Draft Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2018 General Committees

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

May I join the Minister in saying what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen? I am grateful to him for his opening explanation. We are in agreement that the statutory instrument is a step in the right direction, but we will take this opportunity to seek clarification on certain areas and outline reservations that this is a missed opportunity to go further in certain other directions.

There are 2,300 licensed pet shops, 650 licensed dog breeders, 1,800 licensed riding establishments and 6,300 licensed animal boarding establishments in England alone. That is why guaranteeing the welfare of the animals within the system presents such a big challenge for local authorities. Collectively, these businesses make up the fourth largest group of establishments requiring licences issued by local authorities after premises, taxis and gambling establishments. We welcome the opportunity to update the existing legislation, which is contained predominantly within five Acts, as the Minister said, that date back as far as 1925. They are therefore certainly in need of an update.

It is important to account for changes within the sector, new and varied routes to market, updated guidance on animal welfare and changing social attitudes but, perhaps most importantly, it is important to clamp down on those who go beyond poor animal welfare and seek to exploit animals for the purposes of criminal activity and gain. With that in mind, we are pleased to see that under the regulations puppy sales are required to be completed in the presence of the new owner and with the puppy shown with its mother. That is to prevent online sales, which have increased dramatically in recent years and have prevented the buyer from seeing the animal first.

However, the regulations do not prevent the third-party sale of puppies, which is a massive missed opportunity. I heard the Minister’s comments earlier, but the Labour party outlined the pledge in our 2017 manifesto, and we reiterated it in our recent animal welfare plan, which has been endorsed by the League Against Cruel Sports, Compassion in World Farming and the World Wide Fund for Nature. Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals support calls for a ban on the third-party sale of puppies, so why stop short of delivering on that? It would address the issues much more comprehensively than the proposals before us today.

We also want to stress in the strongest possible terms that with the best will in the world, the fewer numbers of staff at cash-strapped local authorities cannot perpetually become experts in the increasing number of fields for which we are asking them to take responsibility. Whether it is environmental health inspectors or licensing officers, when I follow up on casework I am increasingly being told, “The person who knew about that topic does not work here anymore, and I am afraid we haven’t got anyone else.”

Minimum standards are already outlined in guidance, but the Government’s own findings suggest that fewer than one in three local authorities use the guidance when carrying out inspections, and I would imagine that that is a resourcing and time issue as much as anything else.

[Ruth George]

Regarding the resourcing of local authorities, obviously they have to provide the personnel to start with. To monitor the licensing and enforcement, they have to provide up-front training. If they are doing the enforcement side of it, that does not pay as well as the licences themselves. Does my hon. Friend share my concern that if there is a lot of enforcement, that could raise the level of licence fees to a disproportionate level for breeders who are prepared to pay for them?

[Holly Lynch]

My hon. Friend made a couple of key points there. I will come on to talk in detail about the issues she raised, and I hope we will hear the Minister respond to those points, which she made powerfully.

Thinking about resourcing, how do the Government propose to overcome some of the challenges through the new regulations? The impact assessment admits that local authorities may struggle to deliver the new regulations—that was my hon. Friend’s concern—that will be brought into force by 1 October this year. The impact assessment accepts that under this Government, authorities are

“unlikely to acquire additional resource”.

Instead it suggests that to meet demand, authorities may have to reprioritise existing activities. Will the Minister be clear about what local authorities should reprioritise? Is it licences for selling alcohol, taxis, gambling, houses in multiple occupation or tattoo parlours? We all appreciate that that is incredibly important work.

To get down to the detail, the impact assessment assumes a one-off familiarisation cost of two hours’ work per local authority. That is one hour for a staff member to understand the new guidance and a further hour to disseminate that information to other staff members, with a combined national cost to 356 local authorities of just under £11,500. I can only take from that information that one licensing officer will get the training and then is expected to educate the other members of the team. However, the impact assessment specifically says “disseminate” the information. The impact assessment accounts for two hours for one person, which does not allocate a time or cost for the rest of the team to even read the information disseminated, or take part in any internal training, during working hours. With that in mind I will give the Government the benefit of the doubt, and suggest that this impact assessment is just lazy, and provides an inadequate assessment of what the cost would be to get this right in the way that I am sure the Minister intended—because the alternative is that it exposes a fundamental lack of commitment to the training that will be intrinsic to delivering the regulations, and improving animal welfare. I am sure that that is not the case.

We are also keen to better understand how breaches of licence conditions will be penalised—which comes back to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak—and what the consequences would be for those seeking to obstruct a licensing officer. Three years is a significant period of time for those establishments that have a good inspection and are rewarded with a lengthy inspection-free period, based on the assessment of risk. However, if a member of the public or an employee, for example, raised concerns with the local authority that changes had occurred and animal welfare had declined in that period, would that mean that further inspections could be brought forward, as we hope would be the case? I would be grateful if the Minister can confirm that today.

We would also like to put on record our regret that the threshold for these new regulations is three litters per annum, which is still an intensive breeding regime for a dog. Why did the Minister draw the line at three litters and not reduce the number to two per year, or even one, as called for by organisations such as the Dogs Trust?

We firmly believe that these measures are a step in the right direction, but I hope that the Minister will offer us some clarity on the issues that I have raised. In particular, can he revisit the training element of these new regulations, as that will be absolutely key if the measures are to be effective? I would be grateful for his assurances that the impact assessment will be reconsidered and that the training will be delivered properly.

