Sale of Puppies and Kittens

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Thursday 4th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) on securing this timely debate.

I refer Members to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee report on dog control and welfare and the Government response to it, and in welcoming the Minister, my hon. Friend for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), to his position, may I add that I hope his views have not changed too much since he contributed to that report? I also support the comment of the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South that a review of existing legislation is needed.

In the limited time available, I want to make some brief points. The hon. Gentleman highlighted the role of self-regulation, but I am slightly confused as to why he put so much emphasis on pet shops, because my understanding is that they are the one part of the trade that is pretty much regulated; the evidence we received in our report, which was published together with our recommendations, suggests that the Pet Animals Act 1951 pretty much covers that. Perhaps the Minister will say whether he has had any representations that the Act should be improved or reviewed.

I would also like the Minister to update us on the Government’s response to our report: are the Government working with the Pet Advertising Advisory Group on the issue of sales of pets online, and, in particular, are they supporting the work to develop a voluntary code of practice? If the voluntary code is to succeed, it must have good animal welfare at its heart.

The message from the House today should be that there is a role for self-regulation. Any responsible potential dog or cat owner should not be buying puppies or kittens where the mother is not present. That is so self-evident that I wonder whether we need not to legislate on it but simply to go out and educate the public.

I congratulate all the charities involved. They briefed the Select Committee in the context of our report, and it is important to recognise their work, although the following is not an exhaustive list: Blue Cross in my constituency; Battersea Dogs & Cats Home; the Dogs Trust; the Dog Rescue Federation; the wonderfully and aptly named Four Paws. I also want to pay tribute to those who fund these charities. In doing so, they are taking many stray dogs and cats off our streets.

I am asking the Minister today to tackle the rogue backstreet breeders and the rogue importers who import animals from puppy farms across the European Union. I hope that he will take this opportunity to update the House on internet advertising and on the voluntary code. Each and every one of us must do everything possible to discourage irresponsible dog breeders, and we need to set a lower threshold for licensing breeders.

I would also like to ask the Minister whether his views have changed since he made his positive and welcome contribution to our discussions when adopting our report on dog control and welfare. Does he, for example, still hold to the view that, under the legislation, five litters a year should be the maximum, because a bitch would not be in a good enough state to have any more? That was his personal view at that time, and we benefited from his sterling contribution to our report. Has his view changed since he was with us on the Committee? I remind the House that the Committee’s conclusion was that five litters a year was too many. We recommended that a requirement to breed no more than two litters a year should be written on the face of the licence. Also, we would like to support better publicity for puppy contracts. I commend our report and recommendations to the House—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Lady’s time is up.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello), who I know has been a long-standing campaigner on these issues. I am sure he will recall, as my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) said, that I pursued these issues when I was a member of the Select Committee. It would be remiss of me of not to mention Mono, my now deceased pet dog. He was a rescue dog from the RSPCA who, like many others, was a wonderfully dedicated friend, albeit with some behavioural issues.

Let me deal first with some of the issues on which the Government have made progress—tackling irresponsible owners, for example. We have increased the penalty for serious dog attacks and have made it an offence to have a dog attack on private land. We have tightened the law, too, when it comes to dog attacks on guide dogs, and we have introduced compulsory chipping. I recognise, however, that today’s theme has been about a different issue—the welfare of puppies. I have always been clear that we must look after the welfare of puppies and ensure that they are properly socialised. As many hon. Members have mentioned, that is crucial for the behaviour of the dogs as they grow up and mature.

My hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Mr Amess) asked me to tear up my script and speak from the heart. I can confirm that I never asked for a script in the first place. I scribbled some notes of what Members said, and I want to use the available time to deal with as many points as I can.

On pet passports, I can confirm that a new EU regulation is tightening the rules of the EU pet passport scheme. From December this year, it will no longer be possible for a dog under 12 weeks to be vaccinated prior to transportation under the scheme. There is then a three-week period throughout which the puppy must remain in residence before it can be moved. In practice, that means that from December this year, no puppy or dog can be lawfully transported to this country under the pet passport scheme unless it is at least 15 weeks old.

