Animal Welfare Bill

I welcome the assurance given to the Select Committee in November 2005 on that issue. The Minister went a little further—I hope that it will be confirmed today—when he said that it would be necessary to consider new means of consultation within Parliament and that he hoped that the Select Committee would want to consider that and other issues covered by the regulatory impact assessment again. That is an issue that my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Patrick Hall) has raised already this afternoon. I also welcome the fact that the Minister and the head of DEFRA’s animal welfare division, Mr. Bourne, in his evidence before the Select Committee, made it clear that the Government would be willing, as part of their consultation, to consider the question of an out and out ban. But that is not what the regulatory impact assessment attached to the Bill at the moment says, so I would welcome confirmation on those points from the Minister, perhaps later today. I am pleased that, unlike the draft Bill, the Bill does not, as far as I can tell, seek to repeal section 2 of the Pet Animals Act 1951, which states:"““If any person carries on a business of selling animals as pets in any part of a street or public place, except at a stall or barrow in a market, he shall be guilty of an offence.””" There is some confusion here. If that section is to remain on the statute book, how does it gel with the proposal for a system of licensing of pet fairs? By their very nature they should be illegal, and there is no intention to repeal that section, which makes them illegal. There is a further confusion. I welcome the fact that the Government have taken precautionary measures in relation to avian flu and gone along with the European Commission’s directive on banning pet fairs, but there seems to have been a partial lifting of that ban, because as I understand it organisers need merely to have registered their intention to hold such an event two weeks beforehand with a local representative of the state veterinary service. If that is so, it is at odds with my understanding of the current situation, where the local council, as the licensing authority, decides whether to license such events. The Government’s approach has a degree of confusion at its heart. Later this evening, I shall present to the House a petition on the issue containing some 15,000 signatures. The petition asks the Government to think again and hold to their promise to consider an outright ban as part of the consultation on any secondary legislation. It also asks them to go further and deal with the issue now in the Bill, so that the proposed legislation does not overturn the current understanding—this is the view of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health and a number of councils throughout the country—that pet fairs are illegal.