Badger Cull

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

It is great to be here under your chairmanship, Mr Weir. I will have to rattle through some of my points to try to deal at speed with many of the issues that have been raised. First, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) for securing the debate. I would like to single out the contributions from my hon. Friends the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and for Inverclyde (Mr McKenzie), and the hon. Members for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) and for St Ives (Andrew George).

I would also like to mention the contributions of others of various parties who made significant points in favour of vaccination. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main), who made it clear that she had changed her mind based on the evidence. She made a passionate contribution, demanding that the matter should be brought back to the Floor of the House of Commons, debated in full in Government time and put to the vote. As she said, I think the outcome of such a vote would be very different from the previous one.

The Government’s badger culls have been an expensive failure for farmers, for taxpayers and for wildlife. For the Prime Minister and DEFRA Ministers to pretend otherwise is to ignore the evidence. In 2012, the culls had to be abandoned because the number of badgers had been counted wrongly, which is a pretty fundamental mistake. There were too many badgers. This year, the badgers have been miscounted again. This time there were too few, but with no satisfactory explanation, which conveniently allowed the Government to revise the targets downwards. That numbers problem should not have been a surprise to Ministers, because in November 2012, 30 leading scientists wrote to the Secretary of State objecting to the culls and noting:

“Setting such minimum and maximum numbers is technically problematic, especially when local estimates of badger numbers are very imprecise.”

The Minister’s estimates of badger population numbers for the first two culls have been repeatedly wide of the mark. For the Secretary of State to add insult to injury by talking nonsense about badgers moving the goal posts was ridiculous. That is not good enough, when there is a risk of spreading tuberculosis by culling too few badgers or eradicating an entire local population by killing too many. The first two pilots, failures as they have unarguably been, have at least taught us one important lesson. We can have no confidence whatsoever in the accuracy of badger population estimates. That knowledge reveals a risk of perturbation or of localised extermination. On that basis alone, until sound population baseline analysis is undertaken, we cannot proceed with these culls, let alone the further 40 that the Government desire.

After last year’s cull cancellations, the Secretary of State told us in October 2012:

“Evidence suggests that at least 70% of the badgers in the areas must be removed.”

That was one of his fleeting dalliances with the concept of evidence. He added:

“It would be wrong to go ahead if those on the ground cannot be confident of removing at least 70% of the populations.”—[Official Report, 23 October 2012; Vol. 551, c. 836.]

The postponed culls were rearranged for 2013. They spectacularly failed to meet the Secretary of State’s targets, which had also been transposed into the essential guidelines set by DEFRA for Natural England stipulating that 70% of badgers had to be culled in six weeks to avoid an increased risk of perturbation. At that point, the Government should have stopped, in accordance with their own guidance and the Secretary of State’s words. There was no grey area, but they turned their backs on the science. They extended one cull by 42 days and another by 93 days. Four of the nine members of the Natural England board expressed concerns, including the chair of Natural England’s science advisory committee, who went on public record in November with his concerns:

“I fear there will be two tragic losers, the farmers who are paying the crippling bill for extending this trial”—

that was the Gloucester trial—

“and the badgers whose lives may be lost for little purpose.”

Professor Rosie Woodroffe described the extension of the Gloucester pilot from six to 14 weeks as “uncharted territory” and added that the additional time risked increasing perturbation and the detrimental effects of the cull. The Minister’s cull policy may have increased the risk of TB in pilot areas and surrounding areas.

[Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is a bit of a cheek for the Government to say that the pilot culls have been a success, when those of us who are anti-cull have been told not to leap to conclusions until the independent panel has concluded?

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

That is absolutely right. I do not have time to cover everything, so I will write to the Minister on some issues.

I turn to the meat of the matter. Will the Minister agree to examine the evident problems with baseline badger population analysis and bring forward proposals for more accurate population counts? In the interests of good science and evidence-based policy, will he support a vaccination trial in the south-west of England and compare the results with the cull pilots to establish whether it will be more effective, and more cost-effective, to vaccinate instead of shooting or gassing?

