Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Lord Trees Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 16th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trees (CB)]

My Lords, this is a significant Bill, which, in general, I support. It can have good consequences but it could also have unintended consequences. I declare my interest as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare. I thank the Minister and the Bill team, as well as Mike Radford, reader in animal welfare at the University of Aberdeen, for useful and helpful discussions.

In the UK we have a deservedly proud history of protecting animal welfare, from 1822 to the present, as the noble Lords, Lord Herbert, Lord Forsyth, and several other noble Lords mentioned. All that legislation implied recognition of animal sentience without specific reference to it.

Animal sentience was incorporated into Article 13 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU by virtue of the Lisbon treaty of 2009. That article requires member state Governments to have full regard to animal welfare in formulating and implementing policy, as animals are sentient beings. Article 13 differs from the Bill in that it defines a limited number of policy areas to which it applies, whereas, as has been mentioned, the Bill applies to all government policy. Moreover, Article 13 significantly exempted

“religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage”,

as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, and other noble Lords mentioned. Thus, the Bill is very wide-ranging, covering all policy without exception, and it also implicitly includes wild animals. In placing obligations on government, the Bill will complement our excellent Animal Welfare Act, which places obligations on individual keepers of animals.

There were earlier attempts to enshrine the principle of Article 13 into UK law during the Brexit process, both in the other place and in this House, and the Government introduced their own Bill in 2017. This was scrutinised by the EFRA Committee in the other place, which received legal opinion that highlighted the serious risk of endless judicial review, partly related to the ambiguity of the meaning of “sentience”.

This Bill does not define sentience. Defra has commissioned a report from LSE Enterprise on this issue—which is germane to this debate but which, regrettably, is not yet available. Definitions of sentience range from

“having the power of perception by the senses”

to

“the quality of being able to experience feelings”.

The Global Animal Law Project says:

“Sentience shall be understood to mean the capacity to have feelings, including pain and pleasure, and implies a level of conscious awareness.”


Clearly, most life forms have the ability to sense most harmful stimuli and, if they are mobile, to avoid them.

Undoubtedly, as scientific evidence is accumulated, it is likely that certain invertebrates will be added to the coverage of this legislation. Since octopuses and related species are already provided protection within the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, it would be consistent to add cephalopods, as Clause 5(2) provides. There are also credible calls for decapod crustaceans to be included, on which the LSE Enterprise report may comment. With further research, even more animals might be argued to be sentient, which raises the question: where in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom does sentience end?

I raise this as something that will need to be considered at some time, although the Bill quite rightly leaves it to the Secretary of State and hence Parliament to make regulations and to determine which animals to include in the Act. I can foresee that as the frontier of evidence shifts, the Secretary of State may be called upon to choose between scientific evidence and broader policy considerations.

The current Bill will create an animal sentience committee to survey government policy, which may report to the Secretary of State if it feels that the commitment with regard to animal welfare is not honoured. Clause 2(1) says that it “may produce a report”, thus the extent of scrutiny is not clear. I note that the committee will be empowered to publish its report in whatever way it wishes and that the Secretary of State must lay a response to the report before Parliament, thereby ensuring political accountability. I welcome both measures, but there is much important detail about the committee currently lacking in the Bill.

If we are to have an animal sentience committee, in my opinion it is important that that committee is independent and quite separate from the current Animal Welfare Committee—as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said—since it will be a statutory committee, whereas the Animal Welfare Committee is advisory. I suggest that it is also important that the sentience committee is adequately resourced for its huge task and that its membership is appropriate and balanced. I support the idea of adopting some parliamentary process to ratify the membership; for example, as well as scientific expertise in animal welfare, veterinary science and biology, it could include appropriate expertise in policy and impact assessment.

I recognise that the issue of sentience is a huge populist impetus and has become totemic, and I understand the Government’s desire to introduce this. With a measured, pragmatic and balanced approach—as the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, among others, mentioned—this Bill could be a force for good with respect to animal welfare. But there are concerns in my mind about unintended consequences, which other noble Lords have raised. I feel that we cannot ignore them, but I hope that they do not materialise.

Finally, there is much detail lacking about the committee’s role—on resourcing, its obligations, its composition, its powers and powers of inquiry, and, perhaps most important of all, its powers of sanction if its recommendations are ignored. When and how will more detail on these important operational questions be provided?