Economic Case for HS2 (Economic Affairs Committee Report)
Baroness Mallalieu Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)
My Lords, like others, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hollick, his colleagues and officials who have produced a truly outstanding report. The 16 questions posed by them in chapter 9 are those that must receive satisfactory answers before this project goes ahead. I wish I could say that the Government’s written response either answers those questions or shows that the concerns raised have been carefully considered and addressed—but, sadly, I cannot do so. Indeed, I have to express considerable sympathy for the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who has been provided with very threadbare defence against the valid criticisms of the committee in a slight, 30-page response from the Government. It is very long, not on information or answers, but with the usual clichés: “clear and robust”, “step change in capacity”, “convincing” and “compelling”. But it does not answer the questions that were raised about the problems.
That report is far from a lone voice; there have been many others. Most recently, I saw a letter, which may have been the one already referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that was sent to the Prime Minister on 27 May by 15 of this country’s most senior engineers, transport planners and transport economists, led by emeritus professor James Croll. Those experts expressed support for this report and asked for an urgent review of the project. The signatories included the former chief economist of the Department for Transport, Sir Christopher Foster, and six of the United Kingdom’s leading professors in the fields of civil engineering, transport studies and transport economics. They, like the report, question the calculations that are still being relied on in relation to capacity. Despite the very considerable expertise of the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, and my noble friend Lord Adonis, I doubt that those calculations can command the respect or confidence that they place in them. Those experts also expressed the view that, far from furthering northern regeneration, which all of us strongly support, HS2 is far more likely to favour the south, as others have said.
Two things have happened this summer since this report was published that should prompt the Government to institute an independent review. The first has been referred to by my noble friend Lord Prescott: the cancellation of Network Rail’s upgrades, promised during the general election. The axing or delay of major projects that would have meant improvements to the Midland main line from London to Sheffield and the trans-Pennine route, especially from Manchester to Leeds, through lack of money shows that our rail network, especially in the north, is crying out for investment, which is not available and will not be forthcoming while this project proceeds. It could and should be provided.
Secondly, and of very great significance—again, others have already mentioned them—are the statistics published this week for rail overcrowding. From them, it is clear that the serious problems currently on our network are with commuter services, most particularly but not exclusively in London—and the problems are not on the London-to-Birmingham line. The figure has already been given: 139,000 passengers are standing on trains on arrival into London at morning peak time. A quarter of all those trains are overcapacity, with 59% having passengers standing. Those passengers are among the people who will have to pay for HS2 if it goes ahead, and most of them will receive absolutely no benefit.
Worse still, HS2 would worsen their problems. I hear what others say, but I read the debate that took place yesterday in another place. I refer those who say that the commuter position will be improved to yesterday’s Hansard, col. 997. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport, Mr Robert Goodwill, accepted that at Euston there would be a reduction in platforms for existing trains from 18 to 11, together with a reduction in the approach tracks for the existing trains. How can it be right to tell passengers currently struggling on what is in places an inadequate and failing rail network that, at a very minimum—we have heard very much higher figures mentioned—£31 billion of their money is to be spent to provide a small number of business travellers with a slightly quicker way to Birmingham and in the hope that, contrary to experience in some other places, there will be development away from the capital and not more commuters coming in?
I am sure that this House will take note of this excellent report. I hope that the Government will too.
On an earlier occasion when we debated this subject, we were told by my noble friend Lord Mandelson the history of how this proposal came to be adopted. It appeared to be, as he himself put it frankly and “with regret”, partly for electoral reasons and to leave a legacy. It has become a runaway train, but there is still time to put some brakes on and have a proper look at what we are proposing to do. That was the recommendation of the experts. It need not delay the parliamentary process. It might be better if it did, but it could take place at the same time. We must have an independent look at what is going on and we must have the answers to the questions posed in this report.
Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill
Baroness Mallalieu Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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The Lord Speaker (Baroness D'Souza)
I should perhaps remind your Lordships that if this amendment is agreed to, I cannot call Amendment 2 by reason of pre-emption.
Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)
My Lords, my name has been added to this amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Dear, moved it with his customary reason and calm; I fear that I shall not be following in quite the same vein.
Whoever thought up Clause 1 and managed to slip it under the radar of the other place is a strong contender for some kind of award. Perhaps it should be a citation for attempting to increase the power of the state to interfere in people’s lives; perhaps a golden globe for providing the authorities with a new and easy-to-discharge weapon in the war against inconvenient and annoying expressions of dissent; or perhaps even an Oscar for thinking up a way to take out those who are a nuisance or annoyance in any one of a thousand unspecified ways—and doing it in a manner that admits virtually no defence or safeguard and that requires the minimum of evidence.
Those on whom the Government propose to confer this extraordinary power are fully set out in Clause 4. Apart from the housing providers, to whom I will come shortly, they include the Environment Agency, all local authorities, British Transport Police, Transport for London, the Secretary of State for Health—and, of course, the police themselves. In other words, they are in every single case an arm of the state. The proposed definition in Clause 1(2), that the respondent must be someone who,
“has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”,
has been adopted, as we have just been told, from a very limited provision, carefully restricted to conduct affecting the housing management functions of the relevant landlord. Both the applicant and the respondent are carefully defined. It is intended to assist a housing provider to control the behaviour of neighbours—tenants—living in close proximity who, as has been said, cannot simply look the other way, pay no attention or move easily—and in a situation where, because of fear, evidence may be hard to obtain.
The Government propose to take this particular power, designed for the particular problem of anti-social neighbours, and give it to a wide range of state bodies for use without restriction against absolutely anyone. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Dear, recognises the force with which many housing providers have lobbied us between Committee and today. They wish to retain that power in their own very limited and special context. Under this amendment, they would do so.
In Committee—and I anticipate more of the same later when the Minister replies—the response of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, to my similar amendment on the ASBO definition that this amendment seeks to retain, was, “You are not thinking about the victims”. By that he clearly means those who are on the receiving end of anti-social behaviour. I have to say that he is wholly wrong in that. It is precisely because we are concerned about those who are harassed in our hospitals, caused alarm on public transport, or distressed by the conduct of others in the street that we want to see this legislation targeted at that behaviour.
In reality, most anti-social behaviour that the public worry about is already covered by existing criminal law offences under criminal damage, public order and harassment laws. There are unquestionably problems of court delays at present—and not just with ASBO applications. Inadequate resources for police, prosecuting authorities and courts are all factors. Ironically, by making IPNAs so much easier to obtain than ASBOs, for a far wider range of behaviour, and with a lower evidential burden, there is a real prospect that Clause 1 will slow down the courts by clogging them with myriad IPNA applications and will be of little help to real victims in need of urgent help.
I also remind the Minister that there are other victims of whom he appeared to take no account. They include those against whom an allegation is made that is unfair, unwarranted or untrue, or without any proper evidential basis. There is no defence of necessity or lack of intent in the Bill. I see no compensation provisions for a wrongful injunction, or any of the safeguards that normally attach to a civil injunction, especially when the defendant is not present at the initial hearing. This is all worrying, but particularly worrying for me is the lower burden of proof that is now proposed. However, my main concern is the extent to which lowering the threshold to behaviour,
“capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”,
has the potential to undermine our fundamental freedoms, and in particular the way in which the proposed law might be used to curb protest and freedom of expression.
In exercising my personal right to protest in the past, I readily accept that I have on a number of occasions been guilty of conduct capable of annoying someone. Every march that delays traffic, every rally that overcrowds public transport or pavements, and every demonstration with loudspeakers, whistles and horns is no doubt capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to someone, and is usually a headache for the authorities, too. I suppose that there are Members of your Lordships’ House who have never attended a rally, demonstration or protest march, but I would place a small wager that they are in the minority. In a lifetime of attending protests, from Aldermaston as a child to the countryside march and many in between, if I have caused annoyance or nuisance, I hope that I have never caused harassment, alarm or distress to anyone.
