Unsustainable Packaging

Anne Main Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner]

We are already diverting into a range of issues, and I will mention some examples. The hon. Gentleman gets there first on fish and chips; I am of an age that I can remember fish and chips in newspaper, so I agree with him on that. The point about the Royal Mail is not one I intended to make, so he has added an important point to the discussion.

To get back to the wider issues, it is clear to me that public pressure for action on all these issues is growing. We saw from the Extinction Rebellion protests, which have happened nationwide and are strongly supported in Cambridge, that these issues have seized the public policy agenda. The school climate strikes, which I found magnificent, uplifting and inspired, show that the next generation demands change. I am sure we all have examples in our local areas. Last Friday, I was at the Spinney Primary School in Cambridge, and I was impressed not only by the quality of the questions the young people asked but by the fact that they had held an “empathy for earth” day a week or two before, and one could see the young people’s enthusiasm.

We can see the public’s desire for meaningful change. The question is, what can we do? One area that we can start with is the food we eat. When options are given to people to avoid non-recyclable packaging, they can be popular. There are good examples of that, which we have begun to touch on.

I thank the Petitions Committee staff for their excellent work surveying more than 20,000 people on their attitudes to food packaging. For fruits and vegetables, such as bananas, apples, potatoes and onions, more than 99% of respondents said that, given the option, they would choose to buy the items without plastic packaging—that is, almost everybody. A large majority said that they would buy bread without plastic packaging—94.6%—whereas 94.9% said they would buy breakfast cereal without it, and 97.1% said they would buy nuts and dried fruit. Nearly 80% said they would choose to buy meat or fish without plastic packaging, so there is considerable public appetite for change. I will come to some issues around that later.

Last Friday, I welcomed the Petitions Committee engagement team—I thank those involved for their work—to Cambridge. We held a roundtable discussion with various organisations that are working hard to improve sustainability in how we eat and live our lives. In that discussion I heard from owners of sustainable shops, cafés and businesses, such as BeeBee Wraps, the organic reusable food wraps business; Cambridge Carbon Footprint, which promotes sustainable living, local resources and services; and Cambridge Sustainable Food, which focuses on partnerships, projects and campaigns that capture the imagination and increase the sustainability of local eating.

That was an illuminating discussion, and many complex issues arose. For example, inventing new types of potentially sustainable packaging seems to be easier than putting in place the infrastructure and processes to deal with them. There was a concern about the proliferation of new so-called sustainable packaging products and different recycling schemes. Jacky Sutton-Adam described the situation, saying

“we’ve broken all our eggs into a bowl, mixed them up but haven’t made the omelette yet.”

While the Government ought to be investing more in solutions and incentivising people to try new things, Irina Ankudinova and others believed that manufacturers should be required to show that a system was in place to deal with the waste before new packaging products were brought to the market.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an important point about the packaging surrounding the goods we buy, but there are also the goods themselves. As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the prevention of plastic waste, I note that we have weaned ourselves off natural products and fibres and on to plasticised ones. Many of our clothes and carpets are polypropylene. We are wrapping plastic in plastic, and that is a real concern. Does he agree that we need to look at the big picture and have a shift back toward both more natural packaging and more natural fibres within the packaging?

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, who makes a powerful point; I will touch on it a little later, but I suspect that others will want to amplify it further. When I look around the world, there are other countries that have perhaps not gone so far down this path, and some of their lifestyles are very attractive—dare I say it, but even some European lifestyles are very attractive indeed.

On Friday, I was also able to visit the Cambridge Cheese Company, which cycles its cheese deliveries around the city and presents gifts in recycled wooden cheese boxes. I am grateful to a very helpful assistant in its shop, Jade Tiger Thomas, who showed me the amazing aforementioned BeeBee wraps and explained a scheme that allows customers to bring their own Tupperware or reusable boxes to carry cheese home, and reusable jars for olives and deli items. The company is a long-established Cambridge gem. Many hon. Members find themselves in Cambridge from time to time, and I thoroughly recommend that they pay it a visit.

This is not an entirely new phenomenon. A long time ago, when I was a student in Cambridge, I remember going to the legendary Arjuna Wholefoods and buying spices measured into brown paper bags. That was happening long before it became fashionable, and Arjuna’s has proved itself a long-term Cambridge institution committed to sustainability and reducing food waste.

Buying food without throwaway packaging is becoming increasingly popular across the country. At the start of the month, Waitrose began a trial in its Oxford Botley Road store of a new “Unpacked” model, with a dedicated refillable zone of products from wine to cereals, frozen pick and mix and a borrow a box scheme. It also has refillable cleaning products and sells plants and flowers without plastic. Most of us have probably read the stories in the newspapers. It is too early to have solid statistics on the success of the trial, but Waitrose tells me that the reaction on social media to the announcement of the trial was 97% positive and the store sold out of some products within the first week of the trial. I was told that

“customers have bought into the concept readily—they arrive with their own containers ready to fill with the loose cereals, pasta, fish and more. This started to happen within just a few hours of us announcing the trial”.

That put me in mind of happy times past in my life, in places such as Venice, where the wine shops allow people to take bottles to be refilled on a regular basis. Now, perhaps, we can extend that to washing-up liquid, even if it is slightly less enticing.

When these schemes are well advertised and communicated and efforts are made to help people to get acquainted with new ideas, such as the borrow a box scheme for those who may have been unaware or do not have their own, behaviour and culture change are possible. That can also be done on a smaller scale: the University of Sheffield students’ union has its own Zero Waste Shop, which sells a huge range of spices, herbs, grains, legumes, dried fruits and nuts by weight, so people can buy as much or as little as they need. Customers simply bring their own container, buy one from the shop or use one of the recyclable paper bags.

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[Neil Parish]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. The House could of course lead by having bottled tap water instead of mineral water. As a farmer and previously a dairy farmer, I can say that dairy farmers often joke that they would be better off if, instead of milking cows, they could find a spring on their farm and bottle the water, because more money can be made from bottling water than from keeping cows and producing milk. It is fair enough if people really want mineral water; perhaps some people need mineral water for health or other reasons, but we certainly do not need the amount that we consume and we do not need to have it in plastic bottles.

Of course, if we are going to have plastic bottles, let us ensure that they are properly recyclable. Some of the big companies—Pepsi and Coca-Cola—are looking at reverse vending machines. That is where someone takes a plastic bottle, puts it back through the vending machine, gets a deposit and another bottle can be made from that plastic. Of course, only 70% of that plastic can be used and it can only be recycled about twice. With everything in this world that we look at, we find, when we drill down, that it is not quite as recyclable and reusable as we believed it to be.

[Mrs Main]

On the recycling of bottles, I took the APPG to the Veolia recycling plant in Dagenham. A problem that we have is that a lot of plastic cannot be used more than once. That plant had empty machines because it needs to feed those machines. It is a dilemma: the more we take plastic out of the system, the more recycling becomes too expensive to do. That is something we have to think about.

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. We can recycle plastics, but if we recycle a mix of different plastics, we find that we get a very low-grade reusable plastic. If compostable plastics are mixed with the non-compostable, we have another problem. Everything in life is not simple; as with every inquiry that one does, the more one looks into the issue, the more complicated it becomes. I am a practical farmer, and the one thing that I want to see is that we really do good by reducing the amount of plastic, having properly compostable plastics and doing something that actually works. We have to be careful. Governments of all colours will naturally say, “Let’s tick this box. We’ve recycled this; we’ve done this; we’ve done that.” But does it actually work? Does it improve the environment? That is the issue.

Moving on to compostable plastics, we have to be certain that they will decompose properly so that the molecules break down and we can grow plants in our garden or put the material on to our fields and grow our crops and it does not leave tiny little particles of plastic that has not broken down. Most of it will compost, but it has to be composted in a certain way. If I put the beaker that I have with me in the Chamber in my garden with a whole load of other beakers and leave them together, that will never decompose, or it will take a very long time to do so. If we mix it with garden waste and other organic materials and can get the temperature up to 60°, it will break down, probably within 12 weeks to six months, so that can be done. It will break right down, but as I said, it has to be done properly. We do not want the plastic in these beakers mixing with other plastic that is not compostable. That is why the collection of plastics and the recycling of them are vital. We have local government all over the country—I was in local government before I came to this place—and local authorities are fiercely independent, but of course we have lots of different ways of collecting and recycling and so on.

The Government will probably have to be braver on this issue and give stricter advice to local authorities on how they recycle and on having a similar system across the country. For example, I do not have the patience that my wife has to sort things into every tiny little thing. I think that we need to make recycling a little bit more idiot-proof for people like me, dare I say. Do not smile like that, Minister. I was going to say something nice about you in a minute, but I may not now.

[Neil Parish]

Yes, I will carry on with my speech, Sir George; I apologise. On compostable plastic, we need to ensure much better public awareness. We also have to ensure that we collect the material separately and do not mix it with plastic that is not compostable.

I think that if we were to bring in a tax at the source, where plastics are made, that would raise the cost, but those plastics that were genuinely compostable could be made exempt or there could be a reduction in the amount of tax put on that particular plastic. That would ensure that the compostable plastics were more competitive in the marketplace.

The hon. Member for Cambridge rightly went into quite a lot of detail about what we actually need to wrap in plastic. When it comes to meat, fish and things that we want to keep for a long time, we can improve the shelf life by using plastic. We do not want to waste food; that is the last thing we want. We do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so we need to be a little careful. As I have said, we must ensure that we do not waste food. When it comes to those vacuum packs, let us ensure that it is those foods that require a longer life that we concentrate the plastics on.

Other hon. Members have made this point: do we really need potatoes, carrots, onions and all those things wrapped in plastic? Do individual bits of broccoli need to be wrapped in plastic? When we go to the supermarket, the food is almost pre-digested and pre-eaten, before we actually eat it, because it has been prepared so thoroughly. We wash our potatoes, carrots and all those things and then put them in plastic bags. That is all very convenient, but I was told as a boy, “You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die.” I think people would have a job to eat a peck of dirt today, because everything is washed so clean. Carrots, potatoes and all those root crops grow in the ground, believe it or not. They get soil on them, and a little bit of soil—well, I will not diverge from the subject too far, but there is iron in soil. All these things are part of life.

Without getting too romantic and reminiscing too much, we could look a lot more at how we used to eat our food. Not everything will work, and as I have said, we will still need some plastics, so let us make them compostable. Take cheese, for example. Does all of that need to be wrapped in plastic, so that it seems to be made of rubber, and delivered to us? We could have some really good flavoured cheese that is done in a more traditional way; perhaps we could take it home in some greaseproof paper or whatever. Do we need all the plastic and cardboard packaging that is used to package strawberries? For all these things, do we need it?

Another issue that we have not looked at is the glossy leaflets that we receive through the post. They are all plastic-coated. I do not think that the Select Committee will look at this in our inquiry, but when we start looking at something, we suddenly start looking at everything that arrives with different eyes. One of the agricultural merchants sent me a whole thing to do with cattle drenches and goodness knows what, and it was all in a very glossy leaflet, all plastic-coated. That is not necessary. In fact, if we use something that looks more old-fashioned, with old-fashioned print, and put it on some proper paper, instead of a plastic-coated leaflet, it might work a lot better than carrying on with more and more plastic.

[Mrs Main]

We have all become used to seeing huge bales of hay in fields covered in plastic shrink wrap. Does my hon. Friend have a view on that?

[Neil Parish]

If my hon. Friend could guarantee the weather, so that we did not have to wrap the silage because of the rain and could make it all into hay, we could do away with a lot of plastic. She is right that we could use less plastic.

