My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments tabled in the name of my noble friend Lord Mancroft, who, sadly, has fallen to the Covid virus, and we of course wish him well. It falls to me to take on the challenge of trying to persuade the Government, who so far have been pretty unpersuadable, to take this Bill more seriously and put it into better shape. For the record, I do not consider myself, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, suggested, a right-wing Tory, even though some of my colleagues do. This has nothing to do with right or left. I think that the general feeling in the House was that this is a badly constructed Bill. I know that some of the government amendments have the support of the Liberal Democrats and Labour, which means that it is not a well-supported Bill.
For those who have just joined this debate, I say the following: I do not farm, and I rarely fish. I am not an industrial fisherman or commercial farmer; occasionally I shoot—but what I really enjoy is our green and pleasant land, and living in the countryside. As far as I am concerned, it has been under responsible stewardship for a very long time, or it would not still be a green and pleasant land. If I am a Tory, which I am, I believe the well-known Conservative Party tenet that people do better when the Government do least. Here we have a Bill that seeks to interfere with people and how they run their lives. It is not just this Bill on its own, in isolation; we should look at the general onslaught of change that is happening to farmers in the countryside.
How do we arrive at this place? It is extraordinary. I may be totally wrong, but I can count four animal welfare-related Bills, three of which come under a new umbrella of animal welfare created by Defra. Ministers say that they want experts to advise them on sentience, but they are getting loads of advice. They could just come to the noble Lord, Lord Trees, and get terrific advice from him, or the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and get fantastic advice from her, because they are well-known experts. It is why they have been appointed to this House—among many other reasons, I hastily add. It just demonstrates another way of Defra interfering with farming, the countryside and fishing. It is setting down standards and definitions of standards that many other countries do not support. Not even the European Union has gone this far in setting out standards, insisting that our farmers and fishermen adhere to a certain group of standards.
Yet on the other hand, the Government are signing trade deals with these countries and allowing imports of various goods from countries that will not adhere to the same welfare sentiments that we do. We will still get lobsters from Canada—we will be able to get lobsters from Scotland, by the way, as this relates to the United Kingdom. We will still be able to get octopus from Spain not killed in the same way as we
think it should be. We will get langoustines from Scotland and France killed totally differently than the ones that we have—and prawns, as we know, come from Thailand and other countries like that.
There is no civilised way of killing animals, or anybody, for that matter—whether it is slitting their throat, catching them in nets and leaving them out of air on fishing boats, hooking them and shooting them, stunning them or boiling them. They are all terrible ways to die. We should bear in mind that that is the case. Yet Defra is going to appoint a committee that sits as judge and jury on how these animals and sentient beings should be killed—in the animals’ case, but also it will give the description of sentient beings. This will destroy the livelihoods of our fishing industry, which will not be able to compete on the same level field, and it will make farming very difficult.
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Most people I know are welfare inclined towards animals. I certainly am, and I have not yet met any who are not. There are, I freely admit, 10% who are not—but this legislation will never protect us from the 10%; it just hurts the 90%. We will never stop illegal trapping, poaching or illegal netting, yet this Government seek to impose standards on us. One argument that has been used by Ministers is that social media is urging them to carry out these sorts of commitments, but social media is not the way in which to govern the country. Governing the country must be for the benefit of everybody, not those who decide to describe their views and impose them on Ministers. It is Ministers who are elected to opine rather than committees to tell them. In short, we end up with a series of new quangos, from a Government who in theory have been against quangos, another layer of costs on our farming and fishing communities, and an imposition on those who try to live in the countryside in an honest and fair way. I am sorry to spend more time on the general subject, but I see some new faces in this debate, and I wanted to alert them to the fallacy of large parts of this Bill.
In speaking to Amendment 2, I shall speak also to Amendment 48, which would give effect to Amendments 3 and 5, leaving out subsections (2) and (3) of Clause 1 consequentially. The amendments would clarify that the committee is concerned with the process by which current policy is being formulated, and that it is not concerned with policy decisions or policy changes, whether proposing new policy or changes to existing policy. The amendment also seeks to clarify that it remains for Ministers—amazingly—to undertake the balancing exercise between animal welfare and other public interest considerations. This also limits the likelihood of ministerial decisions being challenged in court. We have heard from a former Master of the Rolls that there will be umpteen challenges to these decisions, yet our current Government do not listen to those wise words from such eminent people.
The outstanding issue remains of whether a Minister can be said to have reached the appropriate policy decision when the Animal Sentience Committee reports that all due regard has not been had to animal welfare in reaching its decision. It is hard to see how a policy decision can be properly taken when the process by
which that decision has been reached has been judged deficient. I fear that the result will be many uncomfortable appearances before Parliament by Ministers.
The proposed Schedule, which is given effect by the amendment, simply suggests some statutory structure for the committee—and how badly it needs statutory structure. Everybody has spoken about the importance of that, and I look forward to hearing my noble friend’s response on it. There is also no current requirement for departments to co-operate with the sentience committee; we are merely told that Defra expects government departments to do so. A department that fails to co-operate will simply be reported as having not co-operated. What use would that be in advancing animal welfare, having one department not co-operating but told, “Sorry, you haven’t co-operated, but it does not matter”?
Schedule 1 also sets certain criteria for appointments to the committee to ensure the necessary expertise and to exclude persons who are not independent or may have other agendas. Most of us are terrified of someone like Chris Packham, for example. The other day he took a petition supported by 10,000 schoolchildren to Her Majesty the Queen, which said that she must rewild her entire estate so that we can have bears and wolves back on it. Imagine going out of Balmoral with your corgis and being confronted by a bear and a wolf. I mean, what sort of people are we listening to?
There are so many holes in this, and there is such a lack of clarity, that I thoroughly despair for the countryside in the future. I very much hope that my noble friend the Minister—who, of course, is a practitioner, as a farmer and landowner himself, and a practical man—can give us assurances that we are not being overrun by an endless flurry of legislation where the countryside is being penalised every time it turns up and that actually the status quo can still be maintained.