Wednesday 16th June 2021
(3 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberAnimal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 View all Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)
My Lords, it is a privilege to open this debate. Today, in this House, we are opening a new chapter in this country’s proud story of protecting and promoting animal welfare. I am proud, as I hope your Lordships are, of the UK’s reputation as a nation of animal lovers. The UK introduced the world’s first animal protection law: the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act 1822.
We have made a lot of progress in the two centuries that have followed. We improved conditions in slaughterhouses in 1875, and passed the Protection of Animals Act in 1911. We established a world-leading system for regulating scientific experiments on animals in 1986, and in 2006 the Animal Welfare Act introduced powers to protect all kept animals in England and Wales.
There has never been any question that this Government believe animals are sentient beings. We are now recognising this formally in domestic law and introducing a proportionate accountability mechanism to help reassure people that central government policy decisions take this into account. The Government’s manifesto promised that we would bring in new laws on animal sentience. Parties represented on the Benches opposite made similar pledges. This Bill is our opportunity to honour that commitment.
The Bill proposes three things. First, it provides a recognition in law that any animal with a spine—any vertebrate—is sentient. Sentience is about animals having feelings, both positive and negative, such as pain or joy. The scientific community is continually improving our knowledge of the sentience of different species. There is clear evidence that animals with a backbone—vertebrates—are sentient. The Bill gives the Secretary of State a power to extend this recognition to any invertebrate species in future; for example, if evidence of their sentience becomes clear.
Secondly, the Bill establishes a committee—the animal sentience committee—tasked with reporting on whether individual central government policy decisions have paid all due regard to their effect on the welfare of animals as sentient beings. The animal sentience committee will have the right to roam across all central government departmental policy decisions. This includes decisions relating to policy formulation and policy implementation. The committee’s findings will be made public and its reports will make recommendations.
Thirdly and finally, the Bill obliges the relevant Minister to respond to each report from the committee through a Written Statement to Parliament. That Statement should set out the Minister’s response to the committee’s recommendations.
Taken together, the Bill’s provisions create a targeted and proportionate mechanism for holding the Government to account on animal welfare. The animal sentience committee’s reports and the ministerial responses to them will support Parliament’s scrutiny of how central government policy decisions pay all due regard to the welfare of animals as sentient beings.
The introduction of the Bill fulfils a key manifesto commitment, as I have said, and it will further the UK’s position as a global leader on animal welfare. Now that we have left the EU, we have the opportunity to remake laws and go further to promote animal welfare. Importantly, there are no policy exemptions in this Bill. It covers vertebrate animals in all settings and in all central government policy areas. If you accept, as this Government do, that animal sentience is a matter of fact, then you must properly consider animal welfare in relevant decisions that you make. By enshrining sentience in domestic law in this way, there will be further reassurance that government policy decisions have been made, taking into account the fact that animals have feelings.
It is important to understand what the Bill is and what it is not. It is intended to embed consideration of animal welfare into the policy decision-making process. It does not change existing laws, nor does it dictate to Ministers which decisions they should ultimately make. It is for Ministers to make those calls, taking all relevant considerations into account, and for Parliament to hold them to account. The Bill is designed to support Parliament in doing so.
The committee will have the freedom to choose which policies it wants to explore and how it wishes to engage with the Government. The committee will be able to engage with government departments during the formulation of new policies. In doing so, it will be able to share its views on the ways in which animal welfare is relevant to a particular policy. This will help departments ensure that they have duly considered the relevance of animal welfare before key policy decisions are made, and avoid a formal report from the committee in which the committee comes to the view that the Government have given due regard to the welfare of animals as sentient beings. The committee can also consider how well policy decisions have considered positive improvements that could be made to animal welfare, rather than just considering whether adverse effects have been minimised.
We hope and expect that Ministers and their departments will engage constructively with the committee. My department will be able to support the committee in building productive relationships across government, helping Ministers to take welfare issues into account alongside other considerations. None the less, the committee will retain the ability, when needed, to express its opinion on the ways in which the policy might have an adverse effect on the welfare of animals as sentient beings and the extent to which this has been taken into account. Ministers will be under an obligation in all circumstances to respond to Parliament within three months on any report of the animal welfare committee.