My issue—I will get into trouble with some farmers now—is the amount of plastics in the fields used for growing crops. We are all chasing the early market. We put down more and more plastic, but I wonder whether that is right. The plastic used to wrap those silage bales needs to be properly recycled. I suspect that we could look at the type of materials used, to ensure that they are properly compostable. Of course, one has to be careful to ensure that the acids released in the fermentation of the silage do not dissolve the wrapper. I think that more can be done. Farmers will have to look at that quite seriously. I am sure that the Minister probably does not want to talk about that today, but the farming industry will have to look at that seriously.

I will not carry on talking all day—although I probably could. The hon. Member for Cambridge has brought a very important issue to the Chamber. The real way forward is for the Government, industry and consumers to look at everything we do—the way we live—and ask whether we can carry on with this lifestyle. Do we need as much plastic? Can the plastic we use be properly compostable? If it is not compostable, can we ensure that it is properly recycled? Can we ensure that we collect that plastic in a way that retains the value of the plastic for recycling, rather than turning it into a low-grade plastic?

We can do a lot more. The Government need to consider taxation. I am not a great lover of taxation, but we could tax the overuse of raw mineral plastic made from oil and move people on to compostable plastics. Let us ensure in the future that we use half as much plastic as we do now, and not less than that, that most of it will be compostable and that we genuinely recycle the rest. That way we can use it for good purposes, such as making plastic fencing stakes, which would last forever, rather than rot out. That would be a good use of plastic.

There are many ideas out there. I look forward to the Minister’s response, as well as that of the shadow Minister, who is a good member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. The Minister is making, and will make, an excellent Agriculture Minister.

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[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George, and to participate in this timely debate. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the prevention of plastic waste, I must put it on the record that, as a society, we cannot turn back the clock. I recognise that there is nostalgia for days past, but I really believe that the public would struggle if we tried to get rid of plastic altogether. What we need is to minimise waste from plastic by reusing it wherever we can and ensuring that it is not a throwaway, disposal commodity.

We have got addicted to plastic—we even have chocolates with plastic toys inside. It is so important to slim down the plastic agenda, but we must recognise that some things need to be made of it; I really stress that point, because, if we are not careful, in our desire to take a messianic approach we might end up swapping one problem for another, much as we did when we all embraced diesel cars. We do not want to increase food waste or the number of heavy bottles being transported around the country; we need to decide whether we actually need that packaging, rather than replacing it with something in a different form that might be just as damaging.

St Albans cares deeply about environmental issues and I am grateful to the 464 people from St Albans who signed the petition, because we all need that pressure. I hosted an event on the Terrace with the Coalition for Global Prosperity, which wants to take plastic out of the environment. David Attenborough was the chief guest and was enormously impressive, inspiring the audience in a way that no one else can. One thing he said that stayed with me was that when he was a little boy, his science teacher said, “Boys, you are at the cusp of something really exciting. We have had the ages of stone, iron and steel; now we are in the age of plastic—and it will never, ever go away.” That is our Midas curse: plastic does not go away, so we will have to come up with formulations that make it truly compostable.

We must also ensure that packaging is not mixed. I visited Tesco in my constituency a couple of weeks ago, where the composition of some packaging is so mixed that it makes things very difficult, whether that is the little windows on sandwich boxes or Pringles packets—unfortunately for poor old Pringles, it is seen as one of the worst, with plastic at the end, metal at the bottom and cardboard down the middle. We need to tackle that composite packaging and ask ourselves whether we can work smarter to ensure that our packaging is truly compostable.

We must be realistic. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), whose constituency is a lovely place, mentioned the concerns of farmers. We have moved so far away from natural products that sheep farmers tell me it costs more to shear a sheep than the fleece was ever worth, yet it was not so many years ago that wool was an extremely valuable resource. Now we have plastic in insulation materials, and we put plastic carpets on the floor because they are scrubbable and durable—all the things that we value about it are the flipside of the plastic curse.

We need to look at how to encourage the public to demand less plastic. The plastic that we cannot see is often more injurious than the plastic that we can see. We can be virtuous about seeing bottles and packaging, taking them along to recycling and feeling that we have done our bit, but it worries me that people are washing their Polartec fleeces—sorry; that is a brand, and I know that some fleeces are made from plastic bottles now, but fleecy jumpers and even polyester clothes knock off little bits of plastic into the environment, where it goes into the sea and is ingested by fish, filter feeders and so on. Our beaches are littered with nurdles, which are little tides and drifts of coloured plastic. Because it is indestructible, so to speak—I know that there are compostable variations now—and has been there for such a long time, we have a legacy of plastic. That is what I would like the Government to look at, as much as anything: the legacy of plastic from Governments of years past.

We, the countries of the modern age, have been the worst polluters. Our plastic piles up on shores or beaches and drifts around. That was the focus of David Attenborough’s wonderful “Blue Planet”: people may think that they can scoop up the floating bottles and the job is done, but the reality is that a lot of plastic has become a soup, which is very hard to remove. I would like to see more of our investment in international aid spent on clearing up that soup made from the plastic of years ago. I am all for improving the environmental impact that we are having now, but we cannot rebalance the scales without taking into account the damage that we have all done over the years.

We have become a throwaway society. We throw away clothes that may have been worn only once, which have been produced incredibly cheaply and are often wrapped massively in plastic when they come through the door. We are addicted to online retailing, which often comes with huge amounts of polystyrene around the more delicate items. We have to start looking at how we are shopping as consumers and at how we are living.

This is a massively important debate, but it can make you feel as if your head is going to fall off, because there are so many strands to the plastic story. I am keen to avoid a silo mentality. I applaud the petition for its genuine interest in packaging, but we must also look at the composition of packaging and help businesses to have a much better recycling rate. It seems perverse that in St Albans there are recycling boxes and cartons outside houses, yet businesses have to deal with the waste themselves. We need to incentivise big companies about their packaging and ensure that there is a market for it.

To my shame—although it is nothing to do with me—my constituency has one of the biggest waste tips for supposedly compostable and recyclable wood. The Appspond Lane site has been a disaster over the years because there is plasticised paint on most of the wood that is left there, so there is no market for it; it has sat there as a wet, rotting mountain that catches fire when it exceeds the allowed level. That means that we are kidding ourselves when we put packaging on our doorstep and think that it is being dealt with properly elsewhere.

The hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) mentioned Tearfund, which I hope to do some work with in Bangladesh in September. From the work that I do in Bangladesh, I know that it has an awful lot of plastic packaging but does not have a good recycling industry. We have exported our waste, but not the technology for recycling. When the Department for International Development puts money into countries like that, I would like to see us doing more than trying to stop the tide of waste. There is so much legacy plastic—when we go to those countries, we see rivers, lakes and beaches polluted with it. We need to help countries to increase their recycling, but we also need to cut down our thirst and hunger for plastic in goods and packaging, as well as the legacy plastic that our society has put there.

I welcome today’s debate, which I think will be the first of many. We need to look at how we have got addicted to plastic. At the event that I mentioned, David Attenborough left us with the words that plastic is with us forever. Every time even the smallest bit gets thrown away, we have to remember that it will be there somewhere, and the fact that it may not land on our shores does not mean that it will not land on someone else’s. I really hope that we will hear some joined-up thinking from the Minister today about weaning ourselves off plastic goods, including gratuitous plastic toys given as freebies to small children with meals at certain restaurants, as well as polystyrene foam wraps from fish and chip shops or other outlets.

We have to wean ourselves off plastic, but we cannot expect young mums to do away with disposable nappies. I have met the Nappy Alliance, which is trying to get people to use less plasticised nappies, but there is a huge amount of plastic that we have welcomed into our lives because it stops leaks or protects against things. The amount of clingfilm that we use, some of which is putting gender-altering phthalates into the environment, has concerned me for years. That is why it is thought there has been a rise in the hermaphrodisation of fish, and so on.

Our contact with plastic is huge and in the future people will ask why on earth we did not realise quite how injurious this was, not only to the environment but to those people and animals and plants in the environment that suffer as a result of plastic toxicity. I hope that this debate is part of a joined-up debate, Minister, and that we will all be encouraged today by hearing about lots of different avenues that will be open to us. We should not just be picking up our plastic waste, but cutting off the stream.

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[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) for his excellent speech introducing the debate. As he says, the public determination to deal with the scourge of plastic packaging is overwhelming, and MPs and the Government need to take heed of those concerns and act now.

I also thank all hon. Members who spoke and intervened, and I am delighted that there is a high level of agreement across parties on the issue. I will pick out a few points. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) said that any recycling solutions we introduce need to fit with local authority capabilities. My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) mentioned that there is no point trying to prevent plastic pollution in this country if we do not manage to prevent it in other countries and in their oceans.

The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), in his substantial speech, made the strong point that we can reduce plastic packaging—that that is eminently achievable—but that we need to ensure that the correct plastics are treated in the correct way. He also made the case for a coherent national system, a case with which I very much agree. The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) pointed out the importance of enabling communities to combat plastic litter. The hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) said that we need to recognise the difference between items for which plastic packaging is unnecessary and those for which it is a sensible solution, and the importance of ensuring that compostable plastic really is compostable.

The petition calls for an end to non-recyclable and unsustainable food packaging, and goes on to call for a 100% recycling rate. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge made the point that it is not enough to call for packaging to be recyclable—it has actually to be recycled. Virtually every form of waste could be recycled if the public were able to separate it out, the local authorities were able to collect it, the plant were there to process it, and the manufacturers were willing to use the resulting recyclate rather than cheap raw materials. Some materials are clearly far more easily recycled than others, and when materials can be and are being recycled people need to know that.

[Mrs Main]

Thinking about my Appspond Lane heap of wood, does the hon. Gentleman agree that there has to be a market, some incentivisation to use the recycled goods? Otherwise, they become a valueless commodity; they might be recycled but no one wants them.

[Sandy Martin]

The hon. Lady is exactly right. That is clearly an important part of the entire recycling cycle.

There is no point allowing manufacturers to claim that a package is recyclable when they know that the facilities do not exist, and even less so when the cost of doing so would be ridiculously prohibitive. For instance, it is theoretically possible to recycle the traditional crisp packet, but I believe it currently costs more to recycle it, taking into account the collection costs, than the original cost with the crisps in it. The Government’s strategy paper “Our Waste, Our Resources: A Strategy for England” acknowledges that to a certain extent, but it still refers to targets for making packaging recyclable, so my first ask of the Minister is whether the Government will measure recyclability in future by whether the material is actually recycled, or simply on the basis of a theoretical claim by industry?

My second ask of the Minister is whether the Government will consider a graduated tax on plastic packaging, rather than a flat-rate tax on that which contains less than 30% recyclate. Many manufacturers are already pledging to move well beyond 30% recycled packaging, and I would submit that any regulation that aims to persuade people to do less than they are already doing voluntarily is either pointless or window dressing. Major multinational companies, such as SC Johnson, the American cleaning products company that makes the Ecover brand among others, are already aiming for high percentages of recycled material in all their packaging, and it would be a travesty if the 30% flat rate allowed other less ambitious companies to undercut their prices simply because the tax regime did not incentivise higher rates.

The plastics packaging industry makes various claims trying to minimise the perception of its impact. Plastics do not make up the majority of waste, measured by weight, but neither the climate change impact nor the pollution impact of waste is dependent on weight. Yes, of course, we want a sustainable solution for construction hardcore, but the environmental impact of a tonne of inert mixed rubble is negligible in comparison with the enormous problem that would be represented by a tonne of polystyrene foam or polythene bags.

