Animal Welfare Bill

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, on tabling the amendment, and I apologise to her, because it was my intention to add my name to it and I completely overlooked doing so. I find myself very much in the same situation as the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes. I would be more impressed with self-regulation if we had seen it working; whereas demonstrably it has not been working. My noble friend refers to an isolated incident, but rather like the pheasants that the noble Earl referred to, we simply do not know whether it was an isolated incident. Indeed, there was a further report, about which I have read nothing since, of a not dissimilar case somewhere up in the north-west. There may well be others, and the untraceable gap between the numbers of greyhounds that are used for racing and what happens at the end of the day is not capable of explanation. If I share anything with the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, on this, it is simply that we should have some data on what is happening. I looked back quite a long time, but I cannot recall any occasion when any profession, industry or trade has been facing the possibility of statutory regulation as against self-regulation when it has not protested as volubly as it possibly could. My noble friend Lord Lipsey certainly did that this afternoon. But it seems to me that what will have to be done in this area at the end of the day will be so costly that there is no real chance of the greyhound industry finding the money to do it. There will be slippage, and there will be poor quality. Something of the sort will happen. I accept what my noble friend said about this boiling down to the point that the noble Viscount on the Liberal Benches made about supply and demand in terms of the number of greyhounds required for racing. That may well be insoluble as far as it goes, but if that is what people do we should be saying to them that they must face up to the economic consequences. It is not acceptable to British public opinion that thousands of dogs annually are simply put down. If the Sunday Times article achieved anything at all, apart perhaps from alerting us, it is that public opinion will now expect this House and the one down the road to say clearly that something is going to happen about this. The public will not understand all the complexities of secondary legislation or anything else. That is not what they will understand. They will want to see that we are doing something positive. This amendment does that. I hope that whatever the noble Baroness decides to do this afternoon she will not let this go at the final stage.