sectoral focus, can the Minister explain how engineering biology and, more generally, the work of DSIT on critical technologies fit into the industrial strategy approach? Will we see institutions such as the National Wealth Fund, the British Business Bank and British Patient Capital, which aim to support the objectives of the industrial strategy, be upskilled, empowered, enabled and eager to invest in early-stage and scaling companies using novel engineering biology technologies? Will we see a co-ordinated industrial strategy that does not just fund a few projects or sectors but aligns all of the levers—skills training, public and private investment, public procurement, regulation, infrastructure, mandates and incentives—to support engineering biology?
One approach that we think could help is a high-profile national champion for engineering biology. Our committee recommended that a “national sector champion” be appointed to help co-ordinate cross-government efforts. The Government’s response was somewhat coy. They said that sector champions can be useful and that they will “explore the feasibility of” this. Can the Minister make a firmer commitment on a sector champion?
The Minister will, I hope, bear with me now as I move on to what I would call a perennial topic for our committee: visas for scientists and engineers. This is an issue that engineering biology witnesses raised specifically, but so have just about every group of witnesses from whom we have heard in our recent committee inquiries. Here, the Government’s response was the most disappointing. We wrote a letter to the Home Office in January describing the UK’s visa policy towards scientists as an “act of national self-harm”; that may sound harsh, but it reflects what we felt.
By many comparable metrics, UK visa fees are among the highest in the world. We award only a few thousand global talent visas a year to the best and the brightest, but the Royal Society has found that the upfront costs for a global talent visa are in excess of £5,000 per person for the immigration health surcharge alone, rising to £20,000 for a family of four. For around £40 million a year—a rounding error on the NHS budget—we are putting up a huge barrier to exactly the young, talented researchers whom we need to help grow our economy. In some cases, these costs end up being borne by research institutions, eating into the funding available for research. Cancer Research UK wrote to us saying that it will spend £700,000 a year on covering increasing visa costs—that is £700,000 of money donated by the public that will not be spent on cancer research.
We recommend that the UK rethinks its immigration policy for skilled scientific and technical workers, expands the global talent visa and reduces the burden of upfront costs. These are not new ideas; we said the same things to a previous Home Secretary back in 2022 during our people and skills inquiry but, disappointingly, we have not seen any progress. I expect that the Minister agrees with me that this issue needs to be addressed. The Government were elected on a pledge to reduce overall immigration numbers, but does that really require putting up these barriers to people we recognise as global talent?
The recommendations are not new, but the global context is. Thousands of scientists, especially in the biomedical sciences, vaccines, clean energy and climate areas are seeing grants rescinded and positions terminated by the new US Administration. Surveys show that many may wish to relocate to Europe. Other countries have recognised this enormous opportunity: for example, the Spanish Government have boosted US-focused funding for their “Attract” programme to attract and retain science and innovation talent. We urgently need something similar. Will the Minister advocate strongly to his colleagues that our short-sighted approach must end, and we need specific measures in the immigration White Paper to attract the best and brightest scientists to the UK?
To conclude, spending on science and technology is not just a “nice to have”. The UK has had over a decade of slow productivity growth and fifteen years of stagnant wage growth. This is driving instability in our politics and stretching our public services. That is why the Government have a growth mission, and engineering biology can be a sector that drives growth.
Investment, especially in high-growth technology sectors, is the most obvious route out of this. A new report from PwC and GO-Science suggests that half of UK growth over the next decade will come from the advanced technologies of engineering biology and AI. The UK still has advantages in engineering biology, especially with its life sciences pedigree and the NHS, but we are ceding ground in science and technology to other countries. No, the UK is not the US or China—but we nevertheless still have a lot of advantages: an excellent science base with research that remains world-class, universities that attract global talent, significant research infrastructure to build on and a Government that we believe value science.
Above all, however, there is a growing consensus that something urgently needs to change to address this decline. I do not mean to suggest that this is easy. It requires us to prioritise; it requires a well-co-ordinated, long-term and committed strategy across government; it requires us to get the best out of the assets we have; and it requires us to build the capacity of the state and private sector to support science and technology from blue-skies research through to scaled-up industries. The Government’s response has shown some promising signs of policy development and commitment to this technology and wider measures to enable scaling up, but much bolder action is needed. It needs investment in research and development that is stable, focused, and sufficient; investment in people, both trained here and attracted here from overseas; investment in cutting-edge laboratories and facilities with low barriers to access; investment in the research infrastructure that makes discoveries and developments possible; investors, both in government procurement and in the private sector, who are skilled, experienced and empowered to assess the benefits of engineering biology; investment in our regulatory capacity, so it can lead, not follow developments; and investment from the public, pension funds and private sector in companies that scale up in the UK. We know that the Government recognise this opportunity and the areas where action is required: they must now move from recognition to decisive action.
