Agriculture Bill (Eighth sitting)

Alicia Kearns Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 27th February 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Daniel Zeichner]

I was rather anticipating that we would have a discussion about this issue. This is public money for public goods. We are trying to reflect what we believe is the strong view of the British public that they would not want public money to be used to support hunting. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that we should try to reflect the will of the people?

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Goodwill]

I will take the other intervention, which I suspect may be on the same subject, before I reply to them both, if I may.

[Alicia Kearns]

If this legislation is meant to be pragmatic —if it is there to support farmers and ensure they act in the right way to steward our environment and our communities—should we not therefore be doing pragmatic things, rather than virtue signalling? We should recognise that cats have every right to hunt down mice if that is what they want to do, and therefore restricting what farmers can do in this way is neither sensible nor the place of legislation; rather, it is the place of press releases.

[Mr Goodwill]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, which answers the shadow Minister’s point very well. He has talked about the will of the people: the will of the people was expressed on 12 December last year, when they elected a majority Conservative Government.

I conducted an extensive survey of my constituents prior to my election. We got about 20,000 replies to that questionnaire, which asked lots of questions, including one about hunting. The Whitby part of my constituency was about 60/40 in favour of hunting; in the Scarborough part, it was about 60/40 the other way. I went to a primary school not long before the election, and as we all do when we visit schools, I talked about the issues that the children wanted to talk about. Hunting did come up, and one child who came from a farming family made it very clear that she took a dim view of foxes, and the fact that they had been in her family’s hen coop and were taking newborn lambs. She underlined the need to control foxes.

We are not revisiting the hunting legislation in this Committee; rather, we are looking at what the practical implications would be if this amendment were on the face of the Bill, with its provisions being retrospective and applicable to exempt activities such as one dog killing one rat or two dogs being used to flush a rabbit to be shot. If those exemptions were removed, almost every farm in the country would be covered by that retrospective application.