Dog Control Bill [HL]

My Lords, I will keep my remarks as short as possible because, like other noble Lords, I like to get away to the country to walk my dogs. I recognise fully and agree with the purpose of my noble friend’s Bill, and as I am sure are all noble Lords, I am grateful to him for the care and courtesy with which he has introduced it to us. It is perfectly clear that too many people in this country are attacked by dogs. What my noble friend did not mention is that there has been an incredible increase over the past year or two in attacks on horses by dogs. Again, that is unacceptable. In my noble friend’s introduction to the Bill there was an assumption, which I think is shared across the House, that the 1991 Act introduced by my noble friend Lord Baker, who sadly is not in his place, no longer works. I am not absolutely certain about that. No piece of legislation works perfectly, particularly in the area of criminal law. If it did, we would not have had two criminal justice Bills every year for the past 13 years—indeed, I am told by my noble friend on the Front Bench that we have had more than that, and I am sure he is right. The fact is that these laws never work perfectly, and I accept that in the 1991 Act there was a significant problem with the incredible costs involved in the kennelling of dogs. One attack by a dog is one too many, particularly on children. But I am not entirely convinced that these attacks have increased in number, although I am certainly clear that the sensationalist reporting of dog attacks has done so. I am not sure that the measure of increase indicates that the existing legislation has not worked. I am also not sure that the reason it has not worked as well as it should is that, as with so many other things, there has been poor enforcement. I am not wholly sure that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service across the country have used all the legislation they could—we have the 1871 Act, the 1991 Act, and the amendments introduced in 1997—which is a problem. Indeed, that is what the police sort of admitted when the previous Government looked into this before my noble friend introduced his Bill a year or so ago and therefore, indeed, before he was my noble friend. That is my suspicion, but we shall see as time goes by. I turn to the primary offence set out in the Bill. As so often with these things, I am worried about the law of unintended consequences. Noble Lords should look at Clause 2, from which I will give one or two examples. Imagine that, as I often am, I am out walking with my dogs and it chases a squirrel or a bird. I can assure noble Lords that my dogs do that from time to time. Does that count as allowing a dog to be aggressive in a public place? I should have thought that it might do so. Imagine that I use dogs to kill rats, or to flush or hunt a rabbit. Does that count as allowing a dog to be aggressive in either a public or private place? It is not the private place I have a problem with. Would that count as encouraging a dog to be aggressive or intimidating with other animals? Imagine that I am using dogs to flush animals for shooting, for falconry or indeed to retrieve birds. Am I encouraging my dog to be aggressive in a public place or to intimidate other animals? It is clear that on the ordinary meaning of the word "aggressive", using a terrier to kill a rat would be aggressive behaviour. Similarly, to intimidate another animal is to scare it, and dogs are used to flush or move other animals by causing them to be scared and therefore to engage their natural flight response from a perceived danger. Ultimately, it will be for the courts to interpret the meaning of the words "aggressive" and "intimidate", but their ordinary meanings would suggest that they could be widely applicable in the scenarios to which I have referred. In all those examples, I could be guilty of an offence. The implications for the use of dogs in connection with shooting, agriculture and pest control are extremely serious. Unless an exemption is made for these lawful activities, the use of dogs in the situations I have mentioned would be difficult. My noble friend has said that he is prepared to look at this issue—I would be very happy to work with him on it—but it is a difficult area. Unless the Bill is suitably clarified it would render liable to prosecution the owners of dogs behaving in a perfectly natural way when out for a walk or when used in pest control, shooting and land management. I accept that the noble Lord’s intention was not to incorporate legitimate and lawful activities in the scope of the proposed legislation—he and I have talked about this and so I know that is right—but at the moment the Bill is too widely drawn and needs amendment before ordinary dog owners, farmers, gamekeepers and shooters can feel secure in using their dogs without fear of the risk of prosecution. It must also be remembered that private prosecutions could be brought under this legislation. Those could be malicious or motivated by disapproval of an otherwise lawful activity. It could also lead to complaints