Some will say that we cannot afford to invest in technologies of the future, such as engineering biology, right now. This would be to fall into the same trap the UK has for the last decade or more. The truth is, we cannot afford not to—otherwise, the benefits of engineering biology will be realised elsewhere. That narrow window of opportunity the Minister referred to is closing and we cannot afford to miss it. I beg to move.
Engineering biology is about growth. Make no mistake: it is as much a part of the Government’s growth agenda as anything else. I wish to convey to Members not on the committee, those reading this and—heaven knows—the few people watching our proceedings today the excitement of the new era being opened up by engineering biology. It is a fast-developing field of science. The applications are vast and diverse and could provide immense benefits to the UK from medicines and manufacturing to making new materials, more resilient crops and addressing climate change. We have a fantastic science base and real potential but, as the committee’s former chair just said, there is a real risk that we are falling behind because other countries are catching up. Urgent action is needed, or we run the risk of seeing science and technology developed here but exploited elsewhere.
Only last Thursday, we had a Question in the Chamber about the decarbonisation of transport. Of course, one of the thrilling things about engineering biology is that, in the future, it may be possible to use molecules to, in effect, grow sustainable aviation fuel. That is just one of the ways in which engineering biology can have a huge effect on the future. It is always the same with new technology; the same is true of this House’s current interest in space. We need to identify areas of engineering biology at which the UK excels and which it is well placed to exploit, because, sadly, we cannot do everything.
I hope that the Minister will use this debate to reassure the committee that engineering biology will feature strongly in the industrial White Paper when it is published. I hope that he will be able to say more about the Regulatory Innovation Office—I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, will also speak about that—because we are well placed to play a leading role in setting standards internationally. Of course, a crucial challenge is where to go for scale-up funding, and initiatives such as the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank may help, but there is still a lack of significant funding.
In the short time I have available, I would like to convey some of the views of organisations outside this House. With a report that includes engineering and biology in the title, I went to both the organisations responsible for those subject disciplines. The Royal Society of Biology welcomed the report, saying “the use of bioengineering in plants can unlock multiple benefits in this sector by enhancing disease resistance and increasing productivity and nutritional content, provided that this is proportionate, scientifically justified and consistent and the potential benefits and costs of action or lack of action as a result of precaution are considered”. That is quite carefully phrased but, nevertheless, it recognises its importance. I hope the Minister can reassure the scientific community that in taking this area forward, there will be consultation with all the relevant scientific bodies.
When I got in touch with the Royal Academy of Engineering, it was more explicit on the issues that it wanted to raise. “Now is the time”, it said, “to ensure the longevity of engineering biology and build on its success to accelerate translation, demonstrate commercial scale and secure the value from such activities in the UK”. I could not put it better myself.
My time is almost up, but I want to make a final point. First, I endorse everything that the former chair said about the visa policy. It is all the more important when you consider what is going now on in the United States. Last week, Sir John Bell told our committee that he had people on the phone all the time saying, “When can we come and work in the UK?” This adds urgency to everything that we do. Whether or not you like the rhyming title of our report, the fact is that this is an opportunity that we must not miss, and I, for one, hope that we do not.
Secondly, in that part of the report there was a discussion of the sandbox model for finding exactly how a new technology could be implemented and how the different regulators could impact its development. One regulatory sandbox has now been launched, involving the Food Standards Agency. A sandbox is not a one-day session in a committee trying things out; this is a two-year programme costing £1.6 million focusing on the development of cell-cultured food, particularly meat. This is a real expert exercise engaging with the British start-ups active in this space, finding out exactly what regulatory issues they will face and tackling them as part of the sandbox process. We do not want sandbox reports after which nothing happens. RIO will be involved in this throughout, and there will shortly be an open call for the creation of a second sandbox in engineering biology, and we will see what applications there are. I very much look forward to supporting that.
Thirdly, there is a discussion in the report of regulatory capacity. In the few weeks I have been doing this job, I have already heard almost every regulator say to me, “Of course we would love to do more to promote new technologies, but we are understaffed and under-resourced. If only we had more money, we would be able to do it. Could you help us get more money, please?” We have to be very careful. It is not the job of RIO to go around with an open chequebook writing lots of cheques. We do not have the resource for that, and those are decisions for Ministers.