Quite simply, the Bill currently sets the barrier too low. It threatens fundamental freedoms and, importantly, it undermines tolerance, which is surely an essential quality for living happily in an overcrowded island such as ours. Speaking in a rather different context but saying what I think is appropriate, Lord Justice Sedley some years ago put it rather well. He said:
“Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having”.
To try to prohibit behaviour that is capable of annoying someone is a step far too far, and I hope that this House will do what the other place overlooked and stop it.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)
My Lords, I support this amendment; I have signed it and I believe that it is amply justified. As the noble Baroness has just said, one of our fundamental freedoms is the freedom of speech. Surely it is clear that in exercising that freedom, one may annoy one or more other people. From time to time in this House I have witnessed a Minister explaining his present difficulty by reference to the behaviour of the previous Government, and one immediately senses annoyance on the opposite Benches. If I have an opinion which I know some or many people will disagree with, surely I am entitled to come out with it. Do I have to reasonably consider whether it will cause annoyance to somebody else, and if it would, what should be the consequence? Am I to muzzle my point of view to placate people who might be annoyed? It is absolutely plain that “annoyance” in this context, with a wide application, is inappropriate for this purpose.
The position taken up by the Government hitherto, so far as I understand it, is that this definition has been tried and tested in the courts for some 15 years. But definitions in their application are subject to the context in which they are used, and this use has been in the context of social housing and its enforcement has been in the hands of the responsible authorities for social housing. You cannot imagine an authority in that field trying to stop a street preacher, for example, on the basis that he was annoying the passers-by by the denunciations that he was pronouncing against their acknowledged conduct. It is not the same context at all, and the context influences the proper interpretation.
Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill
Baroness Mallalieu Excerpts(10 years, 12 months ago)
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Baroness Mallalieu
Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)
I shall also speak to Amendments 20A and 20D, which are grouped with Amendment 19C. I speak on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Dear, who regrets that he is unable to be in his place today.
I think everybody agrees that anti-social behaviour is a very real problem and that the authorities have to be able to prevent innocent people having their lives made a misery by it. There can always be improvements to whatever system is in place. However, most of us—if not all of us—also agree that civil liberties are also precious, and freedom of expression is particularly so, as it is often through the expression of ideas that society is changed for the better. These three amendments are tabled with the aim of helping the Government to get the balance right between the two. Many of the people who spoke at Second Reading on this Bill—and many, many more who have written to and lobbied Peers on all sides of this House—feel that Clause 1, as presently drafted, has got the balance wrong.
A law to tackle anti-social behaviour must surely be precise, targeted and given proper safeguards. If not, it would be capable of undermining fundamental human freedoms; it would be likely to distract the authorities and swamp the courts, hampering the tackling of genuine social problems effectively. As it stands at the moment, Clause 1 creates what we are already calling here IPNAs: injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance. The very wording exposes the main problem in the present drafting, because you cannot actually outlaw nuisance or annoyance by all people and in all places. The concept of both of those things without a proper definition is vague and, above all, subjective.
We are talking here about a change of law that will apply to any person in any place, public or private. Clause 1(2) says that injunctions can be sought by a whole range of bodies and individuals in relation to conduct that is merely,
“capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”.
That pretty much covers all human life: there is no human activity, I suggest, that does not annoy someone somewhere. This test has been borrowed from the context of housing, which involves neighbours and people living in close proximity who cannot simply move out or look the other way or pay no attention. The present test is very carefully restricted to conduct affecting the housing management functions of the relevant landlord. It is quite another thing, however, to apply it to the high street, the park, the sports stadium, the countryside at large or Parliament Square. It risks being used against every single one of us for something we do, have done or might do in the future—protestors; people with noisy children playing outside; people preaching in the street; people canvassing; people ringing church bells; pet owners; carol singers; clay-pigeon shooters; and even nudists, whom I have to say have written to me and a number of other noble Lords in very considerable numbers, concerned that they are likely to be targeted as people who are “capable of causing … annoyance”. However, it is not just those groups: it is all of us who are potential targets of this imprecise, all inclusive drafting.
