Animal (Penalty Notices) Bill

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th December 2021 Public Bill Committees

In conclusion, we support the Bill overall. The intention is reasonable. We all want better, more effective enforcement, but there is a risk of unintended consequences. I think this Bill fits uneasily with the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill. It feels a bit of a mess, and it needs more work. We will not oppose the legislation today, but we will monitor it closely to ensure that it does what the Government and the hon. Member for Romford says it does.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the hon. Member for Romford on the Bill, and I entirely support its principle.

I have a brief question for the Minister on the use of fixed penalty notices. They are increasingly being used to do the heavy lifting in the criminal justice system. They clearly have a function, and it is clear what the intended function is here: to fill a gap. The experience with fixed penalty notices over recent years, particularly during covid, has not been a good one on either side. For the Ministry of Justice, if there is not proper recourse to a judicial process, that contains many risks for the alleged offender. On the other hand, if fixed penalty notices are used and not followed up, one gets into the situation where they are issued and there is no consequence. If time goes by and they are not enforced, the period in which they may be enforced elapses.

What I am concerned about is not that fixed penalty notices are being proposed for use; it seems a suitable use. I am concerned about our experience of them at the moment. I entirely understand why the Government want to use them. There is huge pressure on the criminal justice system. The backlog, not only in the Crown court but in the magistrates court as well, was very large before covid. It is now extremely large indeed, and it is not timetabled to come down over any short period of time.

I absolutely understand why the Government would look to fixed penalties as a way of trying to deal with the backlog and relieve some of the pressure. However, it comes with a whole raft of other changes, such as single justice procedure, where there is less scrutiny of offences, less of an opportunity to have one’s day in court and less public access to the justice system. All of those are risks with fixed penalties.

Often these are emotive, quite serious offences. I understand that the fixed penalty notices are intended to deal with those at the lower end, but I wonder if the Minister could say something about this. Could she give us reassurance that, for somebody who believes they are wrongly being given a notice, there will be a proper and clear course they can take that will lead to a judicial process? Secondly, are the mechanisms there to ensure that the prosecuting authorities are able to enforce these notices and that they do not just become pieces of paper that people can disregard?