Ivory Trade

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, for securing this debate and for the way in which he introduced it. Certainly his points about the relationship to other crime, which were reinforced by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord St John, were very well made and I do not need to add to them. As the noble Lord, Lord Jones, said, this is a very timely debate, not just because of the work that the Independent has launched this week but also because of the meetings in Botswana and Paris this week—which is perhaps why the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, is not with us. I pay tribute to the work that he is doing on this issue. Of course, there is also the relationship with poverty. It is striking that the world’s most magnificent and, tragically, valuable animals are surrounded by the world’s poorest people and by some of the worst conflict in the world. That makes it particularly difficult to tackle this issue.

We have heard about the plight of elephants and rhinos. The Independent report suggests that as many as 52,000 elephants a year might now be lost due to poaching and that the population is 15% of what it was 20 years ago. I see from the National Wildlife Crime Unit that 234 items of ivory were seized in the UK last year alone. I also note from Defra’s strategic assessment of the National Wildlife Crime Unit from February 2011 that 12 rhinos a month were being lost in South Africa and Zimbabwe in 2011 due to this trade.

I was fortunate enough to see forest elephants in their natural environment in 2005 in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and I met with the rangers there. I was the first western visitor to the park for 10 years. I believe that every one of the rangers I met has subsequently died as a result of the activity of the Lord’s Resistance Army and from other conflict in that area. I went on from Virunga to Bukavu, principally to see how Darwin money from the UK Government was being spent to protect gorillas in the forests of the DRC. The rangers there made it clear to me that the forest elephants in that part of the world are hugely important to the eco-system because they effectively create the pathways through which the rest of the wildlife is able to move. The tragic fate of the forest elephants, which was highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord St John, is having a serious impact on the rest of the eco-system. This is something that we should value beyond just the charismatic value of these extraordinary animals.

The noble Lord, Lord Jones, explained the choices well. Do you stop the poaching and/or can you stop the market? Both clearly are really hard. We have seen from Tanzania the efforts being made by the president there in launching Operation Tokomeza, with its orders to shoot to kill elephant poachers. Clearly he is doing what he can and that reflects the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Jones, about being able to stop poaching. However, when this activity is sitting alongside such intense and difficult conflict and such intense poverty, stopping poaching is extremely difficult, certainly in those countries with porous borders. It is difficult to be optimistic.

In terms of stopping demand, I would be interested to know whether the Prime Minister in his visit to China was able, in among all the many important discussions he would have had there, to raise this issue with the Chinese. Clearly, that is a critical part of the market. Indeed, the irony when I was in the DRC all those years ago was that the Chinese were the people building the roads through the forest for the people and the elephants were making the roads for the animals. The demand from the Chinese appears to be removing that capacity.

I certainly congratulate the Government on the London conference, and Prince William and the Prince of Wales on their leadership on this issue. The noble Lord, Lord St John, mentioned the decision made in 2008 by the previous Government, of whom I was a member. That decision was debatable at best. It was made with good intentions in wanting to depress the price to reduce incentives to poachers and create revenue with the one-off sale for monitoring and enforcement against poachers. But I wonder whether the Government have learnt any lessons from that decision to allow one-off trade. Personally I regret the decision and it would be good now to see an unequivocal international ban on all forms of ivory trade, although I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say on that.

Beyond the work that is being done internationally, where the Government have a pretty good record in terms of international wildlife conservation, there are also measures that need to be taken internally to make sure that we have our own house in order as we try to assert our authority internationally. I remember seeing the Met’s Wildlife Crime Unit’s efforts at Heathrow and seeing the extraordinary range of different things from the wildlife trade that are seized there on a daily basis. I have already said how much ivory is seized by that unit.

What progress is being made in terms of updating COTES, which implements CITES in this country? I pay tribute to the World Society for the Protection of Animals for its contribution of £100,000 per year to the work of the National Wildlife Crime Unit. I understand that the Government contributed £136,000 for 2013-14, but there is no commitment to fund the unit beyond that. Can the Minister update us on whether the Government will commit funds beyond that, at least at the current level, particularly now that we have the Autumn Statement? Perhaps there is some news buried away in the lengthy documentation that not all of us have had a chance to absorb from today's announcement. Many of us in this debate would like to see funding extended beyond the current level, because there is some evidence that London is the centre for some of this trade. We need to ensure that we play our part in forcing through Home Office funding for that unit as well as the one in the Met.

