Ivory Bill

Simon Hoare Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons
Monday 4th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend has anticipated exactly the point that I wanted to make. It is critical that, in appreciating the importance of the African elephant, we also appreciate the scale of the threat that the species now faces. My hon. Friend is absolutely right: given that 20,000 African elephants are being slaughtered every year in a drive by poachers to secure their tusks for criminal gain, we face a remarkable onslaught against the species—an onslaught that is devastating communities and upending economies, and also poses an existential risk to the African elephant. Unless action is taken to interdict the poachers and reduce the demand for ivory, it is possible that, on our watch—on the watch of our generation—the African elephant will meet extinction. I think that, as was well said by my right hon. and noble Friend Lord Hague of Richmond, it would be impossible for any of us to face our children and grandchildren and say that we had the opportunity to take steps, legislative and otherwise, to safeguard this magnificent animal, and failed to act.

The Bill gives us in the United Kingdom an opportunity to play our part and to show leadership. We have been invited to show that leadership by the countries at the sharp end. More than 30 African nations have asked us, and others, to do what we can to stop the poaching, to end the trade in ivory, and to restore balance and health to their nations by supporting their efforts to ensure that the African elephant can survive in the future.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

rose—

[Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)]

rose—

[Michael Gove]

I should be delighted to give way to my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare).

[Simon Hoare]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State, whose Bill has my support. Will there be an opportunity, possibly in Committee, to consider including in its scope the Indian elephant, the rhinoceros and the narwhal whale?

[Michael Gove]

I thank my hon. Friend for his support. There will be an opportunity in Committee to consider whether the scope of the Bill is absolutely as it should be. A number of Members have previously indicated their interest in extending its scope to other forms of ivory, such as narwhal horns, and there will indeed be an opportunity to debate precisely that matter in Committee.

I am also happy to give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin).

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[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point and he is absolutely right. This is one of the reasons why we are introducing this legislation. There are occasions on which people attempt to pass off as works of artistic or cultural significance items that do not have that significance. They attempt to exploit a loophole and create an excuse or an opportunity to carry on this wicked trade. That is why the exemptions are so tightly drawn, and it is also why the onus is on any individual who wishes to sell an item to prove that it meets the stringent criteria. That switch changes the obligation and places it on the seller.

In the past, it was possible for someone to say—perhaps not genuinely—that they had no idea, and that they thought the item in question was artistically worked and of appropriate provenance and an appropriate age. They could say, “I had no idea. I am terribly sorry.” Those loopholes, excuses and opportunities will end with this legislation, because individuals will have to pay in order to demonstrate that the item they wish to sell meets one of the criteria. This will be a matter that we can debate in Committee, and of course we are now living in more enlightened times, but I believe that some items fashioned in ivory reflect the historical, cultural or artistic importance of a particular period or artistic movement and that we need to respect that, using a clearly high threshold.

I have mentioned that there will be exemptions for portrait miniatures, for musical instruments and for items such as furniture of which ivory forms only a small part. There is one other area. If an item is of truly outstanding historical or cultural significance, and if, for example, a museum wishes to ensure that an item of such significance can be bought and appropriately displayed, that will still be possible if the appropriate steps are recognised and met.

[Simon Hoare]

I fear that I may be talking myself on to the Bill Committee, but my right hon. Friend has just used the phrase “outstanding historical”. Clause 2, which—I hope he will accept that I make these remarks in good faith—needs some further work and clarity, refers to “outstanding artistic etc value” and puts a huge amount of weight on the Secretary of State in appointing advisers and issuing guidance. The country would breathe easy with my right hon. Friend taking those decisions, but “outstanding artistic” is a broad definition that means all things to all men—beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Will my right hon. Friend commit to thinking in Committee about how the wording can be clarified to give certainty to those with an interest in this area?

Fur Trade

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner]

Once again, I am in agreement. I am still trying to go back 20 years in my speech. I shall advance slowly.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

Give up!

[Daniel Zeichner]

No, I am not going to give up—but I give way.

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[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. Let me start by making it clear that I hate, and have hated for all my thinking life—which might be quite short, I do not know—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) knows me too well. I have always hated the fur trade. It is interesting that the debate has not divided on party grounds. It is a rather philosophical debate, because this is one of the few issues that appears to unite vegan and carnivore—the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and I appeared on a BBC politics programme the other week to discuss the dairy sector. It also unites people with diametrically opposed views on country sports; indeed, it unites people with diametrically opposed views on all sorts of issues.