The feedstock for most plastics is still fossil fuel, and the absolute necessity eventually to bring to an end the consumption of fresh fossil fuels, if we are to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, must include an end to the use of fossil fuels to create plastics as well. The industry proudly insists that 78% of plastics are currently recovered, but that mainly refers to recovery through incineration in energy-from-waste plants. The exact efficiency of the electricity generation varies from plant to plant, and depends on the mix of waste being incinerated, but we can be sure that plastic incinerated in an energy-from-waste plant will generate significantly less electricity than the oil it was made from would have done in a conventional oil-fired power station.

We do not use oil-fired power stations any more, as a rule, because of their unsustainable climate change implications. How much more unsustainable is it to incinerate plastic in an energy-from-waste plant? My third ask of the Minister is whether the Government have any plans to ensure that the proposed extended producer responsibility for packaging production will simply be allowed to subsidise more energy-from-waste plants, or whether they have any plans to ensure that the money is used to incentivise recycling instead?

As the petition makes clear, the public want to be able to recycle their packaging, but the best way to deal with unwanted plastic waste is to not create it in the first place. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge mentioned all sorts of imaginative ways in which mainly small retailers are avoiding the use of plastic packaging, all of which are laudable. However, we need a consistent, across-the-board step change in the way we purchase goods, the way packaging is designed, the materials it is designed from, and the way it is dealt with at end of life. Only a coherent national strategy from Government can achieve that, so my final ask of the Minister is this: will he pledge to ensure that all the good intentions, suggested actions, aims and targets in “Our waste, our resources” are pursued, accelerated where possible, and not shoved into the long grass under the next Prime Minister?

Dealing with our waste will be a crucial part of our ability to deal with the environment and climate emergency that we face. We need to reduce the amount of waste we create, and to reuse our packaging wherever possible and recycle or compost what is left, if we are to achieve zero net emissions by 2050 or stand any chance of maintaining any quality of life on our planet, for ourselves or any other creatures.

Leaving the EU: Fisheries Management

Anne Main Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend has been a consistent campaigner to leave the EU and the CFP. The role that he plays on the Exiting the European Union Committee, as a champion for those who have always argued for that, is exemplary. I strongly sympathise with the concerns that people express about the past record of Governments on the fishing industry. What I would say is that the opportunities that will exist after we leave are considerable, and it is only one year—December 2019—when we will rely on that good faith provision with respect to fisheries. As I mentioned in response to questions from Labour colleagues, if the EU were to choose to act in a way in that year that was against our interests, the consequences that would follow for all would not be happy.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

For decades, EU trawlers have plundered our waters and fished in ways that have caused damage to our marine environment. It seems that the Scottish Government are prepared to accept that situation in perpetuity—[Interruption.] Indeed, we have heard comments that they do not trust the EU for a year; I am afraid I have not trusted the EU in its negotiation strategies over the fisheries policy for a very long time. Can the Secretary of State confirm that we will have greater control not only of our fisheries, but of our fishing processes, which have been so damaging to the marine environment and which a lot of us would be very glad to see an end of?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes two very important points. Yes, it is not just the case that the fishing industry benefits by being outside the CFP; our marine environment also benefits. She also makes a very important point about the Scottish Government. They want to keep us in the common fisheries policy and deny Scottish fishermen the opportunities of leaving the CFP. In that position, their protestations ring hollow this afternoon.

Domestic Ivory Market

Anne Main Excerpts

Monday 6th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I apologise for not being able to attend the debate from the beginning, Mrs Main. I entirely endorse all that the hon. Lady says about the need to clamp down on the criminals who are now killing a precious species, but what she is saying is fundamentally wrong. The value in the ivory products that came from the tomb of Tutankhamun or the royal graves at Ur, or exquisite pieces of Louis XVI furniture, is not in the ivory but in the workmanship and historic context in which they were produced. Given what she says, why, by the same token, does she not call for a ban in the trade in jewels produced from blood diamond activity—the result of the deaths of thousands of human beings, and not just elephants? How is it that we would save a single elephant by not having the 1947 cut-off?

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. Can hon. Members keep interventions brief? We are nearing the end of the debate.

[Rachael Maskell]

I absolutely agree. Blood stones— the fact that we have put our ideas of worth above the natural value of our fellow human beings and animals: that is wrong. The hon. Gentleman missed that very point, about the value we put on antiques versus the value of animals that will not be with us much longer, being made earlier in the debate. That is why it is vital to move on. We will mourn, on the day when elephants no longer roam the savannahs of Africa. We are now at the point when we cannot say that our values—our greed and the fact that we want those objects—are more important than saving elephants. It is important to move on and pick up the pace, rather than delaying and dragging our feet. We must put something in place now—including introducing tougher sentencing, as mentioned earlier. That is an important part of a wider package, as is getting on top of the cyber trade, and making sure that there is infrastructure for policing the elephants’ habitat.

We are dealing with organised criminality and we need to do so with the severity it deserves. Therefore let us move on. The Minister has an opportunity not to drag us forward slowly, following other countries, but to take leadership on the issue again and issue a total ban on ivory. That will make ivory pieces worthless—in the sense that the worth of the elephant will come first. I do not think that she will hear a cry from across the country if we do that. It is an opportunity to lead and I trust that the Minister will do so.

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

I am delighted to be taking part in the debate. I extend my thanks to the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall) and congratulate him on obtaining it.

Like many hon. Members in the Chamber and many people throughout the world, I am deeply concerned about the decline in the population of elephants. The UK Government have committed to a ban on post-1947 ivory, but, as has been pointed out, action has so far been thin on the ground. Today’s debate is the result of a petition with more than 107,000 signatures, calling for a shutdown on the domestic ivory market in the UK. That petition is indicative of the strength of feeling about the barbaric practices that the ivory trade fuels.

Many warm words have been spoken about reducing the trade. In 2015, the US and Chinese Presidents pledged to enact near-complete bans on the import and export of ivory. I sincerely hope that the progress made in the US will not be reversed under the new regime. China has also committed to gradually stopping the processing and sale of ivory for commercial purposes by the end of 2017. That is believed to be extremely significant, since according to experts China buys 70% of the world’s ivory products.

The slaughter, however, continues in horrifying numbers, and it is hard to see, when such barbarity is going on, how the beautiful creatures that are being destroyed can sustain themselves as a species. Ivory dealers employ armed poachers who in turn target entire herds of elephants, shooting them with automatic weapons and hacking off their tusks with axes and chainsaws. The tusks are fed into the illegal international ivory trade, which is controlled by highly organised criminal syndicates. That trade feeds demand for ivory products in Asia, Europe, the USA and elsewhere. It continues to bankroll the destruction of elephants.

The history of the ivory trade is too long and too bloody. Investigations by National Geographic uncovered the fact that elephant ivory is now a key source of funding for armed groups in central Africa such as the Lord’s Resistance Army. National Geographic commissioned the creation of artificial tusks with hidden GPS trackers, which were planted in the smuggling supply chain, starting in the Central African Republic. They averaged 16 miles a day, crossing the border into South Sudan. The price of ivory can rise tenfold as it moves through the supply chain. For a pound of ivory, middlemen in the bush pay poachers anything from $66 to $397. As tusks reach Asian markets their value skyrockets and they are used for carving in art and jewellery.

The savannah elephant has declined by 30% between 2007 and 2014, largely owing to poaching: 144,000 elephants have been lost—about 96 a day. Even in protected areas, such as parks, a huge number of carcases is reported. Embattled park rangers are often the only defence for wildlife and villagers. Increasingly, park rangers speak of being there to protect not just the land and animals but the people who live around the park. Worryingly, studies have shown that more than 90% of ivory in large shipments seized between 2002 and 2014 came from elephants that died less than three years before. That demonstrates that it is not taking long at all for illegal ivory to make it to the marketplace, which testifies to the fact that there are large networks for moving ivory across Africa and out of the continent.

What we need, to stop that horrific practice, is international co-operation. We need it as soon as possible if elephants are to survive as a species. That is how urgent the matter has become. All countries around the world need to introduce a complete ban on the international and domestic ivory trade. As has been said, there was a pledge to do that in the Conservative party’s manifesto, but so far the Government have not acted.

I want to take issue with some things that have been said in the debate, which I and I am sure others listening to it found bewildering, if not chilling. To suggest that a ban on ivory puts us on the same page as the religious fundamentalists who destroyed Palmyra is not only absurd but a little hysterical. The hon. Member for South Antrim (Danny Kinahan) said that that was so. I found it quite distressing when he talked about antiques—trinkets with pretty gold tops. Religious fundamentalists destroyed Palmyra deliberately, but a ban on ivory will not destroy trinkets or important historical pieces. Banning trade in ivory does not mean we lose our history; it means we remove the conditions in which the ivory trade thrives and continues.

The hon. Member for Kensington (Victoria Borwick), to whom I pay tribute for attending and speaking so well while suffering from a malady, spoke about the beautiful historic ivory objects in churches and museums, but I am not convinced that banning the trade in ivory threatens their beauty or intrinsic historical value. It seems from the answer she gave me that if historic artefacts cannot be valued in pounds, shillings and pence, they have no value at all in the eyes of the world. I find that extremely depressing.

I believe passionately that as long as there is an ivory trade of any kind, the illegal ivory trade will continue. We have already heard about the difficulty and the prohibitive cost involved in trying to date an ivory product.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. May I ask the hon. Lady to bring her remarks to a close, as I want to call the Front-Bench speakers at 7.

[Patricia Gibson]

Perhaps I may just address my remarks to the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris), who spent most of the debate trying to get an answer to a specific question about the relationship between a total ban on ivory trading and poaching. If we can get a total international ban, it will make ivory much more difficult to sell. The more difficult it is to sell, the fewer buyers there will be. That will reduce the price of ivory, because there is no one to sell it to.

We need to push for a total ban. Time is running out. The United Kingdom could do something good here. It could lead in this battle and use its international influence. I urge the Minister to tell us what plans she has in that direction.

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[John Mann]

We want to know when—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order.

[Dr Coffey]

It is still shortly, and I really hope it will be as soon as possible.

With regard to the reference to CITES and appendices 1 and 2, I think that I answered this in the December debate. CITES relies on scientific evidence. There is a differentiation between appendices I and II, in terms of the extinction rating in the relevant countries. There was reliable intelligence that if what was proposed went through, reservations would be applied by certain countries, thus destroying the ban by CITES.

Laws are only as effective as our action to enforce them, and the House should be proud of its record and global leadership. Enforcement at the UK border is led by Border Force, which makes ivory one of its top priorities. That is reflected by ivory seizures accounting for 40% of seized wildlife products between 2009 and 2014. One seizure alone in 2015—this was referred to—equated to more ivory than was found in the previous 10 years put together. It was more than 100 kg of tusks, beads and bangles that was en route from Angola to Germany and it was detected here in the UK. Enforcement within the UK is supported by the specialist national wildlife crime unit, which provides intelligence, analysis and specialist assistance to individual police forces and other law enforcement agencies. DEFRA has recently provided additional funding to the unit to help it to crack down on illegal trade via the internet—a growing concern.

The UK also shares its wealth of wildlife crime expertise internationally, including in a recent project providing training to customs, police, corruption specialists and parks authorities in Malawi. That has resulted in increased arrests, convictions and custodial sentences for wildlife offences. Initiatives such as those provide a real deterrent to the perpetrators of wildlife smuggling.

Leaving the EU: Animal Welfare Standards in Farming

Anne Main Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Villiers]

That is well worth considering. A number of constituents have contacted me about it. One has to be certain that there are effective ways of monitoring that CCTV, but we should give serious consideration to further strengthening animal welfare protection in that area.

