Control of Horses Bill

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Friday 24th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) on having had the determination to present the Bill.

I am not sure whether I need to declare an interest. I have kept horses and ponies for a long time, but I can assure the House that I have never fly-grazed one of mine. Like many other horse owners, I am acutely aware of the cost of responsible horse ownership. I seem to spend an inordinate amount of my time focusing on a reduction in numbers—not altogether successfully, because the direction of travel always seems to be up.

My hon. Friend rightly identified the issue of irresponsible ownership, but let me emphasise that the vast majority of Britain’s horse owners are entirely responsible. Their animals are, in many ways, treated like their children. Just like other pet animals, they are part of the family—loved, cherished and looked after. There are many of them: although no accurate figures exist, which is a problem in itself, it is thought that there are between 600,000 and 1.2 million horses in the United Kingdom. They are also big business. In 2011, the British Equestrian Trade Association estimated that the horse industry contributed £2.8 billion to the British economy every year.

According to some terrifying statistics produced by Equine World UK, the cost of keeping a single horse can range between just over £3,000 and £10,000 a year, depending on how the horse is kept. The British Horse Society has produced a detailed breakdown of the costs of responsible horse ownership. Interestingly, there is no total at the end, and I did not dare tot up the sums; suffice it to say that they are the sort of eye-watering numbers that I have spent all my life trying to keep from my father.

Those figures, of course, relate to responsible ownership. They include farriery costs and the costs of vaccinations, worming, equine dentists and vets. Those are costs that all who cherish their animals willingly pay, but the owners described by my hon. Friend simply do not bother with them. That is the reason for the horrific welfare cases with which so many equine charities are struggling to cope. When they are called to places such as Alton in Hampshire, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), the rescue charities are not contending with fit and healthy animals; they are dealing with starving, sick animals, riddled with parasites, and with hooves that have grown to such an extent that they bring to mind pictures that used to be seen only in advertisements for foreign welfare charities.

I picked Alton—perhaps unfairly, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire cannot be here today—largely because when I was chief executive of the National Pony Society, it was based in that town. The NPS is Britain’s oldest pony charity, and is dedicated to the welfare of British native breeds and the British riding pony. It does not have a rescue facility of its own, but it is a member of the National Equine Welfare Council.

I remember from meetings that I attended back in 2008-09 that the welfare crisis was well known then, and the rescue centres were already struggling to cope. Wind the clock forward five-plus years, and the situation is much worse. The numbers are much higher, the cost of feed has gone up, and charities that were previously struggling to cope have now gone beyond breaking point. That does not mean that they are not doing their absolute best in extremely difficult circumstances. When, as happened in Alton, they are called to a field of 45 horses that have been dumped by their owners—and, in that instance, multiple owners were thought to have been involved—for whatever reason, and have been left to fend for themselves as a herd, the charities are already at capacity, and in many cases, sadly, there is only one viable option. No one likes to talk about euthanasia, but for sick, old, lame and starving horses it can be the kindest option. However, there are then the costs of destruction. The British Horse Society estimates that it can easily run to £500 per animal, and who is to pick up the bill when animals are not necessarily microchipped or freeze-branded and no one can trace the legal owner?

The case that I have just described occurred on what was definitely private land. Let me now say something about what happens on local authority-owned land. I have never forgotten the sight of two small ponies trotting down Coxford road in Southampton right past the general hospital. Few Members in the Chamber today will recognise the geography of Southampton, so let me assure them that that is right in the urban core of the city. I have no idea where those two ponies had come from, but the only pieces of open land anywhere near there are the cemetery, the municipal golf course, Southampton common and the sports centre, all of which are owned by the city council.

I do not know if those ponies had come from any of those areas, but I do know that fly-grazing has been a problem in the city for many years. It has happened on both private and public land, but areas such as Peartree green have frequently been abused in this way, and it causes distress and concern for local residents. Many of them are simply not used to seeing relatively large animals with potentially dangerous traits—I learned from a very early age that they kick at one end and bite at the other—and it can be extremely scary, especially for the parents of young children who wish to use the play areas and the sports pitches, and also for the horses themselves, which are not usually used to being in an urban environment and can sometimes be found tethered with inadequate access to food and water and without the sort of shelter responsible owners lavish upon them.

