Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 16th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a chair of the Royal Veterinary College and as a person owned by two sentient horses. I know that they have feelings; I would define them in the following way. They experience comfort and joy when I wait on them hand and foot and bring them haylage, and frustration when I get things wrong in a dressage competition. I welcome the legislation that has now arrived, and there is much to welcome in it. It covers all government policy areas, as the Minister said, and means that all government departments will have to consider animal welfare and sentience issues when forming policy. The Bill also applies to wildlife. The animal sentience committee created by the Bill has potential but needs to be toughened if it is to fulfil the potential for increased recognition and application of animal sentience principles across government as a whole.

What strengthening should we be looking for? Strangely, the Bill does not lay a direct duty on Ministers but on the committee, so the committee needs not a discretionary power to review government policy but a mandated duty to review all policies that fall within defined criteria of having the potential for a significant adverse effect on the welfare of animals. The Bill should also require all government departments to inform the committee when such policies are being drawn up, and positively and proactively to seek the views of the committee. What guidance will be given to other government departments to encourage them to take this responsibility seriously? Will all the guidance associated with the Bill be published during its passage in your Lordships’ House?

The committee also needs more clarity about its powers. It needs independent powers and adequate resources to fund a secretariat and to have the ability to call witnesses, commission research and have access to documents. Can the Minister tell us his plan for resources, both funding and staff? Can I also ask the Minister for clarity on the rumours that the committee might be tucked in as a sub-committee of the Animal Welfare Committee? The ASC needs a separate status. The AWC provides reactive scientific advice to Defra alone, and the new committee will proactively review government policy decisions across all departments—a very different role. The ASC must work transparently, publishing all its advice to government and having a direct role with the strong public interest in this issue. It should also demonstrate accountability by having a statutory duty to report direct to Parliament annually and the right to a formal response from the Government in Parliament. On the overall working of the committee, such strengthening would mean that the arrangements could be seen as being in the first division globally, but it would be useful to know what ideas the Minister has drawn from the best global examples of such mechanisms. I include in the best global examples the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission and the arrangements in the Netherlands and those in New Zealand.

Importantly, the Bill must include a duty on government to create and maintain an animal sentience strategy. If it does not, all the responsibility is offshored to the ASC and guidance needs to be given, by means of that strategy, on the policy issues that the ASC would primarily concentrate on, though not to the exclusion of others at the ASC’s discretion.

Lastly, the definition of “animal” should be expanded in the Bill. It currently applies to all vertebrates other than man. Ministers have indicated that the definition could be widened to include invertebrates if new evidence of sentience came forward. It appears that there is already sufficient evidence of sentience among cephalopods and decapod crustaceans, as is the case in the Scottish arrangements. When will the independent review of the subject be published, and can it be expedited so that we can include these animal groups in the Bill as it goes through both Houses? If the Minister is in any doubt about this latter point of inclusion of wider groups, I urge him to view the award-winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher”, which explores the rather bizarre and strange but nevertheless emotional relationship between a man and an octopus. I hope that he enjoys it but has a box of tissues to hand.