If there is one message that I hope the Bill gets across, it is that we have listened. We have heard the calls from this House, from the other place and from across the country, pushing for animal sentience to be enshrined in UK law. We have reflected carefully and brought to this House a robust Bill which aims to deliver clear and proportionate outcomes. The Bill provides recognition in law that animals are sentient and provides a targeted and proportionate accountability mechanism to ensure that this is taken into account in decision-making, alongside other considerations. I commend the Bill to the House.
Lord Benyon (Con)
I am very grateful to your Lordships for insightful and constructive contributions to today’s debate. I start by agreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, on a number of points. First, this is a matter of great public interest, and the passage of the Bill through both Houses will be followed closely not just by organisations but by the wider public. I thank the noble Baroness for her tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Trees, for his work on the preparation of the Bill, rightly pointing out that he has raised important points, some of which I hope to address now.
Many noble Lords raised issues about the scope of the Bill and what it will seek to do. The Government are trying to sail a path between creating something that is meaningful and effective and keeping Parliament as the deciding force on this, not the courts. A number of noble Lords have quite rightly raised the concerns, which I shared when I came to this brief, about the risk of judicial review—I will come on to that in a minute.
Noble Lords have taken me further back than the 200 years of animal rights legislation that I spoke about in my opening remarks. We have heard about Homer’s Odyssey and Copernicus, but it is undoubtedly a fact that we have been living with the concept of sentience written into European legislation, and it was in our manifesto to transpose it. There was, I concur, a rather bumpy attempt to do it, and we have now brought forward something that is much more workable and relevant.
This debate has left me with a strong sense of optimism. There is a great deal of unity in purpose and belief that, as a species, we owe a duty of care to the animal kingdom. We largely agree that animals are capable of thinking and feeling and that this fact should be recognised in law. Even if our views might vary as to the finer details of how this should be achieved, we should keep this fundamental principle at the top of our minds.
I apologise if I do not get to everyone’s points; I will write to those that I miss. I will do this in no particular order. My noble friend Lord Robathan is concerned about whether the animal sentience committee will differ from the current Animal Welfare Committee. The current committee advises Defra and the Governments of Wales and Scotland about particular animal welfare issues that have been remitted to it. Ministers are not required by law to respond to the points made in the expert advisory reports published by the Animal Welfare Committee. Its existence and role have no statutory duty, while the animal sentience committee will be a creature of statute.
The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, asked about the resources, as did a number of other noble Lords. The Bill establishes the committee to consider how central government policies take account of animal sentience, and this will require it to be properly resourced. I am very happy to have more of that teased out in Committee, but at this stage we fully accept that this a point on which people are legitimately concerned, and we are determined that this committee shall work. We will produce a committee that has the necessary means to do this. However, if we fix resources, we put a limit, in effect, on what it can do. It is better to work this out as it starts to go about its business and we can gain an accurate understanding of the nature of its ambition, and then our resources will reflect its needs.
My noble friend Lady Fookes is concerned about the recommendations on improvements to animal welfare and why the Bill talks only about “adverse” effects. The committee’s role will encourage policymakers to think about the positive improvements that they can make to animal welfare—not just minimising adverse effects. Its reports may include recommendations to that effect.
The noble Baroness, Lady Young, and my noble friend Lady Hodgson asked about the guidance for the committee. There will be guidance, and we expect to consult on this. We do not want to direct the committee’s priorities and the work that it does because its members are the experts and we want them to decide what issues they should look at.
In addition, there are some very clever Ministers—I do not put myself among them—and officials, but very few of them are experts in this field. To the noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Ridley, who asked why this is necessary, I say that there is a long history of expert committees advising government, and we should not be afraid of that. What matters is what Ministers do with that advice. The committee will opine on issues, but of course Ministers will take a much broader view.
It is dangerous to use examples, but the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, and others have raised the issue of religious slaughter. The committee may decide a particular point on this, but a Minister will have to take into account the wider considerations of cultural and religious organisations and form a view in accordance with that. The same can be applied to farm animals: as my noble friend Lord Robathan said, taking an animal to slaughter is not a pleasant experience for it, to say the least. However, there is a wider issue with regard to producing meat and the benefit that that brings to our environment and people in this country.
My noble friend Lord Forsyth is concerned about fishing. I have received interesting letters concerning the future and the rights and wrongs of fishing, and I share his enthusiasm for that sport. The way we harvest wild fish to eat is highly regulated, and we want to make sure that the British public have access to good quantities of healthy, sustainably produced fish. If the committee were to make a recommendation on how our trawlers operate and how wild fish are caught, or indeed, how my noble friend fishes on a river, the Minister would have to look at the wider implications.