I pay tribute to all those who have spoken in this brief but high-quality debate. I reinforce my congratulations to the Minister on the work that he is doing on the cause this week and my appreciation of the leadership particularly of Prince William in asserting the UK's role through the conference that we will have shortly. I look forward to the noble Baroness’s answers on funding for the units and what we are doing to make sure that we have as good a record as possible here in the UK to reinforce those international efforts.

Air Pollution

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

I noted the reports from The Lancet which cited air pollution as being the second greatest cause of lung cancer after passive smoking, so the noble Lord is right to flag its risks. The Government are working very closely to raise awareness. We are providing funding for this to local authorities. The public health outcomes framework includes an indicator on air pollution which enables public health professionals to address this. We are providing a forecasting service on levels of air pollution and information to vulnerable groups. There are some trials at Barts on how best to get information to vulnerable groups.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, in reply to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, the Minister, referred to the consultation Local Air Quality Management in England. In that consultation, the Government’s preferred option is to remove the requirement for local authorities to report and declare air quality management areas. How then do the Government propose to monitor air quality if their preferred option is chosen—or are the Minister’s warm words just hot air?

[Baroness Northover]

The noble Lord refers to hot air on a day like this. The consultation is a genuinely open one, and I am sure the noble Lord’s views will be taken into consideration. Many of these Acts date back a long way, including of course the Clean Air Act which had a fantastic effect in earlier decades. We need to make sure that these Acts are brought up to date, and I am sure the noble Lord will feed in his very cogent views.

Badgers

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Tuesday 18th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

I can assure the noble Lord that the Government have considered all approaches, welcome all suggestions and welcome research. Cattle measures are the foundation of our control programme, and ultimately we wish to be able to use vaccination for cattle and badgers. As I mentioned, there is much investment into research. The problems lie in the challenges with the vaccinations; the research that is being conducted at the moment has not produced a vaccine that can be used in the immediate term, either for cattle or for badgers.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, it is vital that we find a workable solution to the spread of TB from badgers to cattle. The science strongly suggests that a cull is not workable, even if this pilot to test whether a cull is humane is successful. In Wales, an intensive effort to vaccinate badgers looks more hopeful, because vaccination does not risk spreading the disease through the perturbation effect of culling. Given that the vaccination trials in Gloucestershire are being carried out at a third of the cost of vaccination in Wales, is it not time for Defra to reduce the cost of mandatory training for vaccination, so that it is at least as cheap as the training needed to shoot badgers?

[Baroness Northover]

I will, if I may, follow up my previous answer. There is an injectable badger vaccine, to which the noble Lord has referred, which is being used in Wales. He will also know that this has a lot of practical difficulties. It has no effect on already infected badgers, it requires the annual trapping of new cubs to vaccinate them, and so on. We therefore look with interest at what the Welsh Government are doing. We note the enormous cost of that and are aware that an oral badger vaccine, if there was one, would indeed be quicker and easier to use. I therefore refer back to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and his students and hope that there will be further research.

Zoos

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 8th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lord Harrison on securing this interesting debate, and I hope that the visitor numbers for Chester Zoo and London zoo rise as a result of the attention that they will no doubt receive. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, on his new position, and warmly welcome him to the Dispatch Box. I am sure that he is relieved to have moved on from the sort of “super-sub” role that he was performing there and which is now being performed by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell. He has a hard act to follow in the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, who I really enjoyed working with, and I wish him in turn all the best at the Home Office.

We have heard praise for the great work that Chester Zoo and London zoo perform. We were privileged to listen to a particularly moving speech by the noble Lord, Lord Paul, regarding his involvement in London zoo. My own experience, more personally, is with Monkey World in Dorset, which is licensed as a zoo but is actually a sanctuary. Effectively, it is the largest rescue centre for primates in Europe; it is also the nursery for orang-utans for Europe and is about the only place in the world successfully breeding woolly monkeys at the moment. Not that it wants to treat many of the species of primate there—it has more than enough chimpanzees, for example; I think that it is on its third or fourth troupe of chimps—but, sadly, that is a demonstration of the need for a rescue centre.

