Can I just add to my noble friend Lord Strathclyde’s remarks? The Government certainly have the capacity to create this committee, but why are they bothering to create a new one? I raised this in Committee and was told, “Oh no; the Animal Welfare Committee and the animal sentience committee are doing two totally different things.” If you took that outside and asked people in the street, “Do you think there’s an enormous difference between animal welfare and animal sentience?”, they would slightly wonder what you were talking about. It is extraordinary that, as a Conservative Government, we did not take a well-respected committee—the Animal Welfare Committee—and extend its remit to include animal sentience. Surely that would have been the most sensible, straightforward way, without creating new bureaucracy, as well as massive expense and giving it a statutory basis.
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Let us consider what this committee will do. We are told that it will be independent, so it can produce reports on anything that it wants. My noble friend Lady Fookes says that it cannot produce a report on the whole question of ritual slaughter, basically because that has already been taken care of in legislation. Is that true? If the committee is completely independent, presumably it can produce a report on anything that it wants. It could put pressure on the Government to say, “Actually, the existing legislation that covers ritual slaughter is inadequate, therefore something should be done about it.” This committee is either independent or it is not. Presumably, it can produce a report on the poisoning of rats. They are sentient creatures—the Bill covers both animals in the wild and domestic animals. Their poisoning is not very pleasant in the absence of terriers which, let us face it, kill rats rather
more cleanly and humanely than any other way. Nowadays they invariably get poisoned; presumably, a report could be produced on that. We are creating a monster here and in the long term we will live to regret it.