A task ahead of us is to create a replacement in this country for the common agricultural policy. As we shape a new system of financial support, we have an opportunity to promote a new vision for agriculture, to help our farmers work in ways that restore natural resources in soils, promote biodiversity and maintain the rural environment in good shape for future generations. Continued financial support for agriculture is not just important for the rural economy and for food security. In my view, it is critical if we are to maintain high animal welfare standards.

There are methods that can keep the costs of maintaining animal welfare standards down to a reasonable level, but the reality is that, in many cases, humane forms of agriculture are likely to be more expensive than intensive, industrial production, so agricultural support payments will be needed into the foreseeable future to ensure that food produced with high welfare standards is not priced out of the market by cheaper, less compassionate alternatives.

With that in mind, I urge the Minister to ensure that animal welfare is an important consideration in future trade talks. We should not be afraid to ask those countries that wish to sell into our market to commit to acceptable standards of animal welfare. We would be constrained by World Trade Organisation rules, but my understanding is that it is possible to set standards for animal welfare and comply with WTO obligations as long as a consistent approach is taken to different countries. We all know that in trade negotiations, compromises and trade-offs occur, but the huge importance rightly placed by many people on animal welfare, including a number of my constituents in Chipping Barnet, means that our negotiators should not lightly trade away ethical concerns in exchange for perceived economic advantage in other sectors.

Quality, safety, traceability and compassionate treatment of animals should be at the heart of the UK’s post-Brexit brand for food and farming. I hope that we will see those themes running through the forthcoming Green Paper on this matter. Our new system of farm support should reward farmers who adopt higher welfare standards.

I hope the UK Government and the devolved Administrations consider the following four areas for reform to further strengthen farm animal welfare. Before I set them out, I want to pay tribute to the work of our farming sector. I am well aware that the majority of our farmers take this issue very seriously, and that our farming sector’s record compares well to anywhere else in the world. Many farmers I know go beyond their legal obligations to safeguard the welfare of their livestock, but there is still more to be done.

The first area of reform should be to phase out farrowing crates for pigs and replace them with free farrowing systems. As with sow stalls, which were banned some years ago, pigs about to give birth cannot turn around in those crates. Cramped conditions mean that the sow can barely move and there is not even enough room for her to lie down, much less carry out the nest-building behaviour normally seen in pigs about to give birth under more natural conditions.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I apologise for the late arrival—several of us were caught up thinking there would be a second vote.

Shockingly, two years after those stalls were banned on the grounds of cruelty, six EU countries were still using them unofficially. Our farmers are already being undercut under EU rules by countries that are not compliant with welfare standards.

[Mrs Villiers]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is no point having rules unless they are properly enforced. It is vital to see all countries subject to the rules enforce them properly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs Villiers) for securing the debate.

Brexit is a great opportunity for the UK to enforce more transparency for farm-to-fork traceability to enable British consumers to make more informed choices about what they are buying and what life an animal has had in the production of food. We should therefore focus on a thriving trade for our farmers, because they operate to some of the highest standards. As I pointed out in my intervention, standards for farrowing crates for sows have been flouted in other countries, whereas our farmers obey the rules.

We will have the opportunity to ban the export of certain live animals, such as the live transportation of horses, which I feel very strongly about. Brexit will allow us to protect endangered species from being transited through the UK, and to ban imports of wildlife trophies, body parts and extracts of bodies. It will allow us to have stronger regulation of animal testing and research, banning that which is causing severe suffering.

UK farmers must not be undermined by lower welfare production units operating abroad. It is vital that we get labelling right. I tried to have a debate on labelling. The EU labelling directive is so tortuous that many years are spent achieving little. The traffic lights system on some of our products was voluntary. Italy kicked up a huge stink because it did not want olive oil labelled as a high-fat product, because it felt that that was discriminatory. I think most of us are fully aware of what we are buying when we buy a bottle of oil or a pat of butter.

Leaving the EU will allow us to be able to take things into our own hands. It will allow us to limit the diseases that sometimes come across from other countries. The Schmallenberg virus, for example, is now widespread across much of the EU. It was not made a notifiable disease, despite Governments seeking to limit its spread. As a result, the US banned bovine semen exports from the EU, including from our significant UK export market, despite our stocks being less badly hit. The EU standing veterinary committee operates through a bureaucracy. With foot and mouth disease, its rules caused delayed response times and exacerbated the risk of spread.

We have many, many opportunities within the wildlife sector, the food production sector, the farming sector, the export sector and the labelling sector to take back control in this country and put our farmers at the forefront. We can stop hiding behind rules that are bent by the EU and stop cross-subsidising inefficient farmers in many EU countries that are operating at standards we would not allow in our country.

I welcome this timely debate. Time is short, but the very fact that so many Government Members are taking the matter seriously means that we will certainly have a great deal for farmers in this country post-Brexit.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

Thank you, Mr Hollobone. I apologise for being late. I was given some unreliable intelligence from my Whips about the possibility of a second vote.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs Villiers) on securing this important debate about the importance of animal welfare in farm policy once we leave the European Union. The debate about agricultural policy is often characterised by a tension between agricultural production on the one side and environmental outcomes on the other, and there is often antagonism between the two. Animal welfare, which is the third issue in this debate, is all too often overlooked, but it is of equal importance. The kindness and compassion that we show to animals that we raise for food are a hallmark of a civilised society.

I begin by paying tribute to the fantastic work of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation. My hon. Friends the Members for St Albans (Mrs Main) and for Southend West (Sir David Amess) have been actively involved in that group for many years, and they have done sterling work in the Conservative party. I also pay tribute to individuals such as Peter Stevenson of Compassion in World Farming, who for the best part of 20 years has been a calm and cogent voice of reason in this debate and provided really incisive analysis on some of these issues, and to the progress that groups such as the RSPCA have made to develop assurance schemes that have improved consumer transparency in this area.

The Government made two key manifesto commitments on farm animal welfare: first, to promote animal welfare in international trade negotiations, and secondly, to place greater emphasis on animal welfare in the design of agriculture policy. The Conservative party was the only one of the main parties to put such specific pledges about agriculture in its manifesto. I am heartened to see so many colleagues taking such an active interest in what is a manifesto commitment for this Government.

The UK has a good record on animal welfare. World Animal Protection rates the UK in the upper tier of its league, in joint first place alongside other countries. We led the way in calling for a ban on veal crates, bringing an end to battery cages for laying hens and banning sow stalls.

Several hon. Members—particularly the two Opposition Front Benchers, the hon. Members for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Dr Monaghan) and for North Tyneside (Mary Glindon)—have raised the issue of regulation when we leave the European Union. It is the case that much of the current regulation relating to farm animal welfare and the welfare of animals at the time of slaughter is governed predominantly by EU law. I reassure hon. Members that nothing will change overnight. As the Prime Minister has pointed out, the great repeal Bill will, in the first instance, convert all existing EU law relating to animal welfare on to a legitimate UK legal basis, and we will be free to improve that legislation over time.

It is important that we do not have a “glass half empty” view and say, as some Members often do, “That means you’re going to have a race to the bottom and reduce standards.” There are areas where current EU standards are wanting and we may want to review things. For instance, the latest science raises some concerns about the very prescriptive nature of the gas mix that is used during the slaughter of pigs, and pigs’ aversion to that. There is an argument for revisiting the nature of that gas mixture. It will be easier for us to do that and to improve standards during slaughter once we are free from the European Union.

However, some things will change. The UK will regain its own seat at the World Organisation for Animal Health, or the OIE—an international body that promotes animal welfare standards. While we are in the European Union, it is literally unlawful for us to express an independent view without first getting permission from the European Commission. That will change when we become an independent country again; we will be free to make the case internationally for higher animal welfare standards and share some of our great scientific expertise to help other countries around the world raise their standards too.

[Mrs Main]

Rothamsted in my constituency has been looking into bee decline. We often do not have a voice on scientific advancements such as those to do with neonicotinoids, sprays and pesticides, because our voice is subsumed in the EU voice. I would like our voice to be stronger.

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend is right. I do not want to divert from this debate, but in all the international wildlife conventions, we will regain our voice, our voting rights and our seat at the table.

Most importantly, leaving the European Union gives us the opportunity to deliver the second manifesto commitment that I mentioned at the start of this debate, by placing animal welfare at the heart of the design of future agricultural policy. We should recognise that there are some limits to how far increased regulation can go. As a number of hon. Members have pointed out, there is no point raising standards here so high that we effectively end up exporting our industry to other countries because we have exposed producers here to unfair competition from countries with far lower animal welfare standards.

We are seriously considering the possibility of introducing incentives to encourage and support higher animal welfare standards and different approaches to animal husbandry that can reduce our reliance on antibiotics, improving animal health while delivering animal welfare outcomes. In the past couple of years, a number of countries have been doing interesting work in the area. Denmark has developed a voluntary three-tier system for its pig sector to reward producers who show commitment to higher animal welfare standards. The Dutch have a similar system called “the better life system”.

Germany is particularly interesting. It has something called the Tierwohl system, which financially rewards farmers who adopt standards of animal welfare that go above and beyond the regulatory minimum. I have had representations from organisations such as the RSPCA and others that would like us to explore similar options here in the UK. As part of our policy development, we are considering all those ideas. As I said earlier, we have a manifesto commitment to place greater emphasis on animal welfare in future policy.

I turn to a few of the points made by hon. Members. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet raised the issue of trade and the context of the World Trade Organisation. As a former Minister who understands the issues well, she will know that yes, there are WTO rules. There have been disputes about the degree to which reliance can be placed on animal welfare standards in trade negotiations, but equally, there are legal precedents and case law to support the use of ethical bans on certain practices and the reflection of animal welfare in trade agreements. I do not believe that anything along the lines that we would propose will cause any difficulty whatever with WTO rules.

My right hon. Friend mentioned farrowing crates. It is a complex issue. We led the way in banning sow stalls. I declare an interest: my brother has a pig farm, and raises a rare breed of outdoor pig. There is a danger of sows lying on their piglets; I put it to hon. Members that that is not great for the welfare of the piglet concerned. It is a genuine management challenge, and it is not straightforward. She also mentioned the possibility of offering incentives to encourage free-range systems and perhaps pasture-based grazing systems. Those are exactly the kinds of idea that we are at least willing to consider as part of our work.

Several hon. Members, including the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron), raised the issue of zero grazing. There is some academic research showing that by a small margin, depending on the weather, cows prefer to be outdoors in pastures rather than housed indoors. More importantly—I used to run a farm where we had livestock—any farmer who has turned cattle out to grass in April and watched their reaction knows that cattle prefer grazing, all other things being equal.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) raised trade, which I believe I have addressed. My hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay), a long-standing campaigner on the issue, mentioned live exports, as did others. While we are in the EU, it would be against free movement rules to place an ethical ban on the export of live animals, but once we leave the European Union, we will be free to do so, if that is the decision of the UK Government; there will be nothing to stand in our way. The only thing that I would say is that it is a little more complex than one might think in that we export breeding stock, pigs in particular, and that is a different issue. There are also matters to do with different animals travelling better than others. The area is complex, but certainly one that we would be free to look at after leaving the EU.

Finally, a number of hon. Members mentioned CCTV in slaughterhouses. A report by the Farm Animal Welfare Committee, which advises all the Administrations in the UK, highlighted some of the benefits of CCTV. Method-of-slaughter labelling, however, is contentious. The European Union did some research and we are waiting to see the next steps. We have always been clear that we do not rule out looking at some kind of labelling for method of production or slaughter, although again the issue is complex.

We have had a fantastic debate, with many interesting contributions. I hope that I have been able to reassure Members that the Government take the matter very seriously.