I slightly stand aside from the narrative of animal rights, because the giving of rights is a peculiar legal minefield. However, what trumps even that issue is our human duties, responsibilities and response to public morality. I start always by asking this question—is the fur trade actually needed? My judgment is that it is not.

Frankly, I could not care less about how marvellous the standards are for animals, or—more usually—how bad the standards are. It is the principle of farming for fur that I find so objectionable. Animals could be put up in the animal equivalent of the Ritz hotel; they could be given room service 24/7; and they could be killed in the most humane way possible, even being tickled to death by a swan’s feather, so that they go out laughing. The principle would still be wrong. So, to those who talk about the “fur fair” campaign and such things, I think that is totally the wrong line of argument to deploy. We should ask ourselves, “In the 21st century, is this a trade that we want to see?”

Of course, regarding the wearing of fur, one can go back to the sumptuary Acts of the Tudor period, which very clearly set out—in Acts of Parliament—who was allowed to wear ermine, who was allowed to wear mink, who was allowed to wear lynx fur and all the rest of it, as fur was a huge status symbol and people in those times often flaunted their wealth by the wearing of furs. I think that people now have other ways of demonstrating that they are wealthy and have access to lots of consumer goods without having to put the skin and the fur of another animal on their backs.

We can point out to those countries that still condone and support fur farming that the economy of a country does not collapse when it is made illegal. When the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) introduced her private Member’s Bill, I am sure people said, “Oh, job losses and unemployment, everybody will get rickets and bubonic plague will break out and God knows what else, because nobody can afford any taxes for the health service!” But the sky did not fall down. People who had been involved in the UK fur trade went off and did something else, and the economy kept going.

I think that nationally—not in this debate, but nationally—we are inclined to do something in this House, we make something illegal, we assuage our conscience and we say, “Job done!” We are, of course, fur farmers by proxy, because other countries are farming fur, the demand for which in the UK is worth—I think my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) said this—£56.5 million in fur sales. So we clearly have to do more as parliamentarians and public policy makers to inform our fellow citizens that fur is something that they should not want, buy or look for.

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) when he talks about the absolute “duty of care” on retailers. The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) mentioned internet sales, which I will not go into because everybody tries to grapple with them, and I have not found a solution for controlling such sales; frankly, we know it is a problem. However, at a time when the high street has never been more competitive—fighting over market share—it strikes me as unconscionable that high street retailers are flogging products to people that they believe are fake but are actually real, because those products can be sourced from overseas at very cheap prices. Those retailers should be called out and those customers should not be going through their doors, because the power of the credit card, the purse and the wallet speaks, and in a competitive, cut-throat retail sector I suggest that the customer is king.

[Sir Roger Gale]

First, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making the point that I had tried to make so much better than I made it myself. Secondly, when the House voted to ban fur farming in 2000, we did so because we believed that it was a vile practice and that it had no place in modern British society. We did not vote to move the problem from A to B. Therefore, when my hon. Friend the Minister responds to this debate, it is only logical that he says that having willed the ends we must now will the means, and ban the trade.

[Simon Hoare]

My hon. Friend is right and if legislation was before us that banned the import of foreign-farmed fur into our country, he would find me in the Aye Lobby voting for it. However, his argument also goes to the point that we slightly salved our domestic conscience when we said—it was before my time in the House—that we have banned fur farming here, but we have not spread the message as to why we banned it, and nor have we pointed out that the doom-mongers’ prediction of an economic collapse after a ban has not materialised. We have not been strong enough in taking that message to those countries where fur farming still continues.

To state the blindingly obvious, we are no longer an imperial power that can send a gunboat to countries that we do not like, so that we can bully people into obeying. However, we can take our soft power and our leadership, and use them. If we wanted to find an example of where we had done that, we and some allies did it on climate change. We realised that there was an issue that needed to be addressed, and through Kyoto and other initiatives we got the world thinking collectively about climate change and the imperative of dealing with it in a proper way to safeguard humanity.

Now, let us not ascribe the same scale to fur farming as to the future climate of our world, although for some it will be equally important, but we should be talking to those countries that still farm fur. Frankly, if our banning imports meant that somebody lost £56.5 million of sales, I suggest that they would just find that money elsewhere in the world market. They will not stop farming fur because we stop importing it. Banning fur imports will make us feel better; of course, it will. We can write to those constituents who have emailed us on this issue—I have had many emails from my constituents in North Dorset—

[Giles Watling]

On that very point, does my hon. Friend agree that by banning imports of fur products into this country, we would lead where others might follow?