to police and local authorities, representing an additional burden on them and on the courts. I received with great interest the brief from the Kennel Club and the Dangerous Dogs Act Study Group, to which my noble friend referred. It is a helpful and constructive letter and guides us on the way in which we should consider the Bill. In its letter of 28 June—which I imagine other noble Lords have also received—it states: ""Any new legislation should also embody the principle of ‘deed not breed’ and oppose breed specific legislation on the grounds that a dog’s behaviour is influenced more by its environment, the training it receives and the responsibility of its owner, than it is by genetics (i.e. its breed or type)"." I am not absolutely certain that that is right. Environment and training are, of course, important, but do not discount genetics. My dogs are charming, affectionate and reasonably well trained, but I would not of dream of walking them off a lead in a field of sheep because any amount of training I have given them would go straight out of the window. I am a responsible owner and I make sure that I do not do that but, however carefully I train them, the genes will take over and they will go. Let me give a couple of examples. However carefully you train it, a Chihuahua will not make much of an attack dog; the genes are not there and nor is the size. On the other hand, however much you train it—and it is easy to train in many ways—you could not get a Rottweiler to flush or retrieve game because the genes will not allow it; it has been bred for different things. And you will never teach a greyhound to round up sheep—kill them, yes, but not round them up—because the genes will take over from the training. To discount the genetics and say that it is all about environment is simply not right. As to the attacks to which my noble friend referred and quite rightly seeks to deal with in this Bill, when we drive around the streets of London we do not see these clearly thuggish people with huge chains, collars and leads walking Chihuahuas; they have pit bull-type terriers. I understand the difficulty of the breed route down which the Bill of my noble friend Lord Baker went, but breed is a significant factor. My noble friend referred to a small dog being poked with a pencil by a small child. Many people have said to their children, "If you do that he is going to bite you"—and, if they continue doing it, they usually do get bitten. It may be a nice dog—it is usually a nasty child, but that goes with the territory—but all dogs will do that. No matter how nice they are, some dogs will always chase cats. However much your Lordships would like to, we cannot legislate against nature—dogs bite—and we need to be careful about how we manage this issue. As a consequence, we need to be a bit wary of totally abandoning the 1991 Act at this stage. Much of what my noble friend proposes in his Bill is very good. He talks about going for the irresponsible owner as opposed to the type of dog. I think that a combination of those might be the way to go. I have not been able to develop that thought, because it occurred to me only on the way down from Wilmslow on a train this morning. I can see some merit in that. I am wary of throwing out legislation wholly and putting new and untried legislation in its place. There is a significant number of dogs in this country which, however well trained, are very large, very frightening and extremely difficult to control. It is the people who get those kinds of dog that that my noble friend’s Bill attempts to address. I have read horrible stories in the newspapers, as we all have. It appears that those people want to go off in the evening to do something and leave those dogs with a friend or a relative, who may—God forbid—sometimes have a child in the house. When something goes wrong in the heat of the late evening, the adult with whom the dog has been left—they may or may not be a responsible adult but, more importantly, they may not know the dog or dogs generally—cannot control it. That is when children get so horrifically injured. I know quite a lot about dogs and have spent most of my life with them, but I would not be able to control those kinds of dog either. So let us not abandon the breed-type of legislation wholly in favour of this approach. Can we in the mean time think about whether we could put them together in some way? My final point, because I have gone on too long, is on prevention. Of course, we would like to prevent these things happening. Whether we stick with the old legislation or go with my noble friend’s new legislation and, in a year or so, have a new Act on the statute book, I do not regard as prevention prosecuting the person after the event and taking the dog away. I should like us all to spend a little more time working out how we stop irresponsible people owning difficult dogs in the first place. The ideal would not be that we punished people after an attack had taken place; it would be that the attack did not take place. This Bill, much as I applaud my noble friend’s efforts, does not address that.