Backbench Business

Anne Main Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

There is no greater expert on African affairs in the House than my hon. Friend, so I am grateful that he has secured the debate. Is he worried, as I am, that Her Majesty’s Government may be underestimating the extent to which the elephant population is declining? In a Government answer on 1 November—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. We must keep interventions short. A lot of people want to speak.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I am most grateful for the intervention, Mrs Main. I agree that we perhaps run the risk of underestimating the problem. I am sure my hon. Friend will say more about it later.

I have been fortunate enough to spend 20% of my life in the beautiful country of Tanzania, and therefore fortunate to see elephants in the wild on many occasions. Tanzania has done a huge amount over the decades to protect wildlife by creating possibly the world’s finest network of national parks and game reserves. I declare an interest as chairman of the all-party group on Tanzania. One park in particular comes to mind. Our family stayed in a hut in the remote Ruaha national park in 1999. We lay awake listening to the noise of an elephant, possibly only two or three feet the other side of the tin wall, munching its way through the night. It was an extraordinary sound.

Of course, human-elephant cohabitation is not always easy. A friend of mine who farms coffee and maize on the outer slopes of the Ngorongoro crater showed us where elephants regularly came down from the forest to find salt. Sometimes they went further down, walking through the coffee, in which they were not interested, to the maize, in which they most certainly were. A herd of elephants could easily polish off a large field of maize in a night.

However, what we are speaking about today is not the result of human-elephant conflict, but the deliberate mass slaughter of elephants by criminal gangs who will stop at nothing—certainly not murder—to profit from ivory. Brave rangers who try to protect the elephants are outgunned and sometimes pay with their lives. Tanzania is estimated to have lost 60% of its elephants in the past five years, particularly in the Selous.

--- Later in debate ---

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. Six hon. Members wish to speak, and I shall be calling for the winding-up speeches to begin a couple of minutes before 4 o’clock. Perhaps the House will bear that in mind, otherwise I will impose a time limit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pauline Latham]

Yes. I am not sure where those figures came from, but other independent people and organisations have come up with much bigger figures, and the problem is escalating. It is not at a flat level or decreasing; it is escalating. They are being killed faster and more frequently.

The illicit wildlife trade is considered the fourth most profitable international crime after drugs, arms and human trafficking. It is worth between $10 billion and $20 billion each year. Ivory makes up a significant proportion of that market, and an estimated 200 to 300 tonnes of illegal ivory enter the global market every year. Given the value of ivory, the brutality directed towards elephants becomes increasingly predictable, although no less despicable. The word “poaching” may conjure up the image of small, individual instances of killing, but the term does not convey the horror of frequent butchery.

In an article in The New York Times, Ugandan Eve Abe describes how, after Idi Amin’s overthrow, both armies involved in the conflict would throw hand grenades at families of elephants and then cut out their ivory. Those armies are no longer present, but to assume that the brutal killing of those animals and the use of the profits to fund terrorist and militia activity have disappeared with them is, unfortunately, incorrect. As long as current UK legislation inadvertently helps ivory trading remain that profitable, the killing will continue.

Tragically, that killing affects more than animals. The Thin Green Line Foundation estimates that around 1,000 wildlife officers have been killed in the past decade. Not all of those deaths will have been due to ivory poachers, but the statistic proves that there is a human as well as an animal cost from the illegal ivory trade market.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. Before the hon. Lady continues with her remarks, I encourage her to finish by at least 3.30, so other hon. Members have a chance to speak.

[Pauline Latham]

Thank you, Mrs Main. I will skip the statistics that I have, although they are important. The Government have an opportunity to make a big difference to the world, not just to Britain. We have an important opportunity to discuss, and ultimately to fight, the appalling slaughter of elephants being driven by the ivory trade. We are seeing the massacre of magnificent animals that face ever-increasing threats from poaching, including potential extinction.

The largest tusks are from the oldest elephants, who are the first in herds to be killed. Elephants live in family units. If the oldest, wisest elephants are slaughtered, the unit is left incomplete, and many of the “teenage” elephants lose their role model. Just like human teenagers, they can run wild. Many of those rogue elephants can become extremely violent. The extension of the domestic ivory ban offers a simple and effective way to protect elephants, and I hope that everyone here will support it.

I have said before in this very hall that, like the hon. Member for Bassetlaw, I fear that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren may never see elephants, given the increasing scale of their deaths. I reiterate that fear today, but I hope that it is the last time I must do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak on this extremely serious subject. I applaud my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) for introducing the debate.

I want to start by telling a story about an experience that convinced me that we absolutely have to do our utmost to protect these precious animals, aside from all the appalling statistics that we have heard today and that many of us know so well. This summer, I was fortunate enough to go to the northern part of Kenya. My husband and I stayed in a camp called Sarara on Namunyak Wildlife Conservation Trust land in 75,000 acres of glorious countryside. Pretty much all the camp’s profits are ploughed back into the community and into protecting the wildlife and habitats of which elephants are a key part.

Let me give some of the background history. The northern districts of Kenya were at the centre of mass elephant poaching in the 1980s: hundreds of elephants were killed for their ivory and the population was virtually wiped out. People soon realised that the wildlife had no future unless the communities themselves could participate in its protection, including by protecting the land, which was becoming eroded and over-grazed. To succeed, a presence had to be established in the bush to deter poachers and protect the elephant population and the local communities had to be convinced that the wildlife was not competition for food but a source of income. Initially, the local herdsmen were provided with radios so that they could report poaching incidents. As time went on, the community began to understand the benefits of having wildlife on their land. Visitors like my husband and I who were interested in the wildlife could be used as a source of income. The Samburu people of Namunyak have learned that, correctly managed, the land can generate a more sustainable income for the community and also protect the elephant herds and their habitats.

On our visit, we were also fortunate to go to the opening of a unique elephant sanctuary that was set up by the people of the community with a lot of guidance from very good consultants and charities working there. It is an elephant orphanage; some of the elephants it gathers up have fallen down wells, but others have become orphans because their parents have been killed by poaching. It is an essential establishment.

I want to highlight a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham): when an elephant is poached, it affects not just that one elephant but the entire herd. Elephants are deeply intelligent and emotional creatures; losing one member can devastate the herd’s whole set-up. It is like a family member being knocked off. Elephants live in fluid, intergenerational, predominantly female herds and flourish under leadership. The matriarch is often the elephant that is killed, because it is the biggest, the grandest-looking and the one the poachers want, and losing it can confuse the herd. Their roaming patterns change and that can be the difference between life and death for elephants. Understanding the deep intelligence of these creatures makes killing them for a tiny part of their body for jewellery even more abhorrent.

There are documented examples of elephants swimming across a river to Namibia by night, where they eat as much vegetation as they can and—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. Could the hon. Lady bring her remarks back to the UK ivory trade? Other Members want to speak; background information is very interesting, but time is short.

[Rebecca Pow]

Thank you, Mrs Main. I will move straight on to the ivory trade; I was just illustrating why it is so shocking and why I am calling for the ban to be extended. A complete ban on all ivory sales would make such a difference to these deeply sensitive and intelligent creatures.

I welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to a consultation, but I gently remind the Minister that a pledge to ban all ivory sales in the UK has been in the Conservative manifesto for some time. I urge her to shed some light on how we might move that forward. I know that many believe in the status quo and the ban on post-1947 ivory to discourage poached ivory arriving in the UK market, but I do not believe that those measures would do the trick. Allowing any ivory trade at all leaves a place for illegal ivory to be hidden. There are ways of making modern ivory look old, as was recognised recently at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s world conservation congress, which voted to close down domestic ivory markets around the world.

Some will argue that we should take care of the small number of antique dealers in this country whose trade potentially relies on ivory. I understand that tests can be carried out to try to prove whether ivory is pre or post-1947, but they are costly and take a long time, and they are often not actually carried out. It falls to the UK’s Border Force to police the ivory trade. Shockingly, over the past five years, 40% of its seizures have been ivory. Good work is also done by the national wildlife crime unit, and I applaud the Government for saving it recently, because its work is invaluable.

I am winding up now, Mrs Main, but you may remember that I mentioned those elephants swimming to Namibia. They swam from Botswana, which is a safe haven because it signed up to the elephant protection initiative. I wonder why, when we are urging other countries to join such initiatives, we do not share their values, join the initiatives and ban our highly damaging domestic ivory market. We can do that quite simply. It would be cheap, and we would have enormous public support. We could prove that, yet again, we are a world leader, and take a stand against organised crime and the dreadful poaching that has had such a terrible knock-on effect in many of the countries we have been discussing. Some good news is that Stop Ivory has commissioned a legal opinion, which states that only secondary legislation would be required for a complete ban to be enacted. I would be happy to share that opinion with the Minister.

To conclude, as I said earlier, I welcome the Government’s consultation on this issue. I urge the Minister to ensure that the Government consult on a ban on all ivory sales so that we can move towards a complete ivory ban. We cannot carry on as we are; it is much too high a price for our precious elephants to pay.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. Before I call Margaret Ferrier, I should inform the other Members who wish to speak that there is now a six-minute limit on speeches.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Borwick (Kensington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I declare that I am president of the British Antique Dealers’ Association. I have also been advised by the British Art Market Federation, the Antiquities Dealers’ Association and LAPADA, which together comprise a group of Britain’s most knowledgeable and highly regarded auction houses and specialist dealers in fine art, antiques and the decorative arts. I hope that this timely debate, secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), will provide an opportunity to discuss a number of misunderstandings.

As the MP for Kensington, my constituency includes antique dealers and institutions containing world-renowned collections of cultural objects—notably, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, all of which have worked ivory and other natural materials in their collections. The V&A houses not only medieval and baroque ivory, but ivory from the early 20th century.

The most important point I need to make is that the antiques trade does not support the killing of elephants, nor does it support any system that allows raw ivory from post-1947 sources to be traded. I emphasise that all the dealers and auctioneers I have spoken to are deeply concerned about the plight of African elephants and deplore their slaughter. They, and the vast majority of antiques collectors, want nothing to do with items made from modern or poached ivory. They welcome the tougher measures proposed by the Minister to remove from sale objects that are little more than tourist trinkets made in the past few decades. Even more importantly, we would all welcome a ban on the export and trading of raw tusks from other EU member states. We have already led the field by banning them ourselves some time ago.

The UK has the second largest art and antiques industry in the world. Collectively, the pool of expertise represented by all those businesses throughout the UK amounts to a resource that is unsurpassed by any other country. Visitors flock to these shores to sell or acquire artworks. Our museums rely on and work with the trade to continue to develop their collections. In fact, at a meeting a few months ago representatives of the V&A explained how they are still enhancing their collections of significant 20th century ivory pieces.

Ivory has been used in European decorative arts for centuries. I have available and can pass around a document compiled by the British Art Market Federation that gives some examples. Antique items containing ivory, such as musical instruments, can be found in the homes of many people in Britain. One of the great misunderstandings about the antiques trade is when people regard all ivory as part of an ivory market; however, the purchaser of a carved ivory medieval Christian diptych who wants the ivory because it is a beautifully worked, culturally and historically significant piece that happens to be made of ivory is not the same as a buyer of modern-day trinkets. To ban the sale of an 18th-century cabinet inlaid with small pieces of ivory, or the sale of an 18th-century portrait miniature painted on a thin sliver of ivory, in order to stop far eastern buyers purchasing contemporary carved Buddhas or trinkets, makes no sense. We need to be intelligent enough to differentiate the two.