But there clearly have been specific occasions when we just needed to help build up capability. The Food Standards Agency, which is particularly covered in the report and has matching responsibilities to the EU post Brexit but with 1/10th of the capability, has recently been awarded £1.4 million from the regulatory innovation fund as a one-off payment to boost its capacity in some innovative technologies. So, I assure the committee that, from the specific perspective of the Regulatory Innovation Office, this excellent report is being taken into account and is already influencing the delivery of government policy.
Meanwhile, let me give a couple of examples. Recently, a department wrote a threatening letter to a growth company that had submitted a procurement bid in which it referenced its existing patents to illustrate its state of development. Among other things, the letter stated that, by having patents, it was behaving anti-competitively and demanded that the patents be surrendered—note the belief that patents are anti-competitive, despite all the rhetoric we have about innovation, growth and export. Even among key officials at the Cabinet Office, IP is not fully understood.
Another SME had signed up for an Innovate grant in collaboration with a catapult. During later due diligence for a large-scale licensing deal with a multinational company, it discovered problematic IP terms. These terms created a serious impediment to the deal being completed and favoured Innovate and the catapult. It took persistent follow-ups with the senior management of Innovate UK and the catapult organisation before they agreed, in writing, to remove the IP obligations. That SME was lucky. More stories, many around the MRC, end in refusal to change terms—but that bar should not be there in the first place.
It also highlights how young, unadvised companies do not see the danger, especially when hidden behind headline statements offering the grant declaring that you keep your own IP. Undermined IP has no value, even though you keep it. These clauses are also generic, whereas in law what is right for commissioned copyright is wrong for patentable inventions.
Technology cannot scale without intellectual property. Investors will not invest unless you can demonstrate competitive advantages, and our government-sponsored system of IP destruction must change dramatically to get growth, scale-up and value out of grants and the line of sight mentioned in paragraph 106 just referenced by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts.
We also recommended that the Government should explore dedicated master’s courses in engineering biology. The Government’s response to our report said that they would explore options around this. Will the Minister say whether any progress has been made here?
The second issue we heard about from our witnesses was the urgent need for skills training opportunities for technicians in engineering biology. From the evidence we received, it is very unclear where training opportunities sit for technicians at present. If the industry expands, as we hope it will, this problem will only get worse. One route is via apprenticeships, and we heard a great anecdote from Professor Susan Rosser from the University of Edinburgh about how useful an apprenticeship can be for the university in its spin-out but also for the career development of the person involved. In essence, this individual came from working in a fast-food outlet—I think it was Kentucky Fried Chicken—to become a highly skilled automation biologist running and fixing robots and a huge bonus to their foundry as well. Key to creating more apprenticeships will be the role of Skills England, which we understand is still being set up. Can the Minister tell us what interactions DSIT has with Skills England to ensure that it is able to provide the critical training very focused on engineering biology?
Finally, we heard from a number of witnesses about the lack of skills needed for understanding the importance of engineering biology across government departments. Engineering biology currently sits under DSIT, but its outputs are highly relevant and important to Defra, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, the DHSC, the Department for Education and others. Funding via the Treasury also needs to be brought into this mix. There needs to be shared communication and ownership across these departments. Can the Minister therefore tell us whether there are plans to increase skills training relating to the potential of engineering biology for civil servants across these many departments, alongside the appointment of a national sector champion for engineering biology to co-ordinate, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, raised?
In summing up, although I welcome the progress thus far, I would appreciate it if the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, could respond to some of the more specific points I have made, which I feel are holding us back from our full potential in this area at present.
I posit that there are other approaches here. You could have land managed and cared for by a farmer or grower—informed by government-funded, expert agro-ecological research—who intimately understands every corner and is protected by a society that has adequate regulation to ensure she will not be pushed to spread sewage sludge contaminated with heavy metals on it or forced to use irrigation water loaded with pesticides and pharmaceuticals. We need to stop assuming that we can make a mess, destroy the immensely complex earth systems developed over 4 billion years, and just engineer something to fix it. That is solutionism, and operates only to magnify the damage and, for a while, allow it to continue.
There are problems—the need urgently to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, for example—for which synthetic biology is the right emergency response, but rather than assuming we can always scramble to that point, we need to think about how we stop the crises emerging in the first place. Synthetic biology cannot help us there. Ultimately, we need, as the Oxford geographer Jamie Lorimer explains, to work our way towards a probiotic: a healthy society and planet.
