Animal Welfare Bill

I begin by picking up on one of the noble Duke’s main thrusts. The Bill imposes no requirement for businesses either to make or to keep records for any length of time. Businesses may choose to do so as part of their risk management policy, but whether they do so will depend on how high they assess the risk of prosecution. I imagine they already take these sorts of decision under the Trade Descriptions Act, which has a similar time limit for prosecutions of over three years, as do many businesses under the Animal Health Act 2002 and 60 other pieces of legislation covering subjects such as agriculture and food safety. We are not aware that businesses encounter any particular problems with the burdens placed on them by those Acts. Clause 30, as the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, said, would extend the time limit for prosecuting an offence under the Bill from that which would otherwise apply under the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980. Under that legislation, a prosecutor has six months from the date on which the offence was committed in which to initiate proceedings. That is done because enforcers have told us that it is often some considerable time before an offence against an animal comes to light, which can lead to difficulties in bringing prosecutions under the current law. Often an alleged offender cannot be prosecuted because once the evidence against him emerges, the case is time-barred. For example, the RSPCA has told us of a case two years ago, when one of their inspectors found a dead dog in a cupboard under the stairs. The owner of the house admitted that he had starved the dog to death. However, because a veterinarian estimated that the dog had died over six months previously, the RSPCA was unable to prosecute. We do not believe it is right that a person should get away with animal cruelty simply because he has been so successful in hiding the evidence. Clause 30 makes provision for what I stress is an exceptional circumstance and will allow a prosecution up to three years after the date of the alleged offence, so long as a prosecutor certifies that he has not been aware of the evidence against the defendant for more than the preceding six-month period. Amendment No. 108 is intended to be taken alongside Amendments Nos. 109 and 112. The changes proposed by these amendments would not work in practice. I appreciate what the intended effect is, but the combined effect is to make less serious offences subject to a 12-month time limit, and the more serious offences subject to a varying time limit, depending on where the case is brought. There is no limit if it is brought in the Crown Court, and six months if it is brought in the magistrates’ court. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, did not intend this effect, which would mean a cruelty case brought in the magistrates’ court being subject to a shorter time limit than a less serious offence. The intended effect—I hope the noble Lord will be content to withdraw his amendment—is one that would result in the different offences under the Bill being handled inappropriately. We believe that Clause 30 strikes a fair balance between the rights of the accused to legal certainty and the need to have an effective and flexible mechanism for prosecuting alleged offenders. Although a six-month time limit for cases that have come to the attention of the prosecutor gives the accused the legal certainty to which he is entitled, the prosecutor’s hands are not bound simply because the evidence was not discovered straight after the offence was committed. We are trying to steer a middle course. There is a wealth of precedent for this approach: the Animal Health Act 2002 extended the time limit in the 1981 Act in this way, and there are also precedents in over 60 pieces of legislation, covering subjects such as agriculture, food safety and trade descriptions. There is little evidence that this long-stop prosecution period of three years, in place of the usual six months in summary cases, has been unfair or unreasonable in its operation. Amendment No. 112 proposes that we make the less serious offences in the Bill triable either way. We have given very serious consideration to the maximum penalties for offences under the Bill. Defra receives many requests to increase the maximum terms of imprisonment for animal cruelty offences, but we are not persuaded that there is sufficient justification for that. The Bill will already increase the maximum term of imprisonment from the six months available under existing legislation to 51 weeks, in accordance with the new under-12-month sentence—custody plus. In addition, the maximum fine that the court can impose for cases involving cruelty will be increased from £5,000 to £20,000. Existing penalties imposed by magistrates on the 800 or so cases brought before them under the Protection of Animals Act do not suggest that there is a need to increase the maximum limit. Therefore, we cannot agree with the suggestion that we should make offences under the Bill triable either way. Amendments Nos. 110 and 111 concern the operation of the six-month limitation once the prosecutor becomes aware of the evidence. The issue is whether the prosecutor should have to provehe has not had the evidence available to him for more than six months or whether a certification by him that he has not had the evidence available should be treated as conclusive. The proposed amendments could lead to a risk of well-founded prosecutions becoming completely sidetracked into arguments about when exactly evidence of the offence came to light and when exactly a decision was taken about the sufficiency of that evidence. That would waste the court’s time and the parties’ resources. The approach was chosen on the basis of consistency with the Animal Health Act 2002, which takes the same approach and treats the prosecutor’s certificate as conclusive. If the concern behind these amendments is that prosecutors will falsify certificates in order to launch prosecutions out of time, I think that is extremely unlikely. Were that to happen and to come to light during the course of a trial, it would have the gravest consequences for the prosecutor, who would be guilty of abuse of process. I hope I have covered the points raised by noble Lords and that they will not press the amendment.