In the interests of transparency, will the Minister agree to publish the full taxpayer and landowner costs of the extended culls, including the cost per badger culled—we anticipate that that will be at least £2,200 per badger—and place a report on the full costs in the Library of this House? Will he agree to strengthen the membership of the independent expert panel to provide additional scientific expertise, and will he be open to suggestions for the composition of that strengthened panel from Labour and others? Will he agree to strengthen and clarify the remit of that panel to ensure that its original task of monitoring humaneness, safety and effectiveness deals adequately and separately, as needed, with the original cull period, the extended cull period and, specifically, the later weeks in which humaneness and effectiveness may have been especially compromised?

Will the Minister publish in full and without delay the transcripts of the independent expert panel, together with any evidence presented, so that full and transparent scrutiny of the decision making by scientific and other peers can take place? Will he also publish in full a report by the independent expert panel? Will he halt any further culls and postpone any announcements on further culls until that report from the independent expert panel has been debated in Parliament with the Secretary of State answering questions? Will the Secretary of State, who has not come to Parliament to answer in full the debate on the extended culls, put any further culls to a vote in Parliament and test the democratic legitimacy of the culls in the country? There has been no vote whatsoever on the extended culls, which is an affront to parliamentary democracy on so controversial an issue.

The numbers attending the debate and the lack of time available for speakers demonstrate the need for the Secretary of State to come to Parliament in Government time to debate the issue, instead of hiding behind repeated written statements. We all accept that we have to eradicate TB for the good of our farmers, but we have to do so in a way that is based on evidence. That is where the Government have failed.

Fly-Grazing of Horses

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

It is great to serve under your stewardship again, Mr Hollobone. I begin by thanking the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for securing this timely debate, and I want to thank all the other Members who have spoken. I will not be able to note their contributions in full, but I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) and the hon. Members for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), for York Outer (Julian Sturdy), for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) and for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns). I shall turn to the Vale of Glamorgan in a moment. It has been a very good, wide-ranging debate with expert thought and analysis.

I also thank the organisations that have campaigned long and hard on the issue to force the growing crisis—and it is a crisis—of horse and pony fly-grazing up the political agenda. Those organisations include the RSPCA, Blue Cross, World Horse Welfare, HorseWorld, the British Horse Society and Redwings, which came together to produce a damning report called “Left on the Verge: In the grip of a horse crisis in England and Wales”. It catalogued appalling neglect and animal welfare abuses in London and Gravesend, Tyne and Wear and Blackpool, County Durham and Norfolk, and Bristol and Leicestershire —in short, in all parts of the United Kingdom.

I also thank the local authorities such as Durham, Cardiff and Bridgend and the coterminous police authorities who have taken a positive lead in developing joint-working protocols and memorandums of understanding to tackle the problem. I pay tribute to the leadership shown by the Labour Government in Wales and the National Assembly for Wales, who, as we speak, are fast-tracking new legislation as an early Christmas present. Where Wales leads in tackling fly-grazing, we hope that England will follow.

The past three years have seen a crisis develop in fly-grazing in the UK. Horses are suffering and dying in increasing numbers. Local authorities, police and highways agencies are navigating through legislation that is, frankly, out of date and not fit for purpose. Farmers, conservation bodies, other landowners and commoners are seeing their land trashed. Horse and animal welfare organisations, along with the public, are dismayed at the seeming inability of authorities to act promptly and decisively. However, their hands are tied. Minister, we must seek to resolve this issue in Parliament and in Government, and in collaboration with those affected.

It is worth saying that there are many good horse and pony owners, including many in the travelling community and others for whom responsible horse ownership and trading is an integral part of their way of life and culture. We should remember that. However, this debate is not about the good owners or even about some romanticised valleys culture, as portrayed in the quite wonderful series, “Stella”, in which the neighbour in the terraced house opposite keeps a horse in the house as part of the family—I am not sure whether the RSPCA would approve of that. It is also not about whatever the equivalent is in Tyneside or Gravesend.

The issue is about the increasing horse welfare problems associated with fly-grazing and the tethering of horses. It is about the dumping of those horses in the light of over-breeding, the drop in the value of horses and the lack of passporting and micro-chipping or easy identification of horse ownership. It is about the complexity of outdated legislation, which allows frankly unscrupulous owners to dance, at great taxpayer expense, around the authorities and the enforcement agencies. It is also about criminality.