The majority of ivory buyers in the far east appear not to be interested in objects of cultural significance. What they want is ivory as a material, and thus we must distinguish between raw tusks and antique objects. In places such as Hong Kong, which is a destination for illegally poached tusks, illicit tusks can be mixed with older tusks, which continue to be exported by some European countries. The EU has plans to introduce a total ban on the export of raw tusks, and the sooner such a ban is implemented the better.

No one has so far demonstrated that genuine antiques containing ivory, of the type sold in the UK and found in our museums, contribute in any material way to the sale of poached ivory in the far east. The World Wide Fund for Nature-backed TRAFFIC report concluded that

“alleged links between the UK antiques trade and the poaching crisis appear tenuous at best”.

In conclusion, the antiques trade in the UK has made it clear that it welcomes working with my hon. Friend the Minister to develop the further regulations that may be necessary to remove from sale post-1947 items, which will effectively be a ban, because it is very important that we all understand the difference. We all welcome greater checks to ensure that only genuine antique items are sold—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I call Dr Lisa Cameron.

[Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mrs Main. It is also an absolute pleasure to speak in such a profound—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I apologise; I am sorry. I call Fiona Bruce for the last few minutes before the Front-Bench speeches. Sorry about that.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

Thank you, Mrs Main.

On 24 September 2016, the third annual global march for elephants and rhinos took place, with people from 140 cities worldwide uniting to call for a ban on the trade in ivory and horn, and to demand that action be taken to end the irretrievable damage caused by the acquisition and trade of ivory. I commend the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) for securing the debate and support him in his call for Members to recognise the irrevocable damage that will be caused both to elephant species and to individuals’ livelihoods if action is not taken.

I particularly commend the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham). She articulated so well how a near-total ban on ivory trade is the way ahead. I very much support such a ban and, as I say, she expressed very well how an “intelligent” differentiation can be made, to use the word of my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Victoria Borwick), between museum pieces and genuine antique objects and other ivory, so that we can not only ensure that there is that distinction but at the same time put an end to and cut off the source of funding for the brutal killers who are poaching elephants in Africa and elsewhere.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire mentioned, a survey of elephants in August 2016—the great elephant census—showed the severe fall in the number of African elephants. The figures that have been mentioned in the debate vary, but it is clear that there has been a severe decline. If the current level of poaching in Africa continues, elephants could be all but extinct by 2030, and certain species will experience an extreme decline even earlier. For example, the African forest elephant has declined by 65% since 2002, giving it only another decade before extinction. The gravity of the need to act on the ivory trade is undeniable.

However, the different species of African elephants are not the only victims of the ivory trade. I saw that on a visit to Tanzania about two years ago, when I was privileged to be invited to go on a safari. We saw many, many animals, but we saw no elephants, and the guide explained to us that the decline in elephants was a serious deterrent to tourists visiting the area, which would have an increasing impact on the jobs and livelihoods of the people living in that area unless something was done.

Those of us on the International Development Committee —including my hon. Friends the Members for Stafford and for Mid Derbyshire, and others who are here today—know that this is a critical issue to be addressed in Africa today, particularly for the younger generation. I particularly ask that the Department for International Development considers whether there is more that it could do to support those dealing with this issue in the countries in which we are spending UK aid.

The responsibility that Britain must take in tackling the ivory trade cannot be ignored. The domestic market means that there is a transition point in the UK for the trading of ivory, with import and re-export occurring. Between 2009 and 2014, 40% of seizures by the UK Border Force were of ivory items.

There has been some progress. I am pleased to see the Government’s commitment to doubling their £13 million investment to tackle the illegal ivory trade and the endeavour to train a British military anti-poaching force. Those are bold and leading measures to tackle the problem, but more must be done. I join other Members in asking the Government to take further steps to close the ivory market, in order to rid Britain of the status of a transitionary market for the trade of ivory, and to impose a near-total ivory ban.

In recent years, international collaboration has been very encouraging. I welcome the announcements by the USA and China within the past year regarding the banning of the ivory trade, and more recently the announcements by Hong Kong and France. I urge the Government to join that international movement and to recognise the urgency of action on the ivory trade. Without a near-total ban on the ivory trade in the UK, we will neglect not only to counteract the rapid decline of African elephants but to support the livelihoods of many people in developing countries who have been crippled by the ivory market. It would be to the shame of our country, and indeed our Government, if we lagged behind other countries that are currently taking a lead on tackling this issue.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

I call Dr Lisa Cameron. As the Scottish National party spokesman, the hon. Lady has 10 minutes. I apologise for getting her jumping to her feet a little earlier.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Cameron]

Yes, I would like the Minister to explain in detail what the Government mean to do on the issue.

The hon. Member for Kensington (Victoria Borwick) gave a perspective from her constituency regarding antiques dealers and museums. She indicated that antiques dealers would welcome tough measures on the sale of ivory and are aware of the plight of the elephant population across the world. They advocate a ban on the export of tusks.

The hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce)—I nearly made my speech before she had even had a chance to speak—made a measured speech, as always. She emphasised the severe decline in the elephant population and spoke about the International Development Committee’s work, to which she has dedicated herself. She raised the important issue of jobs and livelihoods and asked that the Department for International Development does more to protect wildlife in the countries in which it is active.

This year, my two-year-old daughter saw an elephant for the very first time. It was an amazing experience that she will never forget, and I want future generations of children to be able to behold that sight. Time is of the essence. We must act now. If we do not, elephants could face localised extinction. In some African countries, including Senegal, Somalia and Sudan, elephants have already been driven to extinction. Communities across Africa are dependent on elephants for income through tourism, so saving elephants also means preventing poverty, sustaining livelihoods and promoting sustainable tourism.

Elephants are a key species in the ecosystem, and many other animals rely on them for survival. Elephants are nature’s gardeners. Plants and trees rely on them to disperse seeds. Elephants, as has been mentioned, are intelligent and emotional. They grieve for lost ones and feel fear and joy. We must stem demand for ivory from consumer countries. That is fundamental to the survival of the species. Up to 100 elephants are killed by organised criminals every day. In the past 10 years, 1,000 rangers have been killed by poachers.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. Will the hon. Lady bring her remarks to a close? There are two Front Benchers still to go.

[Dr Cameron]

We need conviction rates and justice systems to be strengthened.

I ask that we protect and preserve elephants for the world. If the UK Government do not take steps to act on such a fundamental issue, we must question their fitness to represent the United Kingdom across the world.

Equine Slaughterhouses (CCTV)

Anne Main Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)]

I thank the hon. Lady for securing the debate. I am unsure whether hon. Members are aware of this, but there are no abattoirs in Scotland licensed for the slaughter of horses. None the less, the wider issue of animal welfare at abattoirs is important to many people north of the border. At the SNP conference in the autumn—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Lady is making a speech. Her intervention should be brief.

[Margaret Ferrier]

I am coming to my question—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. Will the hon. Lady sit down when she is being brought to order? “I am coming to my question” is not an adequate response. She is taking too much time from the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts). She should ask a brief question.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Does the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) agree that the provision of CCTV is vital in ensuring that animals are protected prior to their slaughter?

--- Later in debate ---

[Christina Rees]

I definitely do not want the hon. Gentleman’s horses to be eaten. I watched a TV documentary on slaughterhouses as a teenager, and it turned me into a vegan; I have not eaten meat all my life. I support the campaign, because I think that any exposure of slaughterhouses would be beneficial, and I support CCTV cameras in—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Lady is making a speech, not asking a question of the hon. Member speaking.

[Mr Gray]

I accept what the hon. Lady says. A couple of experiences that I have had in slaughterhouses over the years have nearly made me, the biggest beef-eater in Parliament, a vegan. It is a revolting sight, and I would certainly not want to see my horse taken there and slaughtered. However, she makes an extremely good point, which is that the only horses that go to horse slaughterhouses are those destined for the food chain. Other horses do not. Ninety-five per cent of horses are not destined for the food chain, and could not go there. There is a bigger issue. I always argue that we ought to abolish equine slaughterhouses in the UK altogether, thereby sending no meat at all into the human food chain, although I accept the animal welfare downside to that as well: where would those ponies and horses then go?

My message to the Minister is that we must avoid making one thing that we do—introducing compulsory CCTV into slaughterhouses—the enemy of the best. We must address the huge animal welfare concerns about horses, particularly about the large number of unwanted horses abandoned across our land, which is growing as we speak. Those horses will never go anywhere near an equine slaughterhouse, and the provision of CCTV in such slaughterhouses will therefore not help them even slightly at the end of their lives.

I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say, and congratulate the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd on obtaining the debate. I hope that she does not feel that I have in any way lessened the thrust of her argument, which was very powerful. None the less, I hope that one result of this afternoon’s debate will be that the Government begin to listen and think more carefully about the wider welfare issues that affect horses across our nation.

Badger Culling/Bovine TB

Anne Main Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this matter to the Chamber. I presume that many hon. Members have a different opinion from him. In Northern Ireland, there has been a five-year programme costing some £5 million. After trapping, testing and vaccinating badgers and removing any that tested positive, it was decided this year for the first time—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. Will the hon. Gentleman make his point very briefly?

[Jim Shannon]

It was decided after five years of deliberation that diseased badgers must be culled. What does the hon. Gentleman think about the position in Northern Ireland?

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Monaghan]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that information. However, it does not address the fundamental point that killing badgers is not helping the situation, either.

Following the introduction in Wales of the regime that I have just identified, the incidence of tuberculosis in cattle has declined sharply: a 30% decline over a 12-month period was recorded in 2012. The sharpest fall was in the area where the disease was at its worst. In Dyfed, 36% less cattle were slaughtered over two years, with a saving to the taxpayer of £6.5 million in compensation, and of course untold misery was avoided.

It is the case that 84% of the public are against badger culling. Like scientists, the public know that culling badgers is cruel, unjustified and expensive. It divides rural communities, damages the balance of nature and perpetuates disease. It gives false hope to farmers and sets a dangerous precedent that we can ignore this disease. Minister, look to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Recognise the importance of cattle welfare and husbandry. Combine that recognition with rigorous blood testing regimes and effective movement controls to reduce the risks of cattle-to-cattle transmission, and introduce a centrally co-ordinated comprehensive badger vaccination policy in high-risk areas for bTB in England. Start to reduce the incidence of this dreadful disease and stop the regressive and medieval practice of badger culling, which diminishes our collective humanity.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

As of now, I am imposing a two-minute limit on speeches.

--- Later in debate ---

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Dr Monaghan) on securing this important debate and on the clear and robust way he opened it. Like many MPs—I think there were 36 here at the start of this debate—I have received much correspondence from constituents about badger culling. My constituents feel outraged and upset that the Government are continuing with the programme of culls. Many say that the badger cull is cruel, costly and ineffective and I agree with them.

We have heard in this debate—this is one of the key points I want to make—that the Government have failed to take account of scientific evidence and advice on this matter. Culling is expensive, ineffective and in some cases is not being carried out in a humane way. The previous Labour Government carried out a 10-year randomised trial on badger culling, which concluded that culling will not achieve a lasting reduction in bovine TB. Indeed, the trial found that culling risked making things worse for farmers in neighbouring areas. I understand that new evidence released this year has called into question the likelihood of direct transmission of the disease from badgers to cattle.

As we have heard, the Government have failed to take scientific advice and assessments into account. An assessment of the first year of the pilot culls by an independent expert panel was highly critical of the Government’s practices and policies. David Macdonald, the former chief scientific adviser to Natural England, described the culls as an “epic failure”. The pilots raised significant concerns that badgers were being shot inhumanely, and the way the culls had been carried out meant that there was no chance that they could be effective, with a number of culls failing to achieve their targets.