We live in a crowded island; nuisance and annoyance are inevitable consequences of our lives which demand a degree of give-and-take and tolerance. Legislation must be targeted, or our courts will simply be clogged with the trivial and vexatious; real serious nuisance and actual serious annoyance will go unchecked. They will simply not get a look-in and the IPNA will become discredited.
The IPNA is intended to replace, among other things, the ASBO, which a magistrate, at present, can make if two conditions are met. The first is if somebody has acted in an anti-social manner, which is defined, very sensibly, as,
“conduct which caused or was likely to cause harm, harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as him or herself”.
The second condition about which they have to be satisfied is,
“that such an order is necessary to protect relevant persons from further anti-social acts by him”.
The range of bodies which can apply for an ASBO is narrower than that for an IPNA, which obviously reduces the number of applications and the scope for abuse.
The IPNA is applicable to everyone but, most importantly, there is a vast difference between the thresholds of the two. Instead of targeting harassment, alarm or distress, Clause 1, as I have already said, catches any behaviour by any person that is capable of causing nuisance or annoyance. Each of us in this Chamber probably passes that threshold several times a day in the eyes of someone or another—in refusing to give way at Question Time or by talking for too long or too often. That is quite apart from outside this Chamber—snoring loudly in the Library or not putting newspapers back after reading them—or before we leave this House and venture into the outside world.
Clearly, there are other tests in Clause 1 but that it could at its base level encompass the most ordinary activities of human life is breath-taking. Further, instead of having to prove necessity, as under the ASBO, the courts for the IPNA application will operate the ordinary civil court test for injunctions; that is, deciding where the balance of probabilities lies. ASBOs currently are handled by the magistrates’ court, which must be convinced beyond reasonable doubt—in other words, the criminal standard of proof. But IPNAs are to be handled by the civil courts, which need to be convinced only on the balance of probabilities—the civil standard of proof—that a person has engaged in the alleged conduct.
Under Section 1(5) of the Crime and Disorder Act, where an ASBO is sought the individual has a defence if he can show that his conduct was “reasonable in the circumstances”. But, as yet, there is no reasonableness defence in Clause 1 of this Bill, although I see that the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, has a suggested amendment on the Marshalled List. Therefore, IPNAs have a far lower threshold with fewer safeguards, making them much easier to obtain than an ASBO. That is of course the Government’s intention. They want to reduce the present evidential burden, about which some have complained, and to speed up the court process.
There are strong arguments that most of the anti-social behaviour which the public worry about is caught by existing criminal law offences, such as criminal damage, public order and harassment laws. It is also said that it is not the lack of laws but the lack of political will and, I have no doubt, funding on the part of those responsible for enforcing those laws which renders them less effective than they should be. There are undoubtedly problems of court delays and not just with ASBO applications. However, the solution to that is surely not to remove civil liberty safeguards. Ironically, by making IPNAs easier to obtain than the old ASBOs, there is a real prospect that Clause 1 will slow courts down even further by clogging them with large numbers of IPNA applications. Some local authorities—notably Camden, which has a serious anti-social behaviour problem and has had considerable success with ASBOs—have expressed fear that this rebranding, as they call it, will not in the end prove an improvement.
In tabling these amendments, our concern is not with the Government’s attempts to make improvement to the present process for dealing with this sort of behaviour, which has broad support, but with proposing to do so effectively by placing injunctions on free speech and free movement without a court needing to be properly convinced of the need or the seriousness. If Clause 1 retained the definition of Section 1 in the Crime and Disorder Act, the current level of concern would simply not exist.
As it stands, a huge range of people and organisations from all parts of the political spectrum have already voiced serious disquiet. The Commons Home Affairs Committee said that Clause 1 is “far too broad”. The Joint Committee on Human Rights said that the nuisance and annoyance test,
“is not sufficiently precise to satisfy the requirement of legal certainty required by both human rights law and the common law”.
The noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, who unfortunately cannot be in his place today, has provided a most helpful legal opinion from the coalition Benches, in which he says of “nuisance and annoyance”:
“The phrase is apt to catch a vast range of everyday behaviours to an extent that may have serious implications for the rule of law … In my view, the combination of a low and vague threshold for the behavioural trigger, coupled with the civil standard of proof, creates an unacceptable risk that individuals will inappropriately be made subject of a highly intrusive measure that may greatly impact on their fundamental rights”.
He also criticises the lack of a necessity test and describes the safeguards as “shockingly low”.
Even the Association of Chief Police Officers, which broadly supports the IPNA thinks the threshold is unrealistically low and advocates a return to the harassment, alarm and distress test and the addition of a necessity test, both of which would be achieved by our amendments. Justice, Liberty, the Criminal Justice Alliance, the Standing Committee for Youth Justice, Big Brother Watch and countless other organisations and civil liberty groups, ranging right across the spectrum from the Christian Institute to the National Secular Society, have expressed their deep concerns about Clause 1. The three amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Dear, and me seek to address their main concerns; there are other lesser ones. First is the standard of proof, which we say should be beyond reasonable doubt. Secondly, there is the absence of a necessity test, and, thirdly, the nuisance and annoyance threshold should be put back where it is at present with harassment, alarm and distress.
First, on Amendment 19A, the current ASBO legislation is applied by a magistrates’ court granting civil orders. When ASBOs were considered by the Judicial Committee of this House in 2002, it was held that the criminal standard of proof should determine whether anti-social behaviour had occurred. Given the huge impact such an order can have on an individual’s life and bearing in mind that an IPNA can make positive as well as negative requirements, we believe this standard must be retained. As the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale of Richmond, said, also in the Judicial Committee of this House, in 2008:
“There are some proceedings, though civil in form, whose nature is such that it is appropriate to apply the criminal standard of proof”.
We say this is one of them.
Secondly, the necessity test needs to be retained. The requirements of necessity and proportionality are enshrined in human rights law and it is important for them to appear in the Bill to reduce the risk of trivial applications and to help avoid unnecessary and disproportionate orders. Thirdly, in Amendment 20D the words “just and convenient” reflect the standard civil test and appear in the Bill. We believe that the higher test required by human rights law—“necessary and proportionate”—should be in Clause 1.
It is crucial that police, local authorities and the many other bodies which can apply for IPNAs can see for themselves in the statute the test that the court will be applying. This will focus minds and, we hope, reduce speculative, vexatious and inappropriate applications. Amendment 20A returns to the threshold test currently in use, “harassment, alarm and distress”. There is a real danger that if the currently proposed, worryingly low threshold is retained, we will create a situation every bit as bad as that under Section 5 of the Public Order Act, where the “insulting words” limb of the offence was used to silence unfashionable or politically incorrect speech. Noble Lords will remember that this House voted overwhelmingly and contrary to the direction of all party Whips to strike “insulting words” out of that legislation a year ago.
The present Clause 1 has united religious groups concerned with street preachers, children’s groups concerned about playground noise, and protest groups concerned that the temptation to seek IPNAs against inconvenient protesters, whether they be anti-frackers, anti-HS2ers, gay rights groups, Occupy or even the Countryside Alliance—in which I have an interest—will prove irresistible to people in authority. To take a test that works in one narrow set of circumstances, as the Government have done here, and try to apply it to the world at large is a recipe for unleashing a wave of unintended consequences. These three amendments are modest proposals that I hope will bring some real improvement and would not lead to the outrage that many have expressed about the current drafting. I beg to move.
Baroness Mallalieu
My Lords, I thank the positive Minister for his response, but I am bound to say that if that was positive, I would like to hear him in a negative mood. However, I thank him for the crumb of comfort in relation to a possible amendment on reasonableness. I also thank all those who have taken part in the debate.