The Equine Sector Council for Health and Welfare notes the rapid rise in reported incidents over the past three years as the cost of responsible care and disposal of horses has outstripped their commercial value; the 20% rise in calls to the RSPCA for tethered horses in 2011; the rise in welfare concerns to Redwings over fly-grazing, from 160 reports in 2009 to 500 in the first six months of 2012; and the huge rise in reported incidents to local authorities. That crisis has grown remarkably in the past three years and has shown, as it has grown, the legislation to be sorely wanting.

My constituency of Ogmore in south Wales includes the local authority of Bridgend, which, along with neighbouring authorities such as those in the Vale of Glamorgan, represented by the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan, has seen some of the worst excesses and abuses of horse and pony welfare in recent years. Labour-run Bridgend county borough council and the neighbouring coalition council in the Vale of Glamorgan are to be commended for their strenuous efforts alongside South Wales police and animal welfare organisations to resolve the situation, although it has been tortuous and unnecessarily complex and costly due to outdated legislation.

In January this year alone, South Wales police reported nearly 500 calls from the public about nuisance, damage and animal welfare issues because of fly-grazing. Much attention centred on one individual and his family, a well known horse trader in south Wales, who regularly denied responsibility and ownership. That lengthened the time-consuming and costly farce for taxpayers, local authorities, and police and animal welfare agencies with those responsible ducking and diving to evade their responsibilities.

In such cases, public areas such as school playing fields, which the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan mentioned, and common land are trashed. Private land becomes temporary corrals for apparently ownerless horses that appear there overnight through broken fences and disappear just as quickly when enforcement measures are eventually taken. There are risks to public safety and to highways—and all the time, horses and ponies suffer and die through wilful neglect. Outdated and ill-fitting legislation and enforcement powers allow criminals to pirouette through their responsibilities and evade justice, and the horses suffer, as do the public, private landowners and commoners who find themselves enmeshed in this cruel and unnecessary tragic farce.

The individual whom I mentioned, Thomas Tony Price of Wick, was found guilty in June of 57 offences of causing unnecessary suffering and failing to meet the needs of 27 horses. His two sons were also found guilty of related offences. RSPCA Inspector Christine McNeil, commenting on the 12 horses found locked in a barn with no space and no access to food and water—she believed they had been left there to die—said:

“These horses turned out to be the most poorly and diseased horses I have come across.”

She then turned her comments to the wider, UK issues. That individual is now in custody, but that is not the end of the matter. The RSPCA, which was intimately involved in the original case, now fears that the estimated 2,000 to 2,500 horses in the family’s care—I use the term “care” advisedly—that have historically been moved from location to location anyway, may have been steadily relocated across Offa’s Dyke to England, where the enforcement agencies may not be as prepared, in anticipation of the law’s being strengthened in Wales.

In short, parts of England are being seen as the softer option, and Wales’s problem may now be being exported to add to the existing problems in England. Horses that may be related to the south Wales case have already been appearing in the Surrey and Hampshire areas and elsewhere, causing the same problems and concerns.

That is just one sad postscript to the story in south Wales. As of last week, despite the best efforts of the RSPCA, the Vale council, the Redwings sanctuary and the police, just over 100 horses had been euthanised at a site in the Vale of Glamorgan. Thankfully, others have been rehomed. Our thanks go out—I know that the thanks of the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan do—to all those involved in trying to alleviate the suffering of the animals and to resolve this tragic saga.

Labour is urging the Government immediately to follow the leadership of the Labour Government in Wales and National Assembly Members, who will bring forward new legislation within weeks, or to update, at least, existing legislation to the same effect. Otherwise, what is good news for Wales could result in the 3,000 Welsh horses becoming England’s problem overnight, adding to the 2,500 already in England. We call on the Government urgently to consult on new or revised legislation and other measures to tackle fly-grazing in England and to bring forward proposals at the earliest opportunity.

The coalition of horse and animal welfare charities that produced the report “Left on the Verge”, which I have referred to, have also produced the blueprint for the way forward. With new legislation—the Welsh Government model—or with amendments to existing legislation such as the Animals Act 1971, the changes would remove the barriers that currently prevent timely action against fly-grazing. The changes would include: the ability to remove fly-grazed horses immediately and, if rehoming and all else fails, to dispose of the horses within seven days; making it easier to dispose of the horses by rehoming them or, when all else fails, by euthanising them, rather than sending them, in a costly process, to auction; reversing the burden of proof on ownership and so reducing the financial and time costs to local authorities of proving ownership; and improving enforcement and joint working in a wide range of ways.

