Control of Horses Bill

Debate between George Eustice and Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom

Friday 16th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) on getting his private Member’s Bill to this stage. I have been in the House for only five years, but I did have a private Member’s Bill in the first year of the Parliament. It was not successful, I am afraid; it did not even get its Second Reading, let alone progress to Committee, Report and Third Reading.

The Bill addresses a serious and growing problem. There is a charity called the Flicka Foundation in my constituency; it is a donkey sanctuary, which also looks after some ponies. Its representatives tell me that in recent years they have seen a huge increase in the number of abandoned donkeys and ponies that they are asked to re-home. Other equine charities say the same.

There are a number of key implications to the situation: the impact on the welfare of the ponies; the hazard on the roads—as my hon. Friend pointed out, accidents can be caused; and the huge burden on landowners unable to do anything about the abandoned ponies they have been left with. Sometimes, people game the system. People have abandoned their ponies on somebody’s land for up to 14 days and then, just before the order to seize the horse, they move it on to somebody else’s field and start the whole process again. As my hon. Friend said, there have even been instances of people abandoning their horses without a microchip and buying them back at auction after the landowner has been required by law to have them microchipped.

The problem is serious. My hon. Friend has championed the issue for many years; his first parliamentary debate on the matter was in 2012. A number of other hon. Members have also been consistent champions. The first time I debated the issue was in Westminster Hall in November 2013, a debate led by my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot). I have received a great deal of correspondence from concerned colleagues on this issue.

Throughout the debate, there has been a suggestion that we should adopt an approach similar to that implemented in Wales in 2014. It is worth pointing out that there has always been a range of other legislative tools in the box. I will reflect on those, as I highlighted them in earlier debates. First, there is the Animals Act 1971, which this Bill seeks to amend. There is also the Animal Welfare Act 2006 and the Highways Act 1980, which deals with stray livestock. The new Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 could also be used in this area.

All that said, as the debate progressed, particularly after the 2013 Westminster Hall debate, we conceded that a number of important things had changed. First, the requirement to microchip horses had increased the costs and burdens on landowners who took remedial action when horses were abandoned on their land. Secondly, the original legislation restricted disposal methods to sale at auction. When the law was originally put in place in 1971, people could expect abandoned ponies to fetch reasonable prices at auction. That is not the case now. As the shadow Minister pointed out, there has been a period of irresponsible breeding of cob ponies, which have very little value so landowners are unable to recover their costs in auctions. We recognised that two important things had changed since the 1971 Act and that there was a gap that we should seek to address, borrowing elements from the approach adopted in Wales.

The Bill creates new options for disposal, including the ability to gift abandoned ponies and horses to charities; that is not possible under the existing legislation—first, they have to go through an auction process. For the worst cases, the Bill creates the possibility for euthanasia. Nobody wants that to happen, but welfare charities would point out that having a large number of ponies abandoned on verges and starving is not good from a welfare point of view. Sometimes in those cases, euthanasia can be the right approach.

The second and most important feature of the Bill is that it condenses the time scale of the detention period from 14 days to four working days. It also reduces the notice period from three days to 24 hours. When withdrawing his amendments, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire said that he hoped I would give further thought to his points, which he did not feel had been adequately covered. I owe it to him to have another go at persuading him that we do not need to change things as he suggested.

We think four working days a reasonable period for detention, and sufficient to enable people to report the situation to the police, because the animal welfare codes for looking after horses are clear: people should attend to their horses—checking that they are okay—at least once a day. If somebody has not reported a missing horse to the police within four days, that is a pretty good indicator that that horse is not being cared for correctly. In normal circumstances, we would expect somebody to realise within 24 hours that their pony had gone missing—escaped out of a field or jumped the hedge. They would then immediately report that to the police. Having a notice period of 24 hours and a detention period of four working days provides ample time for the situation to be picked up and for legitimate owners who have legitimately lost their horses to be protected.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I accept my hon. Friend’s point, but if he thinks it is sufficient to give notice to the police, the Government ought to consider dropping the point that if the person detaining the horse knows the person to whom the horse belongs, notice should be given to that person as well. If notifying the police is sufficient, that subsection should be dropped.

[George Eustice]

We put the subsection there as an additional mechanism. I do not see a reason not to have it. If the person detaining the horse feels they know the owner, they can tell them directly and quickly, but that does not remove the requirement for them to tell the police in any event. The starting point is that if they decide to detain a horse, in any event they must notify the police. If they happen to know the owner of the horse, it is reasonable to put on them a due diligence requirement to notify the owner at the same time.

In Committee we broadened the scope of the Bill so that it covered detention of horses not just on public land, but on private land. As the hon. Member for York Outer pointed out, that is important. If the scope had been limited to public land, as is the case in Wales, there is a danger that the problem would merely be displaced to private land. If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing properly. The Animals Act 1971 deals with both public and private land and we concluded that it was essential that the Bill should be consistent with that Act and cover private land as well.

In conclusion, I am very pleased that my hon. Friend’s Bill has reached this stage. The Government fully support it and hope that we can get it through in this Session, before the break-up of Parliament, reassured that we have full support from the Opposition Benches and cross-party support. I wish the Bill a fair wind as it goes through proceedings in the other place.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.