A number of noble Lords referred to the Housing Act and the reasons for the much reduced requirements for an ASBI, the injunction allowed under that Act. The reason—as we all understand it, and as others have said—was the very great difficulty of persuading people in close-knit communities to give evidence against their neighbours and people they knew out of fear. That was the reason for the particular wording of that Act, which a number of noble Lords referred to and said worked perfectly well in that context. However, in each context where that lesser definition has been used there have been very clear statutory limits on the circumstances. What the Government are proposing to do now is to open that definition and apply it to everybody in all circumstances. They are apparently going to allow what must be an imprecise and subjective test to hold sway, and not in any way in the circumstances to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, and others referred, of close neighbours and fear.
The guidance, which was referred to not by the Minister in his winding-up speech but by others, also troubles me. Although there is already guidance in draft, and no doubt more is being prepared, there should be, whatever guidance comes later, clarity on the face of the Bill. While it is reassuring to hear that trivial matters are not going to be taken up and pursued, that is not something that anybody looking at the Bill itself can be confident about. The Bill should contain clear definitions. It should contain the important guidance—what has to be proved—but at the moment it does not.
There is no question of a Division in the House tonight but I say to the Minister that this is undoubtedly a matter to which we will return at a later stage. I very much hope that in addition to being positive he will be—as we know he is on other matters—fair and open-minded, that he will be prepared to hear further argument between now and Report and that, on reflection, he himself will table some amendments that reflect and go some way to meeting the anxieties raised tonight. With that in mind, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Horses: Transportation
Baroness Mallalieu Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Mallalieu
My Lords, I first declare a personal interest as the president of the Horse Trust and the chairman of the All-Party Group for the Horse. I am also a member of the Humane Slaughter Association. Secondly, and most importantly, I thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, on securing this debate which is particularly timely in relation to the Commission, for reasons I will come to.
At the age of 11, I came across a leaflet written by Ada Cole, the remarkable woman who founded the charity which is now called World Horse Welfare. It was about the export of live horses from Ireland, taken by sea for slaughter on the continent. There was one photograph which I can still remember in every detail. It was of a carthorse with a kind eye and a crooked white blaze, barely able to lift its head from the position in which it had collapsed on the dockside in Antwerp. It looked totally exhausted and a picture of misery. After, no doubt, a lifetime of work, its last days should not have been spent at sea in terrible conditions. The caption beneath that picture, which I have never forgotten to this day read, “A victim of man’s greed”.
That terrible trade in old and unwanted horses from Ireland to France and Belgium by sea has gone. It was killed, in part, by public outcry when, on one occasion, some 12 dead horses, which had collapsed during the journey and been thrown overboard, were washed up on a genteel English seaside beach. The fact remains that, after 50 years of so-called progress, some 65,000 horses still make long, gruelling and almost wholly unnecessary journeys to their death within the European Union each year, with the sanction of the Commission which is frightened of restraining trade. About 15 years ago, we had a debate on this subject and I can still remember one speech from that evening. It was made by Lord Slynn of Hadley, no longer with us, who described his own experience of stopping at a continental motorway service station and looking through the vents of a huge lorry standing in the car park. It was crammed with horses, some visibly injured, all utterly exhausted, standing in total silence. They had, he found, been on the lorry like that for two days and had two more to go before arriving at their eventual destination for slaughter in southern Italy.
There has been progress, but it has been painfully slow and inadequate to prevent what is a wholly unnecessary suffering. I have recently visited Transylvania—part of Romania—where tractors are still a rarity and the work is done, as it was 150 years ago, by horse-drawn vehicles. The population of working horses in eastern Europe is still huge yet, despite the fact that no horse there is more than 12 hours from an abattoir in which it could end its days after its working life finishes, many will instead make a journey of two to four days to Italy and Spain in vehicles which are, as the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, said, far removed from the sleek racehorse transporters which we see on our motorways. Those horses are overcrowded, sometimes quite unfit to travel and with wholly inadequate checks made to monitor journey times and rest periods or on whether water is actually provided. Ironically, the comparative cost of slaughter near the point of origin and refrigerated transported is, I am told, very little different from the cost of transporting these animals across a continent in these conditions. The majority of the meat is processed in any event, so arguments about consumers demanding fresh meat are largely irrelevant. In reality, the trade continues in this way because that is how it has been historically and because the Commission lacks the willpower to deal with it.