Many hon. Members rightly raised the issue of the internet. The biggest concerns put to us by the animal welfare charities related not so much to the problem of puppy farms as to that of backstreet breeders that are completely unregulated and unlicensed. In many cases, the people involved are not the right people to be breeding dogs at all, and in the worst cases, they maltreat the puppies deliberately to make them violent by giving them violent traits—the so-called “status dogs”. That is a major concern, which is why at the end of last year, my noble Fried Lord de Mauley brought together a group in connection with the Pet Advertising Advisory Group to put in place a voluntary code, which has been running since the beginning of the year. I can tell hon. Members today that, since that code was put in place, 100,000 adverts have been removed from the internet. I pay tribute to the work done by the internet companies that acted so responsibly and by all the volunteers who took part in monitoring the internet for that purpose. Given the scale of the problem, I hope hon. Members will understand that making further progress on the internet continues to be our main priority.

Let me touch on the contentious issue of the five-litter threshold, raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton, the Chairman of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She is right. When I sat on the Committee, we highlighted some concerns about the five-litter threshold being too high. Hon. Members who follow what has happened will know that the Breeding and Sale of Dogs (Welfare) Act 1999 states that anyone carrying on a business of breeding and selling puppies must have a licence, irrespective of the number of litters. However, a second clause, always intended as an anti-avoidance clause, said that irrespective of who owns the puppies on a particular premise, a licence is compulsory if there are more than five litters. That was to prevent people from claiming that some of dogs belonged to their brothers, sisters, father or whoever.

Over the last few years, however, or since the legislation was introduced, it has been apparent that local authorities have taken the five-litter threshold to be the one to work towards. It became something of a mystery, which we managed to solve last night. The reason is that in 1999 when the Act was put in place under the last Government, the Home Office sent out a circular indicating for local authorities that in most situations five litters should be taken as the threshold to use.

[Miss McIntosh]

Will the Minister give way?

[George Eustice]

Let me finish the point. Since that time, it would be fair to say—from all the representations made during today’s debate and from the recommendations of the Select Committee—that this is the wrong way to interpret the legislation. Those carrying on a business of breeding and selling dogs should be required to have a licence. I can confirm that we will write to local authorities to provide new clarity through new guidance so that they can interpret the Act in the spirit intended by the House today.

Pet shops are a key item of today’s debate. It is important to recognise that only about 2% of pet shops sell cats and dogs—around 70 in total—and they are already regulated and licensed. They are regulated under the Pet Animals Act 1951. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South asked me to clarify whether local authorities have the additional power to place restrictions on which animals can be sold at a licensed pet shop establishment. I can confirm that they do have the power to restrict the number of animals that can be sold. He asked, too, about the issue of ambiguity and contestability in that context. Let me clarify that the intention of the provision is for local authorities to judge on a case-by-case basis whether a particular premise is suitable for a particular animal to be sold. It is not necessary for local authorities to change the law; it is for them to have considerable discretion in making a judgment about whether it is appropriate for certain animals to be sold on the authority’s premises.

The hon. Member for Coventry North West (Mr Robinson) made the important point that much can be done within the existing regulations. I agree. In January this year, along with the RSPCA, the Dogs Trust and many other charities and organisations, we contributed to some model licence conditions that were made available to all local authorities and were published by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health. These included 50 pages of recommendations about the sorts of conditions that should be included in a licence for dog-breeding premises. There were strict provisions on the need for social interaction with humans, which should apply for the whole day if the buyers were present all the time.

In addition, in September 2013 we published the model conditions for pet vending, which also set out strict conditions for pet shops about the need for interaction with staff and humans. It is specifically recommended that at least four times a day a human should spend at least 20 minutes with the puppies on sale. We have already put in place important guidance on these issues.

I would like to conclude by saying that we have had a really important debate. I, too, have received many hundreds of letters on the issue and it is clearly of great importance to the country. We have 8 million dogs in this country and we are a nation of animal lovers.