I know that “unions” is normally a dirty word for this Government, but I ask the Minister to listen to the words of at least one union, the National Farmers Union, which is demanding that the Government match the legislative changes in Wales or risk more horses being abandoned in England, or to the words of the coalition of horse and animal welfare groups when they say in their report that Wales is taking action—England must, too. We will support the Minister and the Government in bringing forward the necessary legislative changes at the earliest opportunity, but if the Government are minded to resist, we will make the necessary changes when we return to government.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Eustice]

I will address that point in a moment. I just want to make this point about new powers in the pipeline. Clearly, the act of leaving a horse or horses on another person’s land is an example of antisocial behaviour. The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill is currently before Parliament and, when enacted, will provide enforcers with new and much more flexible powers to tackle antisocial behaviour in all its forms, including the act of leaving a horse on someone else’s land. Indeed, there have already been some instances in which the existing antisocial behaviour orders—ASBOs—have been served on perpetrators of fly-grazing.

The new antisocial behaviour measures will make it even easier for enforcers to use such powers to tackle these problems. For example, if a person is identified as having left their horse on someone else’s land without permission, the local authority or police could issue a community protection notice requiring the individual to do anything reasonable to address the antisocial behaviour.

In the case of fly-grazed horses, the notice might require the individual to remove or even to sell the horses. Failure to abide by a community protection notice is a criminal offence, and anyone who does so may face a fine or other sanctions. The provisions give the authorities power to impose a forfeiture order on any item, including an animal, used to breach a community protection notice; in this case, that would be a horse.

Several hon. Members have alluded to the frustration of those who complain to the authorities about such problems but no action appears to be taken. If a complainant is dissatisfied with a local authority, either because it has not responded to their concern or because they consider that it has not dealt with the concern effectively, it may be possible to use the new community trigger. Under the community trigger, the police, local authorities and other organisations can be required to review their response if a resident or group of residents have complained about the same problem three or more times and are not satisfied with the response.

In applying all those antisocial behaviour measures, it is necessary to know who the culprits are. We should not delude ourselves into thinking that we can tackle the problem without identifying and tackling irresponsible owners. If authorities can pool their intelligence and information, it should be possible to identify the leading perpetrators of fly-grazing and take appropriate action. If the problem is acute in certain areas—looking at the charts, Wales appears to be particularly badly affected—it should be a priority for the authorities to do whatever is necessary to deal with it. The tools are there, and we need to ensure that they are enforced.

One of the problems in dealing with fly-grazing is identifying the owners. As we know, identification of the owners of the horses involved is one of the key issues in enabling the authorities and those with whom they work to tackle fly-grazing.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Will the Minister give way?

[George Eustice]

I will press on, otherwise I will not cover all the points.

Revised horse passport regulations have been in force since 2009. They require all owners to obtain a passport for each horse that they own and all newly identified horses to be fitted with a microchip. We and other member states are currently considering EU Commission proposals to improve and strengthen the horse passport regime in response to the horsemeat fraud incident earlier this year.

Several measures are under consideration, including stricter standards for passports and a requirement for all member states to operate a central equine database, to which several hon. Members have alluded. DEFRA officials are working closely with the equine sector council strategy steering committee on the matter. As we have heard today, however, horses associated with antisocial behaviour are frequently not identified, so although we welcome the strengthening of the horse passport regulations, we recognise that it is not a solution in itself.

I wanted to touch briefly on another point raised by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome about the tripartite agreement between France, Ireland and the UK. The Government are committed to protecting our equine industry from the threat of disease from overseas. European statute requires that horses that move between EU member states must undergo a veterinary inspection 48 hours prior to movement, and that they must be accompanied by a passport and health certificate. Any movement must be pre-notified to the competent authorities.

However, the existing tripartite agreement applies a derogation from those rules for horses moving between the UK, France and Ireland, on the basis that the three countries share the same health status for equines, and it seems reasonable that that should continue. We have, therefore, managed to avoid imposing unnecessary costs and burdens on horse owners.