I cannot help but feel that, if the public in Spain and Italy had the same degree of awareness of what is involved as people in this country, 1 million of whom signed a petition to limit journey times, then demand would drop. This would bring changes more quickly than anything else. There is still no overall limit on the duration of those journeys, despite the recommendation of the European Food Safety Authority, whose research has shown that above all other species—and there are differences between species—horses suffer severe welfare problems in journeys over that time. Our MEPs have shown their support, the European Parliament has supported the change, yet still—and inexplicably—the Commission so far prefers to go down the line of guidance and enforcement of existing regulations, which are currently not adequately enforced.
We are moving into the Cypriot presidency, during which, I suspect, this issue will have very little priority. However, I understand that Ireland takes over immediately after that and I very much hope we will then see adopted the proposal to reduce the journey time for horses to 12 hours, at the very longest. I hope that the Minister can assure us that pressure will be stepped up. I should like to pay tribute to the Minister, Jim Paice, who on 15 June released an intervention calling for the introduction of that limit, as recommended by the EFSA, and it was accepted by the Council of Europe.
The long journeys from eastern to southern Europe are not, however, the only disturbing feature of what is going in relation to horse transport in Europe. For different reasons, we should all be concerned about the shipments of surplus horses, mostly of very low value, currently taking place between Ireland, France and the United Kingdom. During last year, the provision of abattoirs in Northern Ireland was insufficient to meet the demand for the slaughter of unwanted horses that were, having been bought by UK meat dealers, sometimes waiting for up to six weeks in unsatisfactory conditions before there was the capacity to ship them to England for slaughter. The Horse Trust and other charities did what they could to assist the very limited provision of equine welfare over there, but the volume of abandoned and malnourished welfare cases, which is a combination of the recession and chronic overbreeding, means that humane slaughter on the spot was often the only option.
Low-value horses come every week to the UK from Ireland and France, and go out again. They are not routinely checked at ports of entry and, on occasions, are unfit to travel, or they introduce disease, as the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, pointed out. What on earth was the horse that brought the disease coming here from Romania for? Given that African horse sickness is knocking on our door—with its potentially disastrous consequences for our £3.8 billion equine industry, should it reach us—it is a state of affairs that should worry us all, and every Government.
What this international trade is all about is unclear. There are meat dealers in this country who own literally hundreds of horses of little value, and many of those horses were in a very poor state last winter. It is on a scale that has the equine charities and local authorities that have to deal with the consequences of abandoned horses, fly grazing, welfare cases and escapees, tearing their hair out. These dealers treat the horses as commodities to be sold on, if and when there is a market, but most are poor specimens of little value and no use, save perhaps for meat at some future point. They are the result of indiscriminate breeding, both here and in Ireland. In time of economic difficulty, the numbers are such that all the rescue organisations put together could not begin to take even the worst cases. I have heard reports of local authorities and, indeed, major charities considering that their budgets would not stretch to prosecuting even the worst offenders.
Somehow, people have to be educated, here and in Ireland, not to breed horses unless they have a job for them—and then only to breed from the best—and when they reach the end of the road to do the right thing and put them down at home, not sell them on to the dealer who promises to find a good retirement home. These are the horses that end up on a transporter, being shipped hither and thither to an uncertain end.
What needs to be done right now? The Commission needs to pressed, as it already has been by our Ministers, and pressed and pressed again, until it implements the 12-hour limit. Better guidance and inspections en route, which have been accepted by the Commission, must be implemented. Consumers must be told how the meat has reached their plates in Italy, Spain and parts of France. That is something that I understand World Horse Welfare proposes to do. Horses should bee seen and treated as sentient beings, not mere market commodities. If they are to be eaten at the end, so be it; but it is surely our duty to ensure that in life they are treated with respect and consideration, as should be all our food animals. Despite all the advances and all the talk over the course of my lifetime, too many horses remain the victims of man’s greed.
Baroness Verma
My Lords, I remind noble Lords that this is a time-limited debate and when the clock shows “10”, the 10 minutes are up.