I say to noble Lords who are concerned about other matters that there are plenty of opportunities in this House and the other place to bring in legislation, whether on dog collars, farm animals or whatever. This Bill has no effect on the democratic ability of Governments and Members of this legislature to bring legislation forward. What it does do is provide expert advice to Ministers in order to take forward a greater understanding of the measures needed to get better legislation. There has been much criticism in this debate of the standard of legislation that has come before us in other forms. This is an attempt to ensure that we are thinking about something that Governments ought to think about.
My noble friend Lord Herbert raised the issue of sentimentality, and a number of noble Lords have talked about anthropomorphising animals. A considerable amount of blame was laid at the door of Disney. We are not trying to sentimentalise here or create something that will take the debate on animals into a place it need not and should not go. We are recognising sentience in domestic law to provide reassurance that central government policy decisions have been made with all due regard to the fact that animals can experience feelings both positive and negative, such as joy and pain.
The noble Lord, Lord Dodds, talked about the jurisdiction of this matter, an issue rightly raised by a number of noble Lords. This committee will look at the reserved matters that all legislation covers, and devolved matters will be left to devolved Governments. For example, an activity undertaken by the Ministry of Defence would be a reserved matter; the decision of the committee would reflect the whole United Kingdom. It cannot talk about legislation in Northern Ireland reflecting devolved matters, and I think that is an understanding devolved Governments have accepted and taken forward.
My noble friend Lord Howard raised an important point about judicial review. I want to come back to this because it is really important. The EFRA Select Committee, in its criticism of the original attempt to legislate on this matter, was right and pointed out that it did expose risks. The purpose of the report will be to set out the committee’s own views on the question of whether, or to what extent, the Government are having, or have had, all due regard to the way the policy under review might have an adverse effect on the welfare of animals as sentient beings. However, responsibility for policy decisions remains with Ministers, who must come to their own conclusions about how different relevant considerations should be weighed up and what weight should be given to them. The Government’s response to a report from the committee will help explain to Parliament why the Government may have legitimately reached a different conclusion to the committee.
Alternatively, if the Government intend to review the policy decision in light of the committee’s views, they can say so. If the Government’s response is found to be wanting, it might be possible for someone to establish sufficient grounds to bring a judicial review, but we believe that in this situation the grounds on which that judicial review might be brought forward would present, irrespective of the committee’s report. This is really important, and I urge all Members of this House who may be thinking about bringing forward amendments to consider that we want to keep the control of these issues in this House and not in the courts.
My noble friend Lady Deech made a point about experiments. The Government have no plans to change the regulatory system for the use of animals in science. The use of animals in scientific research remains a vital tool in improving our understanding of how biological systems work, both in health and disease. She is entirely right to pay tribute to the work done on bringing forward the vaccine, which we are all benefiting from.
A number of noble Lords, including the Opposition spokesman and the noble Lord, Lord Trees, wanted to know more about who the members of the animal sentience committee will be. The standard public appointment rules will apply to appointments to the committee; we intend to run a fair and open recruitment process and achieve a diversity of talent and experience that will be the key asset of the committee. I refer noble Lords to the Governance Code on Public Appointments. I am not going to go into detail now, or at any stage in this process, about what the membership of the committee should precisely contain. However, we do think there should be a broad group of experts, undoubtedly involving academia and veterinary expertise, and a number of others. My noble friend Lady McIntosh talked about farmers and I entirely agree with what she said. I hope all those involved in the raising of animals, be it on farms or in other settings, will feel that they are represented—not necessarily on the committee, but in that their views are represented.
I will finish by addressing the concerns expressed by my noble friends Lord Hannan and Lord Bellingham about the rationale of the Bill. Nowhere in UK law is the concept of animal sentience—their capacity to have feelings and a level of conscious awareness—recognised. This Bill recognises that fundamental principle and provides a statutory basis for the welfare needs of sentient animals to be properly reflected in all government policy-making, in a reasonable and proportionate way—I emphasise “reasonable” and “proportionate”—and it is vital that, throughout the process of this Bill, we recognise that.
I am very grateful to noble Lords for a thoroughly interesting and useful debate, as a curtain-raiser for this legislation. I look forward to seeing it in Committee, with your Lordships’ support, and to debating some of these points in more detail. I commend this Bill to the House and beg to move.