Following considerable work with the equine sector and the member states concerned, I can confirm that a new tripartite agreement has been signed, which limits the derogation from EU health controls for intra-EU trade to groups of horses with a demonstrably higher health status. That will come into effect in May 2014. Those new changes will apply only to movements between the UK and France, and Ireland and France. The situation regarding movements between Ireland and the UK remains unchanged, because we are satisfied that on disease control grounds—bearing in mind the aims of the relevant EU directive—there is no additional risk. The new agreement between the UK, France and Ireland will hugely benefit the sector.

My hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) highlighted the importance of co-ordination. We have been particularly struck by the protocols introduced by councils in Wakefield and York, which give guidance to local practitioners about the steps they should take to deal with the problem of fly-grazing, citing all the laws at their disposal. I emphasise to local authorities that they can use existing and future antisocial behaviour legislation to tackle that problem.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire and others have asked whether it would be possible to provide further guidance, and we are looking at that. In the case of tackling dangerous dogs, for instance, we issued specific guidance to councils so that they understood the implications of the new measures. We are keen to learn from Wakefield and York councils about whether further work can be done in the area.

On the Welsh proposals, there are a couple of limitations. My biggest concern with what is proposed in Wales is that it introduces no new powers beyond those in the Animal Act 1971, but it shortens the time scales. There is a danger of our putting the onus on local authorities to deal with the problem, rather than on tackling irresponsible owners. We could end up imposing costs and additional burdens on local authorities—

Water Bill

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Monday 25th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff North (Jonathan Evans). In a different incarnation, he was my Member of Parliament, and indeed my tenant, so our relationship goes back a long way. His expertise in insurance, which he brings to this debate, is well known. We have heard many other contributions tonight, including from the hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), who has great experience and knowledge of these matters. Had he been introducing the Bill, he would have had three years to prepare, whereas my hon. Friend the Minister, whom I am pleased to see here, has had about three weeks. Nevertheless, he was a member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee that scrutinised the draft Bill and will be aware of the detail and some of our concerns about things that are not in the Bill.

I broadly welcome the Bill. One of the vital challenges facing the UK is the need to protect the health of our rivers and lakes, while keeping water available and affordable. Water resources are currently under considerable pressure, and it is predicted that water constraints will become more severe in the future. There is limited competition in the current system, so I welcome the competition clauses, which will open the sector up to more competition and encourage the construction of more connections between water company areas. The introduction of retail competition among water companies could support greater water efficiency in the non-domestic sector.

Although I welcome the idea that businesses and local authorities can switch water suppliers, I recognise that individual consumers will not have that opportunity. The regulator must ensure that bills remain affordable, while expecting water companies to have the ability to invest in the infrastructure. We need consumer bills to be affordable now, but we must also recognise that water supplies are needed for the future, so I hope that we can amend the Bill in Committee to make it better for consumers and for the environment. There has been concern that, as companies compete for customers in the commercial sector, domestic customers may carry more of the costs of supply. We will need to hear from the Minister in Committee how that will be prevented.

The system for abstraction licences is not fit for purpose and is long overdue for reform. The Government have said that the work will have to wait until the mid-2020s, but it is important to address it much earlier than that. We need a system of licensing abstraction that balances resilience with the state of the environment.

One of Ofwat’s secondary duties is to promote sustainable development. Liberal Democrats would like to see that duty elevated to a primary level. For that reason, I intend to table an amendment in Committee to give Ofwat a primary duty to promote sustainability. I agreed with the comments of my noble Friend Baroness Parminter, in a debate on the Gracious Address in the other place, that a thorough examination is needed of the effect of the water industry on the environment now and in the longer term.

Ofwat seems to have a rather confused approach to sustainability. Let me quote from the supplementary written evidence submitted by Ofwat to the EFRA Committee in respect of the draft Water Bill:

“I provide further written evidence on specifically why we consider that our duty to contribute to sustainable development should not be elevated to a primary duty”,

yet it also said:

“Indeed, the core vision of our strategy is: ‘A sustainable water cycle in which we are able to meet the needs of water and sewerage services while enabling future generations to meet their own needs”,

It calls this “sustainable water”—it seems to me that its thinking is rather confused. My understanding of sustainability is that it is about balance, not conflict, and Ofwat should be well aware that its decision making can affect the environment as well as economic and social matters. I believe that Ofwat has accepted the need for sustainability as a primary duty and that the Government should legislate to establish it.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman, who represents a constituency not far away from mine, makes some very good points. Does he agree that in his opening remarks the Secretary of State seemed to be arguing for that duty of sustainability and, indeed, that his rhetoric fitted exactly what the hon. Gentleman suggests should be on the face of the Bill?

