Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 7th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on bringing the Bill to this stage. My concerns about it have not changed, but we are where we are. I want to lend my support to and associate myself in particular with Amendment 1. In doing so, I repeat that I am a fellow of the British Veterinary Association and share some of the concerns outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Trees, regarding its practice.

I seek reassurance from my noble friend as to the response of the devolved Parliaments to the amendments. Have the Government had the chance to square the amendments with them? I further seek reassurance that in the operation of the Bill the Government, particularly my noble friend’s department, will be mindful of the role that farmers and especially livestock producers play in rearing our farm animals, and perhaps recognise that they are best placed to respect animal welfare and are masters in their own right of animal husbandry.

I hope that, in light of the short debate we had elsewhere in Questions this week, the Government will be mindful of the fact that there is still a severe shortage of seasonal workers which is impacting on abattoirs and the slaughter of animals. I hope that there will not be any undue concern over potential animal welfare consequences of that. I realise that it is not entirely within the scope of the Bill, but I wish to draw it to my noble friend’s attention. I congratulate him on accepting the two amendments before us today.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I had thought that the Government had completely forgotten this Bill, because it has been so long threading its way through both Houses. Anyway, I am glad that it is happening. It is not the Bill that I would like to have seen passed, but I guess that we have to accept it, since it is better than nothing—although that is not exactly glowing praise. I hope that we can see some effectiveness coming from the Bill and real action, so I say well done for bringing it back and getting us to this point.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I want first to thank my noble friend the Minister, who has put an inordinate amount of effort into discussing concerns about this Bill with those of us who have them. I congratulate him not only on becoming a grandfather but on landing this Bill, as he does today.

However, it remains a very bad Bill and I think it is worth repeating why. It is not because it entails a huge administrative reorganisation; in this House, we take huge administrative reorganisations in our stride. We have been reorganising the National Health Service over the past few weeks, which is possibly the largest organisation in the world, certainly in Europe. The Government’s defence of the measure is essentially that it is administratively very minor: it just sets up a committee; it is an advisory committee, and Ministers will make final decisions—“There is nothing to see here; move on”. But the important part of the Bill is not its administrative effects but the fact that it is a declaratory Bill. It declares something in the law of the United Kingdom for the first time to be true—that is, that animals, vertebrates and certain non-vertebrates, are sentient. I know that this appeared previously in a treaty that we were party to, but it moves it on a considerable step to incorporate it into domestic law in this way.

It is worth asking why that declaration matters. It matters because it is very much part of the agenda of the animal rights movement to achieve agreement on three things. The first is that animals are sentient; the second is that sentience is the sole basis for judging moral conduct; and the third, as a consequence of that, is that humans and animals are to be treated on the same basis in moral terms. That is a complete upturning of our established view of moral conduct; it is a completely new anthropology. This Bill is therefore profoundly anti-human. It opens the door to a moral calculus in which people can ask the question: how much chimpanzee suffering is equivalent to a human baby suffering? That is why it remains a very bad Bill. It is a Bill that we will come to regret.