Equine Welfare Standards

Lord Dear Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dear (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, for securing this debate and to the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm of Owlpen, for so ably filling his slot. Horses, too, have formed a part of my life—hacking, hunting and riding ceremonially in London. I was proud to be a trustee of World Horse Welfare for a five-year period that concluded in 2015.

I have spoken in your Lordships House before on matters equine, ranging from the registration of farriers to the problems of long-distance transport, which I will touch on in a moment. This is a short debate and I get the feeling that we are racing through it in order to complete it within the allotted time span, but this is a subject that we could quite easily take three hours on. However, I am grateful for the time that is available to us today.

First, it seems in the UK that we have a highly romantic view of the horse compared with the variable view that is taken of dogs, cats or perhaps ferrets. The horse is met with almost universal acclaim and respect—and quite rightly too. Most people who know nothing of horses would conclude that they are probably dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle, but that does not stop the universal love for the horse that we in this country have seen. One only has to exercise a 16.3 half-hunter, groomed to within an inch of its life, in central London and stop anywhere near a footpath to be immediately surrounded by a crowd of people—not all tourists: many of them office workers—determined to explode the horse by filling it full of polo mints and chocolate to understand that.

But that love of the horse, as has already been alluded to, leads to a massive ignorance of what is really going on behind the scenes. We have heard a lot of that before and I concur with the views that have been expressed. It leads to a growth of abuse and neglect of the horse, and all of that was ably identified in the World Horse Welfare report in July of last year, Horses in our Hands, which was referred to by an earlier speaker. The welfare needs of the horse have been ignored and I will cover just three points in this short debate. Two have been covered already, so I shall repeat them purely for emphasis, and one has not yet been mentioned.

The first is the issue of equine identification. There is no real system of enforceable equine ID in place, which leads to very shady practice, as we have heard. What we need is a tough, robust, user-friendly and enforceable passport system backed with a central database. I do not think anyone has mentioned the central database that would have to be put in place behind that, but it should certainly be a matter of some government concern. Will the Minister comment on that issue particularly? What we have is a system that is coming in late and is patchy. Microchipping has been mentioned retrospectively and local authority enforcement of that system is required.

Secondly, on welfare at slaughter, £500 has been mentioned, but it costs £650 in the Cotswolds to slaughter a horse and dispose of the carcass. Many people cannot get anywhere near to that. Of course, that is exacerbated by the reduction in the number of slaughterhouses generally that we have seen over the last few decades. CCTV installation would do much to sort out that problem and bring transparency and a degree of mandatory control. I will not go on because those points have already been made. Food Standards Agency involvement would be essential.

Lastly, if my voice will stand up to this, on the question of long-distance transport of horses, one tends to think that this is a problem of horses leaving Poland or Estonia and going down in transporters to the toe of Italy, southern Greece or southern France. That is so, but at the same time it also involves horses travelling from this country. I have spoken in your Lordships’ House before on this issue. It is estimated conservatively that 50,000 horses are so moved across Europe each year. That is days and days of travel and thousands of miles, and the horses are often deprived of rest, food and water. Yet an EU transport regulation—of 2005, to be precise—is largely not enforced across Europe. That is backed up of course by the EU scientific adviser, who has said to the whole of the EU that the maximum travel should be 12 hours and then the journey should be broken for food, rest and water. That is largely not being done. So my question to the Minister is one that I have asked in your Lordships’ House before. What are we doing to support and encourage other countries in the EU to enforce that regulation?