The final six pages of the report talk about risks, focused particularly, and with good cause, on the danger of inappropriate technology and materials falling into ill-intentioned and ill-prepared hands. This is an important issue, and I am pleased to see the focus here, but there is no real focus on the general systemic risks of messing around with an immensely complex biological system, about which we are, to compare with the education of a child, around early to middle primary in our understanding. We have just about mastered basic mental arithmetic, while life is operating at the level of the most sophisticated maths professor. Synthetic biology is mucking with systems that we just do not understand.
To illustrate that, I draw on another piece of just-emerging knowledge; it is an absolutely fascinating, paradigm-shifting discovery. I reference a Nature article published on 8 April and entitled:
“Cells are swapping their mitochondria. What does this mean for our health?”
That mitochondria can swap around cells is an entirely new discovery. It is massive. Most—nearly all, probably—of our synthetic biology does not take into effect how gene editing of cellular material might interact with that.
I have one final, extra thought here; it is an example of how we have inherited from the 20th century lots of ideas that we need to unlearn. Francis Crick’s central dogma was grounded in Crick’s reductionist belief in the possibility of explaining biological entities in terms of their physical and chemical components. He was absolutely wrong. Ultimately, I would urge, at the base, consideration of the phrase “engineering biology”. You can engineer machines, but life’s living organisms and ecosystems are nothing like machines. We need to acknowledge and examine carefully the long-running category error that we inherited from the 20th century.
Although public perceptions of safety may be different from actual safety, we ignore those concerns at our peril. One big scandal could set research back significantly. For example, if there were the uncontrolled release into the environment of an organism that disrupted ecosystems—let alone a virus—or if there were a high-profile scientific scandal, public opinion could turn pretty quickly. We have not had that here yet, but they have had it in China, and it has had a damaging effect.
We need to think this through. We do not want ethical considerations blocking advances, but avoiding that requires keeping the public with us—explaining, educating and encouraging excitement and pride at what we can achieve. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics sensibly said that we have to be anticipatory here; that is missing. Of course, that is the exact opposite of what happened with the GMO debate. Indeed, we now hear that some of the hybrid plants that the UK is working on are easier to grow in the United States than here. This suggests greater public acceptance there—something that we could learn from—as well as an easier regulatory environment. We may or may not be sympathetic to that.
We are trying to negotiate a trade deal with the United States right now, so some of this matters. We have to get public perceptions and understanding in the UK up to speed. It is important for UK plc, as well as for our ability to cure and treat innumerable diseases, let alone many other benefits. What does the Minister plan to do in this area? We know that he wants limited priorities in a framework built around delivering four main outcomes, but we know nothing yet about how public engagement fits into all of that, which is a major component of the Government’s industrial strategy.
In our report, we argued that the Government should support public engagement for engineering biology and that regulators should explain the new technologies that they are regulating to the public and be resourced to do so. We said that UKRI should fund research into the public attitudes to engineering biology and, indeed, the ethical considerations as things come to market. The Government accepted our recommendations only in part. What is desperately lacking is a much broader public awareness and engagement campaign. Unless that happens, the ambitions for engineering biology will be hard to realise, public sympathy will be lacking, and we will risk more debate like that around GMOs, which has not gone away. The excitement and pride that we should have in our advances will be sorely lacking. I hope that the Minister can provide us with some comfort and tell us that public engagement is high on his list for regulators and government more widely.
Since the Government have not yet commissioned an analysis of feedstocks and their sourcing, I ask my noble friend the Minister whether they will now do so, taking account of those three sources: homegrown, imported and circular economy-based feedstocks. Otherwise, if securing those feedstocks is not part of what they are trying to do, it simply looks as though the Government are not serious about upscaling. Can the Minister tell us when we will see the circular economy strategy? Will it deal with the feedstock issue?
If substantial land-based feedstocks are envisaged, Natural England should be included in the regulatory arrangements to ensure that land use and biodiversity impacts are not forgotten, as they were in the GMO debate, during which I was proud to be on the opposite side of the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in his new regulatory role, is listening. Natural England is not currently a member of the Engineering Biology Regulators Network.
My last point, which I have 20 seconds to deal with, concerns the lack of a reliable process internationally for the screening of sequences of concern, and potential misuse of the technology. We have had guidance, but guidance is not enough. The Government said that they would consider putting screening on a statutory footing. What is the timescale of this consideration? What steps are we taking to develop international consensus on the need for screening for sequences of concern?