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[George Eustice]

If it is okay with the hon. Lady, I will return to the issue of the threshold set on the number of puppies. Even as a backbencher from 2011, I looked closely at this issue over a number of years, and I think we have arrived at the right place, but I will return to that.

I will say a little bit more about resourcing. As the hon. Member for Redcar correctly pointed out, by making sure that the licence can start in any month of the year—so it is a 12-month licence, not a calendar year licence—we spread the workload for local authorities. With the ability to have earned recognition for the best performing establishments of up to three years, we will also therefore reduce the workload in that regard. The combination of the ability to recover the cost of the licence—the regulation provides for that—and the evening out of the workload will help local authorities.

The shadow Minister raised the point about the consistency of application. We recognise that this has been a bit patchy in the past. It varies from local authority to local authority. That is why we will address that by requiring, for the first time, training of those carrying out the licensing. That will address that particular concern.

[Holly Lynch]

I am grateful for the opportunity to make an intervention. Returning to the impact assessment, that training is for just one member of staff. While there is a responsibility on that member of staff to then disseminate information within the team, there is no accounting of time or cost for people to be involved in that training, to listen to and digest it, and to be informed when they are then going about their business. Is that an error within the impact assessment or is that intentional?

[George Eustice]

I was going to move on to that. The hon. Lady raises the issue of familiarisation. These regulations consolidate a number of other existing licensing regimes. So it is not as though we are starting from scratch. All local authorities will have people who have some familiarity with the existing regulations. We are changing, improving and consolidating it, but the starting point is that they are familiar with the regulations that exist today. The second point is that when I was handling this part of the portfolio—it is now with my noble Friend Lord Gardiner—in 2015, we were actively engaged in discussing this issue with local authorities and we have been ever since. To get to the stage we are at today there has been an enormous amount of dialogue with local authorities on these regulations and the approach we are taking. It is an approach that they have supported and, in effect, co-designed with us.

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[George Eustice]

The hon. Lady is taking us into a slightly different area, which is wildlife crime and persecution of raptors, but she will be aware that we have the national wildlife crime unit, which also addresses this particular issue. It is a challenge. However, as I have said a number of times, local authorities can recover the costs of running this licensing regime and the regulations have provided for that.

The shadow Minister raised an important point, particularly given that there could be a longer licence, what are the remedies if there is a breach of the licence? That is an important point because, somewhat astonishingly, the existing regulations—with the exception of the Performing Animals (Regulation) Act 1925—have no provision at all to revoke the licence. It is an annual licence and the remedy effectively was that it would not be renewed if there was a breach. We do not think that is sufficient or acceptable. In a new addition we have brought in, these regulations enable local authorities to revoke and suspend licences where a breach has occurred. The establishments affected will have the ability to appeal, if they wish, to a first-tier tribunal, so we would make provision for an appeals process. This is the first time that local authorities will have the power to revoke or suspend licences. That is new. It gives us the confidence to grant those longer-term licences where operators have demonstrated a high degree of compliance and a commitment to high-level animal welfare.

[Holly Lynch]

May I just query, in those circumstances where a licence is revoked, for example for a dog breeder, what would happen to the animals within their care?

[George Eustice]

In a situation such as that, the animal welfare officers at local authorities already have the power to intervene, to take those animals away and find a way to re-home them, probably with rescue charities, other breeders or other establishments that retain a licence. They have the powers to facilitate that already. On the issue of the threshold of the number of puppies, as I said earlier, I looked at this in depth as a Back Bencher and it might be worth dwelling briefly on the history. Until, I think, 1999, if someone bred more than two litters—that is, three litters or more, the same as we are proposing now—they required a licence. As a result of a debate that took place in the House of Commons regarding concerns over commercial, large-scale puppy farms, a direction was given that resources should be focused on large-scale puppy farms rather than smaller breeders.

As a result, a Home Office circular was sent out, in effect giving guidance to local authorities that they should follow a threshold of five litters or more. I am not going to make a political point; that took place under the last Labour Government, but it was done with good intentions, to try to target resources where the greatest concern lay, as Parliament saw it in those days, which was large-scale puppy farms.

What we have subsequently found, particularly in the last decade, is a worrying growth in what I would term backstreet breeders, particularly people breeding status dogs. Those are people who are not really fit to raise dogs or to look after puppies. To make it worse, they often raise them, and try to train them, to be aggressive. There has been a worrying trend of status dogs, which started in around 2005 and has run for the last decade. The change we are making will capture those people again, by effectively reinstating the position as it was until 1999.

There is always an argument that we could go further, but we can review this. The regulations will be reviewed every five years, and if the feeling of the House at that time is that there is a reason to change the threshold again—maybe putting it up or down; it tends to move quite often—there will be an opportunity to do so at that point. Having looked at this, to put the position back as it was and to put it back in line with legislation introduced by the Welsh Government, which also has a threshold of three litters or more, is right.

The final thing I would say is that, notwithstanding the second criterion of three litters or more as a threshold, if somebody were breeding fewer than that but were doing so commercially and regularly selling those puppies, they would still be captured by the need to have a licence under the badges of trade criterion, which is included in the legislation.