[Simon Hoare]

My hon. Friend makes a point, but if he looks at this matter dispassionately he will see that, although we banned fur farming, the major countries that do the large-scale fur farming have not followed suit. So, yes, we can act and, yes, that would close off to all but the illegal trade the market in fur in this country, but we have to do far more in terms of world leadership to help those countries that have a fur farming sector, to show them how they can move away from it, how they can support the creation of new jobs and how they will not see a black hole in their economy if they ban it. So, let us lead by example, of course, but let us also use the soft power that the UK has.

[Jamie Stone]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that banning fur farming in this country while still buying fur has the smell of hypocrisy about it, whereas a total ban would surely take us to the proper moral high ground, and that in the scheme of things that can appeal to other people and so our influence might well percolate out?

[Simon Hoare]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and a total ban is one of the weapons in the arsenal that one can deploy. It would be bonkers for us to exhort people to stop farming fur if we were still seeking to import it—that is absolutely right. I suggest to the Minister that now—20 years down the timeline set out by the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner)—is the time to take that next inexorable step of a ban on UK imports. Having done that, in a timely way, it should not be a matter of thinking “job done”, popping open the Pol Roger, the prosecco, the cava or the drink of choice and saying, “Aren’t we good?” The task then moves to the next stage—the two stages could run in parallel—of convincing those countries that still farm fur that it is time to stop. In the 21st century, the human body does not need another animal’s furs to keep warm. We have ways of doing that and of displaying our disposable wealth other than by wearing the pelt of an animal on our backs.

[Gavin Robinson (Belfast East) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman knows me to be an Ulster MP, but I was surprised when researching this issue that there are still three animal fur farms in the Republic of Ireland, one of which is in Ulster—in Donegal. Those farms kill more than 200,000 mink per year. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a good starting point would be our nearest neighbour and trusted friend—a European partner we collaborate with and sit on British-Irish ministerial councils with—and that in this area we could convince it of the sound arguments, so that it would end its fur trade?

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[Simon Hoare]

I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. He catches me totally by surprise, by saying that that remains a fact as we start the second half of 2018. That should be one of the easy wins—if one likes—in our campaign to stop the farming of fur for the retail and fashion trade.

I conclude with two key points. The first is about labelling, customer awareness and customer pressure on the retailer. It is a cut-throat marketplace and high street at the moment and now is the time for the consumer to speak. The second is world leadership. Let us ban here first and take that message, that dialogue and that discussion to those countries that continue to farm fur. Let us make it clear to them that we are not interested, per se, in the standards by which the animals are kept or the manner in which they are killed, germane and pertinent as those matters are. We urge them to stop farming fur because we think it is wrong and it is for our country to show the moral and legal leadership I know it can provide.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Eustice]

I was going to come on to that point, because I am aware that the hon. Lady introduced a private Member’s Bill on this subject. She recalled earlier how a number of Back Benchers frustrated her Bill. She joins an illustrious list of people before her and since who have had their private Members’ Bills frustrated. As a general rule, I find that if the Government do not support a private Member’s Bill, Back Benchers support it, and vice versa. It is one of those Catch-22s that we have to live with.

The hon. Lady correctly pointed out that the Farm Animal Welfare Council—now the Farm Animal Welfare Committee—did a piece of work on fur farming. It looked specifically at two species, mink and arctic fox, and concluded that because they are wild animals it was unable to come up with an industry code of practice to enable those two species to be farmed in a way that was conducive to their welfare. On that basis it recommended, and the Government accepted, a move towards a ban on fur farming. It is important to recognise, though, that—for reasons that I will come on to later—the then Labour Government introduced that ban but stopped short of a ban on trade in fur. Instead, they introduced a fur farming ban, which is far easier to achieve.

However, the hon. Lady put her finger on an important point—the difficulty of farming animals, and wild ones in particular, in a way that is conducive to their welfare. That point was made powerfully by a number of hon. Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for Clacton (Giles Watling), for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) and for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant), and the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). My hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) talked about the ethical difficulty of these issues.

The Government have supported higher animal welfare standards worldwide as the best way of phasing out cruel and inhumane farming and trapping practices that are banned here. Once the UK retakes its independent seat on international bodies, such as the convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora and the World Organisation for Animal Health, we will have an opportunity to promote the British view on animal welfare in such international forums, and to support improved animal welfare standards internationally.