Instead of reviewing the culling programme and accepting that other forms of intervention were necessary to prevent the spread of bovine TB, the Government disbanded the expert panel and continued with the culling programme. Professor Tim Coulson described the Government’s approach as “wilfully” ignoring the concerns of their own scientists. I think that is appalling.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Lady has a few seconds to conclude her remarks.

[Barbara Keeley]

Yes, indeed. I will end with the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) made: there are two important questions for the Minister to answer, particularly in the light of what I just said. When will we have a thorough and independent assessment of the two pilot culls? And when will the Government assess the research on transmission?

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Wollaston]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

I am afraid that the hon. Lady cannot give way because the Minister must be called and we need a minute for Dr Monaghan to sum up.

[Rachael Maskell]

New measures need to be introduced on biosecurity and testing, and we have heard about the gamma interferon test, which has a far higher level of accuracy but is not being widely used. The DIVA test is coming on board, and it will clearly differentiate between infected cattle and vaccinated cattle. We understand that that will be ready in about five years’ time. We need to look at the vaccination programme and build up vaccine stock.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

I ask the hon. Lady to bring her remarks to a close.

[Rachael Maskell]

Of course. Farmers continue to pay the price for a lack of evidence-based policy making. The Government are using a one-pronged approach. We need to see scientific evidence and a proper biosecurity strategy at the heart of addressing bovine TB.

Badger Culls (Assessment)

Anne Main Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[Chris Williamson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct in his summary of the position. Of course bovine TB is a dreadful illness, but the way in which the Government have gone about tackling it is precisely the wrong thing to do and is likely to be making matters worse. I do not understand why they are ignoring the overwhelming scientific view that the badger cull should be abandoned and a different approach taken.

I was referring to the opinion of the chief scientific adviser to Natural England, who described the cull as an “epic failure”, and was about to ask, what did DEFRA do in response to such overwhelming criticism? It simply changed the methodology. That was described by one badger expert, Professor Woodroffe, as “very crude”. She went on to say that the Government targets

“are all rubbish because they are based on rubbish data”,

and that

“with the data that is being collected, it will be impossible to know how effective this year’s culls have been.”

The Government did not like the conclusions of their independent expert panel, so they moved the goalposts again by disbanding it, but the new Secretary of State says that the outcome of the latest culls will determine whether there will be a roll-out across the rest of the country.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. Is he aware that the BBC is reporting today that a journal of the British Ecological Society has offered to assess the trials independently, in the light of the fact that the independent panel has been disbanded?

[Chris Williamson]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that intervention. It is important that there is independent assessment of the culls, as there is a real fear of a lack of trust if there is no independent assessment of their effectiveness. We cannot leave it to the Government to determine whether culling has been effective because, as we have seen, they simply ignore the wealth of evidence put before them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

It is a delight to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton. I congratulate the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) on keeping up the impetus on this difficult subject.

Across the House, the majority of Members believe that we should tackle TB humanely and effectively. That includes the issue of how we deal with what is seen to be a contributory factor to the problem, namely the spread of TB by badgers. I am a convert to the cause and was pleased to lead the debate in March that showed overwhelmingly that the will of the House was to come up with a better way of controlling TB. I do not think that the House ever intended to control it by inflicting cruelty on another species, while potentially making the problem worse.

On 7 July I chaired a panel discussion with members of the Badger Trust and Care for the Wild, the director of the Humane Society International, an ecologist and habitat and species specialist, and Dr Tim Coulson, a member of the independent panel of experts. The IEP was unhappy that it could not continue with its work. On top of that, Dr Coulson said that he had asked Whitehall officials about a meeting with the Secretary of State but that request was not followed up.

On 16 July I wrote to the Secretary of State asking her to meet the IEP. The Minister replied on 16 August—over a month later—stating that meetings would be considered on a “case by case basis” and that the Department was

“in dialogue with leading vets and scientists”.

Why has it not, as far as I know—unless the Minister corrects this—met the IEP? Anecdotally, Dr Coulson has told me that the Secretary of State replied to his request by saying that she was terribly busy and unable to find a date. Has the Department still not been able to do so?

How can the public have confidence in the Government if the culls are not independently monitored? As I pointed out in my intervention on the hon. Member for Derby North, there has been a kind offer of independent monitoring by the British Ecological Society. Will the Government consider taking that up? I would like to hear an answer to that today. I gather that there would be no cost to the Government. If the Government are to have confidence that they can take the public with them on this subject, which polarises opinion and creates strong passions, they should be able to explain their actions in a way the public understand. The public could then at least find a reason to support those actions, even if in their hearts they do not support the idea of some animals having to be killed to control the disease.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I apologise for having come to the Chamber very recently, Mr Caton; I have been chairing a committee on prison education.

In DEFRA questions last week I saw a glimmer of light, as the Secretary of State said that she absolutely believed in the appliance of science to most of the topics we were talking about, including losing our birdsong in this country. If we apply that to the situation with badgers, there is a small possibility that someone at DEFRA might be waking up to the idea that we need science and proper independent evaluation.

[Mrs Main]

I hope that I am correct in interpreting what the hon. Gentleman says as meaning that if the Secretary of State was listening to the science, the Government would take a different route. Unfortunately, the science—the results of the trials—does not bear out the hope that there was when the trials were agreed. It is important that we do not have a roll-out based on two failures. We should not consider rolling out any Government policy on the basis of two test runs, whether it is a proposed benefits package or something like the poll tax. Surely we should learn from our failures and not roll out a failure elsewhere.

[Bill Wiggin]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mrs Main]

I certainly shall give way to the branch of the NFU that is my hon. Friend.

[Bill Wiggin]

I am most grateful for that tremendous compliment. I suspect that if the NFU had its way, the schemes would not be pilots but would be rolled out into all areas where there is a high incidence of TB. If the science is so important—I suspect that the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) feels it is—will my hon. Friend take this opportunity to condemn the people who are sabotaging these experiments?

[Mrs Main]

I absolutely condemn anyone who sabotages experiments, and I condemn anyone who puts any of our armed forces, police or anyone else involved, including protesters, in any danger. However, my hon. Friend must accept that passions are running high because logical arguments are being made in various debates and by panels that I have chaired, but people are not listening. If we are to prevent sabotage, which is obviously a last resort for some people, we must ensure that genuine concerns are listened to.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I went down to Somerset recently to meet some of the people monitoring the culls. They are there not to sabotage them, but to ensure that the rules are obeyed and that badgers are not shot and left wounded to die slowly and painfully. They are there to ensure that the rules are kept. I met a farmer who did not want to take part in the cull pilot, but wanted to vaccinate her cattle. She had to stand guard at midnight at the gates to her farm to stop people coming on to her land and trying to shoot badgers. It is wrong to categorise anyone who protests against and monitors the culls as trying to sabotage them. They are just trying to ensure fairness.

[Mrs Main]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. Other hon. Members want to speak, so I will not labour the point, but my constituents, who have written to me in their hundreds, have lost confidence in the rationale and the way the problem is being tackled. No one is disputing that there is a problem, but we still do not know how many badgers were killed after having been cage-trapped, when that was expressly excluded originally.

I do not believe that the Government’s method of choice will deliver what the farmers and the Government want, so we must look at the matter again. I for one, and hundreds of people in St Albans who care about the humaneness of the approach, believe that the Government are foolish not to listen to two failures. I do not accept that activists have ruined the trials; I suspect that the badger does not wish to comply with the trials, that the marksmanship has not been up to the job, and that the original premise of using free shooting instead of cage shooting was never a realistic means of dealing with the problem. We must come up with an alternative proposal, and I suggest that cattle movements, vaccination and other methods that do not inflict cruelty on another animal species are the way forward.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[George Eustice]

We are making progress. In fact, we have been talking to an accreditation organisation about whether we could get farmers to sign up to a package of measures to improve biosecurity, including keeping badgers away from their farmyards, for example, to try to reduce the spread of the disease.

There is a misunderstanding about the IEP. Last year, the IEP was not out in the field in the middle of the night with binoculars to observe the culls. That was done by Natural England staff last year, and they did it again this year in the same way. The IEP did not carry out the post-mortems on badger carcasses last year. It was done by the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency, both last year and this year. The IEP had a one-off role last year in informing us of how we should treat the raw data that came from AHVLA and Natural England. The IEP was not in the field; it was a desktop exercise. The IEP completed its work, and we do not need to repeat it this year. Do we need the British Ecological Society to repeat what the IEP did last year? No, we do not, because that job was done and completed last year, and this year we have a process that will be audited. If the British Ecological Society has an opinion, it can express a view on this very detailed, 34-page report. People like Professor Woodroffe say that they do not agree with the report, but they have yet to explain why.

[Mrs Main]

Will the Minister give way?

[George Eustice]

I will not give way, because I want to get through as many other points as I can. My hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) and others highlighted the situation in Wales and the limitations of vaccination. He is right that it is wrong to read too many conclusions into the fall in incidences of the disease in Wales. The vaccination trials in Wales cover only about 1% of the land area. We are running our own vaccination trials in the edge area. I have met a number of wildlife groups to discuss taking that project forward to check the spread of bovine TB, so vaccination has a role in fighting this disease. Vaccination is part of the Government’s strategy.

My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) mentioned the inaccuracy of the skin tests. We know that the test is only about 80% effective, but where we have a serious breakdown, we often use it in conjunction with the gamma interferon test, which has fewer false negatives but a few more false positives. We can use that where we deem it necessary. The shadow Secretary of State mentioned that the RBCT proves that culling does not work, but that is not the case. The RBCT actually proves that, at the end of the four-year cull period, there was an improvement in the number of breakdowns.

I finish by reminding hon. Members that we have the worst bovine TB situation in the developed world. We cannot let that continue if we want competitive, productive and profitable beef and dairy sectors. Other countries that have faced similar problems, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) pointed out, have demonstrated the route to long-term disease freedom. They show us that addressing the risks posed by wildlife must be part of any coherent and comprehensive approach to tackling this disease.

We now have a very clear strategy for achieving our goal of official TB-free status in England. The approach includes deploying tighter cattle measures, strengthening biosecurity, and vaccinating badgers to prevent the disease from spreading from the TB high-risk area to the edge area. Unlike the Opposition, we are clear that any coherent strategy to eradicate TB must include measures to address the disease in wildlife in TB hot spots. We will continue to use all options available to us today to fight this dreadful disease, which has been out of control for 20 years. Doing nothing is no longer an option, which is why we intend to stick with this strategy.

Migratory Birds (Malta)

Anne Main Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2014 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

Following on from that point, does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that from 1 April this year, the penalties for illegal shooting in Malta were multiplied by 10? I welcome that. I lived in Malta and I fully understand that there is still a hunting party out there, which needs bringing to heel. Secondly, just yesterday—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. May I ask that in a half-hour debate Members keep their comments very short?

[Andrew Miller]

I promise you, Mrs Main, that I will be very quick.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I call Sir John Randall.

[Sir John Randall]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman and pleased to hear about the increased penalties, but the point is that penalties have to be enforced. Earlier, he was telling me that the Maltese are taking action. If that is so, that is welcome news and I wait to see what happens.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir John Randall]

I believe there are three minutes left, Mrs Main—

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I am afraid that as the Minister has concluded his remarks, the sitting stands adjourned, Sir John.

Question put and agreed to.

