Animal Welfare Bill

My Lords, this is another area in which I can report a modest amount of progress to the House. Under the previous timetable for regulations and codes, no commitment whatever was made for game birds, whereas a commitment now exists for a code of practice by the end of 2009. That is a direct result of pressure from your Lordships’ Grand Committee. I have not seen the photographs to which my noble friend Lord Christopher referred, so I do not know whether, as the noble Earl said, it is an urban myth—it could well be so. An astonishing number of birds is released each year. The figure is between 20 million and 35 million. Around 40 per cent of pheasants for rearing come from France as eggs or day-old chicks. There is a small trade in six-to-eight-week-old poults. Approximately 90 per cent of redleg partridge are imported, the majority from France, but some also from Spain and Poland. The question of rearing practices for birds released as game birds therefore goes outside the country. I hope that my update is to the noble Baroness’s satisfaction: the Government have looked at this issue closely since Grand Committee. We are sympathetic towards the purpose of the amendment—there is no question about that—but it is mistake to insert the new clause simply because it is too inflexible. We intend to introduce a code of practice for game bird-rearing within the next two years, but to require it to be established within 18 months of the enactment of the Bill will certainly pre-empt the results of the game bird research which has been commissioned by Defra to inform the code. We want the code to be based on evidence. There is little scientific evidence about what is required for good game bird welfare, including minimum space requirements, but the Game Conservancy Trust is conducting research into the use of certain practices as management tools. As the noble Earl, Lord Peel, indicated in Grand Committee, the Farm Animal Welfare Council intends to study the breeding and rearing of game birds, including the use of the raised laying units to which reference was made. It will report back to us in the summer of 2008. Those results will be far too close to the 18-month deadline set by the amendment to enable us to draft the code. In some ways, the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, hit the nail on the head. The code is needed. While there might be a shortage of scientific evidence, a lot of good practical knowledge exists about welfare in rearing game birds. We are talking about a scale of release of between 20 million and 35 million and a large expansion in production, as clearly indicated by the price going through the floor. Game birds are more widely available in butchers’ shops than was the case when most of us were a lot younger. Certainly, people on my side of the road could not afford them.