Of course in the Romsey and Southampton North constituency we might reasonably expect horses to be commonplace. There is a small corner of the New Forest in my constituency and at Canada and Wellow commons we can find the indigenous New Forest ponies in abundance. I am the first to celebrate feral ponies running wild—our traditional mountain and moorland breeds, which can be found in their natural state all over the British isles. It entertained me earlier to hear the Minister speaking of the national parks of Exmoor and Dartmoor, but in many cases it is our national parks where we find our native species running free, from the Exmoor and Dartmoor ponies in the south-west to the original Thelwell ponies on the Shetland islands—as an aside, Norman Thelwell was one of Romsey’s most famous former residents, who lived on the banks of the river Test. However, these are distinct cases and very different from the situations my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer has identified in his Bill, but I am sure he has considered them, and fully considered how the national park authorities might address this sort of issue, should they encounter it.

In other parts of my constituency there have been real problems with semi-feral herds of ponies, including an unfortunate incident earlier this year at Braishfield, where a large number of ponies escaped and ran loose through the famous Harold Hillier gardens and arboretum, causing much damage. While there can be an almost comical aspect to the prospect of police community support officers, police officers and local residents running through the gardens chasing after roughly 80 ponies, it is not funny for a motorist who encounters a dark-coloured pony in the dead of night standing in the middle of the road.

If we find a horse or pony loose, they are very tricky to identify. Yes, since 2009 all foals have had to be microchipped, but when there are large fields of horses with no discernible owner indiscriminately breeding among themselves, who exactly is checking whether they all have passports or microchips? Local authorities simply do not have the resources or the expertise to be matching fields of feral horses to what in many cases is non-existent documentation.

My hon. Friend the Member for York Outer rightly referred to the problem of over-breeding and identified that in many instances owners might decide simply to continue breeding when there is no viable market for the stock they produce. I would highlight that those who breed responsibly do so very scientifically and with much thought, in many cases with generations of knowledge and expertise, but even they, producing very high quality animals with commitment, love and dedication, cannot find homes for all the ponies they produce—or certainly are finding it very difficult to do so with an economic return on them. Why then are irresponsible owners simply getting away with indiscriminate breeding? In many cases, close relatives will be breeding among themselves, producing many conformational defects and horses that are never going to be any use on the open market because they are not sound and never will be.

Earlier this year a loose pony was found on the A36 trunk road running through my constituency. I met one of my constituents clinging desperately on to it with a length of washing line in the car park of the local convenience store, and I did the decent thing and took it home. As I did so, I spoke to a police officer who had been forced to stop all the traffic on the trunk road, and a jam was building up. I said, “What do I do with it now? How are we going to find the owner?” I was met with the response, “We’ll just wait until somebody notices it is missing.” I looked at this beast, which I did not much want—it was very sweet, but I did not want to keep it or have the costs associated with doing so—and was told that the owner might appear. Last night we debated the perils of social media but this incident proved their power, because once the mugshot of the offending pony was plastered all over Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat the owner recognised the wandering criminal, came forward, collected it and took it home.

I wondered what would have happened if the owner had not done so. How long would I have been left with this wee beastie? If I had sent it to auction, that would in no way have met the cost of keeping it for however long was necessary. If it had had to be sent to be humanely destroyed, I certainly was not going to be the one stumping up £500 for that. The local authorities do not have the capacity to stable unwanted straying horses, the charities are at breaking point and the police certainly did not want to be lumbered with this beast, although they were keen to get it off the main road. Thankfully, it eventually went home. I cannot say that I blame the local authority or the police for not wanting it, because the costs of stabling it would have been horrendous, and over long periods, in particular, our public services and local authorities cannot be expected to sustain those, especially not in the numbers we have heard about today.

Hampshire is thought to have about 5,000 fly-grazed horses and ponies, and is second only to Surrey in that respect. Those figures were put together by the Country Land and Business Association. My hon. Friend the Member for York Outer has done sterling work in introducing the Bill, which aims to remove the ambiguities in the current law, and consolidate powers into one place and strengthen them. He has worked tirelessly to secure Government support and, given that, as he said earlier, the situation is a crisis, he has been absolutely right to do so. What we all want from this Bill is an improved welfare situation; greater clarity for local authorities so that they can more easily detain, secure and dispose of animals that are causing a hazard and being illegally grazed; an avoidance of situations where owners at the last minute remove one animal and replace it with a different one; and, importantly, a presumption that, if you can find them, the owner of the horse will be liable for damage and all associated costs.