Badger Cull

Anne Main Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that the pilot badger culls in Gloucestershire and Somerset have decisively failed against the criteria set out by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in guidance to Natural England for licensing of the culls, which stipulated that 70 per cent of the badger population should be culled within a six-week period; notes that the costs of policing, additional implementation and monitoring, and the resort to more expensive cage-and-trap methods over an extended period have substantially increased the cost of the culls, and strengthened the financial case for vaccination; regrets that the decision to extend the original culls has not been subject to any debate or vote in Parliament; further regrets that the Independent Expert Panel will only assess the humaneness, safety and effectiveness of the original six-week period and not the extended cull period; and urges the Government to halt the existing culls and granting of any further licences, pending development of alternative strategies to eradicate bovine TB and promote a healthy badger population.

I thank you for your gracious comments, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am sure that the debate will be very well attended and, bearing that in mind, I hope that colleagues will accept that I will not be taking any interventions during my opening remarks. I know that the many right hon. and hon. Members here today will make this a lively and impassioned debate.

This is a timely debate, coming before any further roll-out of the culls, and particularly in the light of concerns being raised from many quarters about the culls. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting a full day’s debate and vote on the Floor of the House. I have received a large amount of cross-party support for this debate. It is important to note that this is not a matter of one side of the House versus the other. The House wants a chance to vote on this issue and I have made repeated calls for it to be brought back before the House. I tabled my first early-day motion on 25 June last year calling for the matter to return, and 149 Members from both sides of the House supported it. I then tabled another on 31 October asking for a return, which attracted 107 Members. In a well-attended Westminster Hall debate on 11 Dec, I pleaded with the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), to bring the matter back before the House. Well, I have brought it back, with the support of many colleagues of all political parties. I hope that colleagues today will examine their consciences and try to do the right thing. I know that this is not an easy subject, and that feelings are running high on both sides, but we must not be seen just to be doing something, if we are now convinced that the facts and evidence indicate that we might have taken the wrong approach.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mrs Main]

I am sorry, but I have indicated that I will not be taking interventions.

The public might be surprised to learn that the Minister can instigate a cull without having to get the consent of the House. Consequently, there has been no substantive vote in Parliament proactively to adopt a culling strategy. Instead, we have merely had two votes not to adopt one. The two votes on the subject took place in Opposition day debates on 25 October 2012 and 5 June 2013. The most recent vote in the House of Commons, on 5 June, was 299 to 250 against the motion:

“That this House believes the badger cull should not go ahead.”

As the House can see, even in an Opposition day debate, the vote was a close one—and that was before we had gleaned all the information about the underperformance of the culls.

We all accept that the House has had an uneasy relationship with this topic, but we should not be here today to score political points or to try to rehash history. We should be here to examine our current position in a cross-party fashion and to give a strong steer to the Minister as to the next steps we believe he should take. I believe, as I am sure many other hon. Members do, that we should halt the culls and not issue any more licences until a full examination of the failings has been taken into account. That is what the debate is for; it is not a blame game. It is a recognition that hon. Members might wish to change their minds based on the change in facts.

There is great sympathy with farmers who have experienced heartache and hardship over losing cattle and precious stock to bovine TB. There is also regard for how we as a society treat all animals, but in particular a protected species. This tension has divided the House. I believe that many lent their support to the concept of tackling bovine TB with this strategy, but they did not give their Government permission to carry on regardless—regardless of humaneness, effectiveness or cost.

Performance criteria for the pilot culls were set by the Government, and they were not arbitrary, but intended to reassure hon. Members and the public that what was being done was an effective way of tackling bovine TB infections and was, crucially, humane. The reason for the 70% kill target within a six-week period was specifically drawn so that sufficient badgers would be killed to ensure that they did not simply go elsewhere, thus spreading the TB more widely.

This approach reflected extensive research carried out by Professor Woodroffe in trials in the 1990s, which showed that a failure to kill this percentage in a narrow window of time could worsen matters as disturbed diseased animals took TB to new areas. Analysis commissioned by the Government found that the number of badgers killed according to the criteria fell well short of the target deemed necessary, despite the cull being extended and cage shooting being used. We must face up to the fact that this House, if we persist and simply roll out more free-shooting culls, may be contributing to an increase in TB in cattle.

The humaneness test set by Ministers was to ensure that no animal suffered needlessly a protracted, agonising death. Badgers were supposed to be free-shot quickly, efficiently and, importantly, cost-effectively. It is now understood, however, that between 6.4% and 18% of shot animals took more than five minutes to die, and sometimes even as long as 10 minutes or longer. In order to avoid suffering, the standard to be met was that no more than 5% of shot badgers should take more than five minutes to die. An independent expert panel was appointed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to help Ministers to evaluate, against the Government’s own criteria, the effectiveness, humaneness and safety of pilots, and its conclusions are damning.

[Mr Harper]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker—[Interruption.] Will Opposition Members listen to my point of order? I have been listening carefully to my hon. Friend quoting figures from an independent report. Are you aware, Madam Deputy Speaker, whether that independent report has been placed in the Library of the House or on the Table, so that hon. Members taking part in the debate may reference it? I was not aware that the report had been published.

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. That rule applies to Ministers; it does not apply to a Back Bencher addressing the House.

The matter is now at an end. The hon. Member for St Albans is referring to the report, which may come up and be debated for the rest of the afternoon; it is not for the Chair to rule on where the report ought to be. The hon. Lady is quoting from it, and I am sure that Members will listen carefully to what she is saying. They will then be able to deal with her points, with or without the report before them.

[Mrs Main]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I know that passions are running high in this matter.

My hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) must be psychic, because my next words were to be that no one appears to be disputing the comprehensive but leaked report. Whatever the detail, the dispute is about whether we pursue a failed policy, or adopt a new one.

As Professor Rosie Woodroffe, a scientist at the Zoological Society of London, said, the

“findings show unequivocally that the culls were not effective”.

I know that hon. Members say, “We haven’t seen the reports”, but that is not in dispute, unless the Minister whose desk the report has landed on says that it is not in the report. If so, I look forward to hearing it, but I believe what has been widely reported in the media after being leaked comprehensively.

I hope that the Secretary of State will now focus on other ways of eradicating TB in cattle. If predictions of the findings in the report are borne out, the cull

“has cost a fortune and probably contributed nothing in terms of disease control, which is really unfortunate.”

Those are the words of Rosie Woodroffe.

I am personally disappointed that a DEFRA spokesman has recently said:

“We knew there’d be lessons to be learned from the first year of the pilot culls which is why we’re looking forward to receiving the panel’s recommendations for improving the way they are carried out.”

If the House notes those comments carefully, it cannot hear the sound of any culls being stopped, but simply of them being improved. In other words, we are committed to finding a better killing strategy—[Interruption.] I am sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker, that is my phone—someone who obviously does not respect the—[Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. In these unusual circumstances, this incident will be overlooked. As I said at the beginning of the debate, these are unusual circumstances; no other Member may take this as a precedent.

[Mrs Main]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Perhaps it was a badger ringing me up and willing me on.

If the House notes the comments, it will hear talk not of culls being stopped but of their being improved. The Government do not have carte blanche to carry on regardless. Hon. Members may dispute the report and whether it has been leaked, but the Government do not have unconditional support to continue with a failed approach, in particular one that causes suffering to a protected species. As Robin Hargreaves, President of the British Veterinary Association said:

“We have always stated that if the pilots were to fail on humaneness then BVA could not support the wider roll out of the method of controlled shooting”.

There are colleagues who share those views.

The pilot culls were supposed to demonstrate a minimum of 70% of badgers killed within six weeks. Despite the badger population estimates being sharply cut and the culls being extended, both pilots failed to meet the minimum 70%. When both trials duly failed to kill sufficient badgers within the specified period, they were extended on the advice of the chief veterinary officer, Nigel Gibbens. The panel’s widely leaked report, although still disputed today, concerns itself with the initial six weeks. This extended the misery, the cost and, if we accept the time scales based on the original pilot criteria, the range of TB spread due to perturbation.

Do we continue with cruel practices licensed by the Government in order to be seen to be doing something? DEFRA agreed with an expert group the criteria for how the trials could be deemed humane. It was DEFRA’s rules, not some arbitrary figures plucked out of the air. Mark Jones, vet and executive director of the Humane Society International of the UK, said:

“The government’s boast that all badgers were killed cleanly and killed instantly is clearly not true. We fear many badgers may have suffered significant pain and distress.”

Andrew Guest, from the National Farmers Union, said of the revelations: “It doesn't sound good”, but added that it was important that a significant number of badgers had been removed.

Simply getting rid of lots of badgers, regardless of cost, pain or effectiveness, was not the criterion set down by the Government. That is not a good enough reason for this House to support ongoing culls. This House wishes to tackle bovine TB efficiently, effectively and humanely. That is why we need to stop the failed cull policy, not grant any further licences and come up with a better method to tackle TB without inflicting pain and misery on an endangered species. The badger culls were condemned as “mindless” in 2012 by Lord Krebs, who commissioned the 10-year study. The extensions to the culls were criticised by Natural England’s lead scientific director, Sir David Attenborough, and the National Trust.

We acknowledge the devastation inflicted on farmers and cattle by the scourge of bovine TB. This should not be about the House abandoning their plight, but neither can we ignore the plight of the badgers. Monitoring reports from England’s wildlife watchdog, Natural England, apparently seen by The Guardian and perhaps hotly disputed by some hon. Members, show that a third of the badgers were shot in the wrong part of the body. Apparently, badgers are very hard to shoot, although I would not know as I am not a marksman. Two out of nine badgers had to be shot twice, having not died instantly.

Professor Woodroffe, who worked on a landmark 10-year study of badger culling, said the conclusion to be drawn was simple:

“The pilot culls have not been effective.”

She questioned the multi-million pound cost of the culls and argued that badger vaccination would be cheaper and more effective. So our argument today is probably leading us towards vaccination of badgers and/or cattle. The current available vaccine for badgers, which is injectable, has been shown to reduce the burden of disease in badger populations. An oral badger vaccine is not expected until 2015. I know there is some concern that vaccines may not be as effective as we would hope, or be licensed and come on line quickly enough, but if the current shoot-to-kill approach is also deeply flawed we should endeavour to strengthen and prioritise all the non-lethal methods in order to find a humane solution.

Many hon. Members and wildlife lovers believe that is the only way forward, unless we are to decide to keep slaughtering badgers in perpetuity to eliminate a reservoir of TB in badgers, many of which will have been infected by other species or cattle. The Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth told the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) in DEFRA questions that the Government

“'accepts that there is a range of measures we should pursue, including developing vaccines, and we are doing some work to develop an oral vaccine for badgers as well as on cattle vaccines. We are considering other measures such as contraception for badgers and increased cattle movement controls, so we are covering a range of issues as we try to solve this difficult problem.”—[Official Report, 13 February 2014; Vol. 575, c. 998.]

That answer shows that the Minister recognises the value of these other strands of TB control, and I hope that he will commit today to redoubling his efforts on those fronts. Today, we need to urge the Government not only to speed up their work on vaccines, particularly of the oral kind, and redouble their efforts on enforcing biosecurity and cattle movements, but, most importantly, to stop this inhumane slaughter of badgers.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Main]

I thank hon. Members on both sides of the House for their compassionate remarks in this important debate. Although I have not been in the Chamber for all of it, I have watched it all and I recognise the passion on both sides.

I stress again that the debate is not about one side against another. It is about whether we are pursuing the right strategy. I would like the House to express its wish today, but I recognise that the motion does not bind the Minister. Whatever the result of the vote today, if there is a vote, I hope that the Minister will take the issue away and reflect on it, read the report and come back before the House with a statement and a votable motion of his own. I recognise that, without that, we will get no further on this difficult subject, which gives rise to a lot of passion but on which we should not just be being seen to be doing something. I thank all hon. Members for taking the time to come here on a Thursday for this important debate.

Question put.