Sentencing Tariffs (Offences Against Animals)

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders)—he is a fellow west country MP—on securing the debate and raising an issue that attracts a great deal of interest. He has always championed it, and I join him in praising the RSPCA for how it pursues some of the horrific cases that he outlined in his introduction.

I was personally interested in this area before I joined the Government. I served on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, and earlier this summer, as part of my research, I read an interesting report called “Unleashed”, which was written by an academic called Simon Harding. It looked at the phenomena of status and weapon dogs and tried to understand why we are seeing an increase in some types of dog fights.

There are three key types of dog fight. First, there are those awful dog fights where bets are placed. They often take place in private venues, and that is the type of thing that my hon. Friend mentioned. Secondly, there is what they call “back of van” fights or trunking, which are awful. The idea came from the US, where they lock dogs in the boot of a car to fight it out. The third type, which some of the evidence suggests has had the greatest increase, is chain rolling, where dogs are used as an alternative to a knife and there are impromptu fights in parks. There has been a significant increase in reports to the RSPCA of illegal fights of that sort.

A further problem has been the growth of the internet, which has made some of these crimes easier to commit. That point has been highlighted by a great many of the animal welfare charities. We have the awful problem of the different terms and code words used in internet advertising for dogs designed to be sold for fighting, such as red-nosed, game-proven, game-bred and blocky. I welcome what the Pet Advertising Advisory Group has done to try to tighten that up by creating a new code of conduct for those companies that advertise pets.

The Government deplore acts of animal cruelty and believe that offenders deserve the full force of the courts. Our responsibility is to ensure that the legislation is fit for purpose. My hon. Friend asked whether we would review the legislation. We reviewed the main legislation that protects the welfare of kept animals—the Animal Welfare Act 2006—in 2010.

The report prepared by my Department and sent to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee for its consideration concluded that there was broad agreement that the 2006 Act has genuinely had a positive impact on animal welfare. It successfully brought together a number of different pieces of legislation into a comprehensive whole and placed a duty of care on those who are responsible for animals. The 2006 Act also introduced a preventive measure that has allowed action to be taken without animals suffering unnecessarily. Although the consultation highlighted some concerns that more could be done to speed up court cases involving seized animals, it did not cast doubt on the adequacy of maximum sentences.

Of course, legislation must set maximum penalties. It is then for the courts—usually the magistrates court for animal welfare cases—to take a view on what sentence should be given. Judges and magistrates have a great deal of discretion in sentencing. In coming to a view, they are helped by specific sentencing guidelines produced by the Sentencing Council, which has been responsible since 2010 for providing detailed guidance to courts on the appropriate sentence for individual cases.

Sentencing guidelines help to achieve consistency in deciding the type and length of sentence and set out the factors that should be considered in those decisions. The guidelines set out how a judge or magistrate can decide on the seriousness of a particular offence, and then determine the appropriate sentence. Of course, the circumstances of different cases can vary quite widely and that can explain the different sentences handed out. The guidance to magistrates covers cases of animal cruelty for offences committed under the 2006 Act and helps magistrates to impose an appropriate penalty. Those guidelines were last updated in 2008 and reflect the current penalties available.

The Government’s responsibility is to ensure that the courts have the flexibility to impose the appropriate sentence within acceptable ranges. To that end, the 2006 Act makes it an offence to cause any unnecessary suffering to an animal. That offence carries a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment or a fine of £20,000 or, crucially, both. Someone found guilty of organising or participating in a dog fight, along the lines that my hon. Friend described, could receive both a fine of £20,000 and a prison sentence of six months. Six months is the highest sentence available to a magistrates court and the fine is much greater than the usual £5,000 limit.

In addition, the 2006 Act makes it an offence to fail to provide an animal with its welfare needs. That offence can attract a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment or a fine of £5,000, or both. The offender can also be disqualified from owning an animal in future.

[Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)]

As I was coming to work yesterday morning, there was a Staffordshire bull terrier-type dog dead in the Thames. I hear what the Minister says, and I commend the Government’s action on increasing fines and sentences, but what action has specifically been taken to stop the people involved from owning those dogs again, legally or illegally, and what action has been taken to stop these dog fights taking place?

[George Eustice]

There are a number of measures under which we can do that. Under the 2006 Act, which was introduced by the previous Government, people can be disqualified from owning dogs. Through that Act, Parliament tightened up the earlier legislation. The courts now have to state why they would not impose such a disqualification, rather than it being left entirely up to them.

[Chris Evans]

My concern is on the safeguards to ensure that someone who is banned cannot own a dog again by legal means. What evidence do we have that someone owns a dog, even if they are banned? How do we impose that ban? That is the issue that I was raising.

[George Eustice]

Clearly, it is for the courts and the police to enforce the bans. Other bits of legislation related to dog welfare and, in particular, breeding, contain anti-avoidance clauses, so that if someone has five litters of dogs being bred on a premises—regardless of who owns or claims to own those dogs—they are caught by the law and require a licence. There are elements of legislation that do that, and I am here to set out what the law states. I commend what the previous Government did in introducing the 2006 Act. As I said, it requires the courts to state why they would not impose such a disqualification.

I realise that some people would like to see the maximum limits raised, but we need to be clear why such a move is deemed desirable by those calling for such an increase. Is it because the maximum limits are considered to be low compared with other similar offences? If we make that point, however, we should compare them with the maximum penalties for other crimes, such as assaulting a police officer, which can attract six months of imprisonment, a fine of £5,000 or both. The maximum penalty available for acts of antisocial behaviour, under the new Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, will be three months, a fine or both.

My hon. Friend mentioned the Animal Welfare Act provision to increase sentences to 51 weeks. I think that he was referring to a scheme called “custody plus”, but it is not quite true that that would relate to a custodial sentence of 51 weeks; in fact, the sentence was always intended to be a combination of community service and imprisonment. It was not simply an increase—a mixture was always intended.

Alternatively, is an increase intended to act as a deterrent? The Government, however, have received no indication from magistrates that the penalties for animal cruelty cases should be increased because they are having to impose more and more penalties towards the upper end of the range. Crucially, for no convictions has a judge handed out the maximum sentence of six months. We therefore have to ask, why increase the maximum, if the existing one is not being used by the courts?

To give an example of the penalties handed down by magistrates over the past three years, convictions under the Animal Welfare Act have been roughly 1,000 a year; typically, about 10% of those have been sentenced to imprisonment, with the remainder getting a fine. That does not indicate to me that magistrates consider that the maximum penalties for animal cruelty should be increased. I understand the points made by hon. Members about increasing maximum sentences, but there does not seem to be evidence to suggest that a review is necessary, especially given that the issue was reviewed most recently in 2008.

My hon. Friend has, however, brought up an important subject for debate, which we all recognise as a growing problem, and the Government have introduced additional bits of legislation to deal with dangerous dogs, such as community protection notices or criminal behaviour orders, which allow the courts to ban people from owning or breeding dogs, or to require dogs to be neutered—a whole suite of other policies applies there.

My hon. Friend asks whether I am willing to meet him and the RSPCA, and of course I am, although the area is the responsibility of my noble friend Lord de Mauley, so he might well take that meeting on my behalf or with me. Nevertheless, I thank my hon. Friend for an important debate.