In the meantime, there are some EU provisions that the UK has always supported—indeed, in many cases the UK argued for them. First, there are regulations that include a blanket ban on the importing of furs from a number of animals, including cats and dogs, as well as seal skins and products from commercial hunts. Secondly, there are EU regulations that ensure that any fur that can be imported into the UK from the EU comes from animals that have been kept, trapped and killed humanely, as defined by EU regulations. Fur production is allowed in some other EU member states, and EU directive 98/58/EC applies animal welfare standards to farmed animal production, including animals farmed for fur. EU regulation 1099/2009 applies requirements to protect the welfare of fur animals at the time of killing. Those regulations are audited by the European Commission.

Humane Society International figures suggest that about 85% of fur imported into the UK comes from farmed species such as mink, arctic fox, racoon, dog and rabbit, with the remainder coming from trapped wild species. The EU does not allow imports of fur from wild animals caught by unacceptable trapping practices. EU regulation 3254/91 relates to fur from 13 animal species, and requires certification, including from third countries, that animals were trapped in the right way.

All of those EU regulations pertaining to trade from third countries and the standards we require will come across into UK law through the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament. I will return to the issue of additional trade restrictions in the WTO and the EU, which a number of hon. Members raised, but first I want to dwell on some of the other restrictions that we support.

In addition to the EU regulations, CITES controls fur from endangered species. For example, export permits and commercial use certificates strictly control the import of fur from endangered species. Those controls are implemented in the UK by the wildlife trade regulations. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is responsible for processing import declarations and granting customs clearance for regulated goods, and Border Force works to ensure anti-smuggling controls intercept any illegal products. Although there were no seizures last year, 19 consignments were checked because it was considered that they might have some irregularities in their paperwork.

There are legal frameworks for the farming of fur animals in some non-EU countries, including minimum standards and inspections of welfare conditions. However, there are of course no EU or UK checks on farming conditions in those third countries.

[Simon Hoare]

We will all have heard what the Minister said about the international treaties and our ability to make the case that many of us have talked about, but does he accept that, notwithstanding the prevailing regulations and those that might come in the future, we would prefer to live in a world in which those regulations are not required because the trade has ceased?

[George Eustice]

I understand my hon. Friend’s point, and I was going to return to the issue of trade. The point is that it is not possible to make a difference just through the restriction on trade to the UK, because we represent a tiny portion—about 0.25%—of the entire global market. We would probably be more effective agitating for change through international forums such as the World Organisation for Animal Health, CITES and others to get improvements and further restrictions, and to encourage other countries to adopt the sorts of measures we have adopted. The Government recognise that some consumers do not wish to purchase fur on ethical grounds. As a consumer protection measure, there are laws about the legal fur trade to ensure consumers can obtain sufficient information about whether a product is composed wholly or partly of fur so they can make an informed choice.

I recognise, as several hon. Members pointed out—including my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) in an intervention—that concerns have been expressed recently that real fur is being passed off as fake fur, especially in low-cost items. That is the subject of an inquiry by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, to which my noble Friend Lord Gardiner gave evidence. The hon. Member for Bristol East cast aspersions on Lord Gardiner’s knowledge of these issues, but I believe he has looked at them in depth and understands them well.

Transport Emissions: Urban Areas

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

There are some countries, including some outside the European Union such as Norway, that have a more ambitious target than our own. However, I do not think that the legislation has yet been given effect in Germany.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend may seek to control what goes into them, but may I invite him to confirm that he has no intention of introducing a ban on wood-burning stoves? Manufacturers, retailers and users of them in the UK will be listening very carefully to what he has to say. Such stoves are an important part of domestic heating.

[Michael Gove]

We have been working with the domestic heating industry to ensure that higher standards can prevail in future. We want to ensure that all stoves sold in future meet those new higher standards.

Draft Waste Enforcement (England and Wales) Regulations 2018

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2018 General Committees

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

I am interested to hear what the hon. Gentleman says about waste incineration. It is my understanding that more dioxins and other nasty things are released from an ordinary garden bonfire in one day than are released from a waste incinerator in a whole year, given the complexity of the scrubbers and all the cleansing arrangements. It is a total myth that waste incineration is polluting to the atmosphere.

[Dr Drew]

I would argue that we are far too lax in our control of bonfires. I could add a fourth thing that people moan about: people setting fire to their garden waste next door. Given that in many authorities—including mine—there are ways to dispose of garden waste, to me, bonfires are an idle way of dealing with it.

On dioxins and furans, which come out of incineration, my argument is that we are not properly checking that. We are somewhat ignorant about particulates and what they end up doing; they do come down somewhere, because their nature is to reassemble themselves. We are not necessarily talking about incineration here, but I am just using it as an example of why we have to be very careful about what we collect and what we do with it, because in this country we are not very good at deciding what we are doing.