Monkey World started by rescuing chimps from the beaches of Spain and has now grown to encompass all manner of primates. It is not a collection, though, and that is an important thing to say in the context of the debate about zoos. A lot of zoos look to collect a couple of each species so that they can show everyone what they all look like. Clearly that does not apply to all zoos, nor to all species, but we should move welfare standards so that animals live as closely to how they live in the wild as possible. My noble friend Lady Rendell talked about the Jaguar being a solitary animal. Clearly you would not want to put a bunch of Jaguars in an enclosure together, but there are other species that you would want to because that is the way that they like to live and we do not want to put them in solitary confinement.

When my children were young, we followed the recommendation of their grandfather and took them to Marwell Zoo, near Winchester in Hampshire, which showed me as a parent the extraordinary educational value that well managed zoos can offer. Indeed, when I was exchanging views on zoos on Twitter over the weekend, one came from a friend of mine who works in one of the most innovative schools that I know, the Essa Academy in Bolton, talking about the marvellous educational value of zoos and what technology can now do to enhance that using, for example, augmented reality to show evolution and some of the extinct species that obviously are no longer available in zoos.

When I was a Defra Minister, I was also pleased to visit a wonderful project in the heart of the Amazon that the Darwin Initiative was funding with the Zoological Society for London to sustain local communities that were farming ornamental fish and looking at alternative ways of creating a living for those people.

It is worth recalling, though, that there are problems at times with zoos. We heard about those from my noble friend Lord Harrison in his fine speech, and there are horror stories from around the world of cramped cages, the illegal trade of social animals living in solitary confinement and animals dying of malnutrition, including in US zoos—this is not confined to zoos in the poorer parts of the world but can be in some of the richest places in the world. When I was researching this, I was hoping that I would not find any examples from this country that would cause me concern, but sadly there are indeed areas of concern. I had a look on YouTube at a film about Noah’s Ark zoo near Bristol that was made a couple of years ago. According to the TV report, it would appear that that zoo was effectively breeding tigers to supply circuses. We will shortly be debating wild animals and circuses. Certainly, we on this side do not support the use of wild animals in circuses and encourage the Government to end that practice as soon as they can. The keeper of that zoo seemed to regard it as being just a business and had lost touch with the conservation and education concepts that are at the heart of a successful zoo.

I have also seen the Born Free Foundation’s excellent report evaluating the implementation and enforcement of the 1999 directive, to which my noble friend Lady Smith referred. The foundation produces specific country reports for members of the Union. It is worth noting that the report says of England:

“Despite a concerted effort by Defra to support and advise Local Authorities in the implementation and enforcement of the ZLA, it is questionable as to whether Local Authorities have the time, funding and expertise to ensure effective application of zoo legislation in England”.

That point has been made in the debate with reference to the Zoo Licensing Act. The document continues:

“Overall, the findings of this investigation indicated that licensed zoos in England were not fully compliant with the ZLA”.

That has to be of great concern in this debate. The document further states:

“Overall, English zoos were making an insignificant contribution to Threatened and ‘conservation sensitive’ species”.

The report also contains other findings. Those findings are clearly of considerable concern to us and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to them. I would also be interested to hear anything he has to say about the story that appeared in the Sunday Express this week about zoos being inappropriately hired out for wild raves. Will he comment on the questions raised about local authority capability and expertise, consistent licensing quality and consistent inspection by local authorities? On balance, we are in favour of well managed zoos but are concerned that more needs to be done to raise the quality of regulation.

Socioeconomic Equality Duty

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, I could not have put it better than my noble friend Lord Lester.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I was disappointed in the Minister's Statement. I remind her, given her response to my noble friend, that the previous Government lifted 500,000 children and close to a million pensioners out of poverty. Therefore, for her to claim that we did nothing about poverty is at best disingenuous—I say this despite the respect that I have for her.

The Minister mentioned the pupil premium. Perhaps she saw that yesterday in the other place the Liberal Democrat MP David Ward walked out when it became clear that the pupil premium will not give a per-pupil increase in real terms. It is a sham. She will have seen in yesterday's unemployment figures that the number of unemployed women went up by 31,000 while the number of unemployed men went down by 40,000. Does that not show that we need legal duties in place as safeguards to ensure that we continue to address inequality?

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, I do not need to take lessons from the noble Lord. However, I will add that the gap between those who have and those who have not has widened—and it widened during 13 years of the noble Lord’s Government. The noble Lord highlighted the issue of legal duty. That is why we supported the Equality Act.