[Roger Williams]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for those comments. There is widespread acceptance that sustainability should be a core feature of Ofwat’s work, yet it seems that some people are setting their face against having that on the face of the Bill.

The UK has been faced with an increase in the number and severity of flood events, and it is vital for the Government to provide widespread and affordable household insurance in at-risk areas. I thus welcome the proposed new legal framework that seeks to establish Flood Re—a levy-funded reinsurance pool for high-risk individuals. If that is introduced, insurance companies must make their customers aware of the scheme and the opportunities it provides. A number of my constituents in Llangammarch Wells were really frightened by some press releases put out by the Environment Agency in Wales—now called Natural Resources Wales—about restricted insurance. After further consultation with Natural Resources Wales, we have been able to sort that matter out.

Water bills set a particular challenge for low-income families. There are no specific benefits such as housing benefit or council tax benefit to help with these costs, but the Government have stated that they will continue to support the WaterSure initiative, even though take-up has been rather poor. Other water companies can bring forward their own schemes, and Welsh Water provides a good example of how that can be done in practice.

The water industry is responsible for the most essential public services. Few things are more important for public health—or indeed for normal day-to-day living—than a safe and reliable supply of drinking water, and the efficient collection and treatment of waste water. More than 90% of health improvements over the last two centuries have resulted from the provision of safe-to-drink tap water and proper sanitation.

The water industry everywhere is very capital-intensive. Many of its assets—reservoirs, treatment works, water pipes and sewers—have very long lives, but, even when we allow for that and for the fact that investment doubled after privatisation in 1989, the average age of water company networks is increasing every day. The rate of renewal of sewers, for example, gives an average assumed age of more than 600 years. Investment levels are agreed with regulators every five years, and investment decisions are based on the priorities for the years ahead.

The water industry invests and spends more than it receives from its customers through bills. It finances its expenditure by raising money from investors in the capital markets, and so far that money has come almost entirely from bonds and other borrowing. In other words, the industry is cash-flow negative, and that will persist, partly because of the backlog of asset renewal but mainly because of the new standards that must be met. As a result of that cash-flow negativity and continuing high and necessary levels of investment, the cost of capital and funds raised from the capital markets is key, and will become more and more important. The cost of capital on money raised since privatisation already absorbs a third of the bill, and relatively small changes in the allowed or achieved cost of funding. Every 1% saving on the cost of financing the industry’s “regulated capital value” reduces customer bills by 5%.

Given that so much of the value chain is represented by the network of assets, both the raw material and the retail element represent a very small part of the overall bill. The Water Bill proposes that business customers in England should be allowed to choose their water retailers, but the Welsh Government have decided not to go down that route. As Professor Dieter Helm has said, large business customers will argue that they should pay only marginal costs, and if water companies succumb to the pressure, it will mean higher bills for household customers.

The true cost per customer varies enormously, and the rural customer costs many times more than the urban customer. Averaging the cost in that way is good public policy. “De-averaging” poses a real risk by giving business customers choice, thus causing water companies to reduce their tariffs locally to satisfy demands from big customers and to recover the lost income from household customers who cannot exert the same pressure.

The water industry should be owned, managed and operated in the interests of customers. I do not believe that it should be re-nationalised, but this long-term industry provides us all with the most essential of public services. Few things are more important to public health, and indeed to modern life, than a safe and reliable supply of tap water.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

At the risk of being slightly parochial, may I ask whether the hon. Gentleman finds it odd, given the rush to privatisation all those aeons ago, that we have only one mutual water company? In a week in which we have heard bad news about co-operative movements and so on, we should bear it in mind that that one mutual company has achieved very high levels of customer satisfaction, has invested massively over the last couple of decades, and manages to keep its bills pretty low despite having no profits, no shareholders and no dividends.

[Roger Williams]

I think that it will come as no surprise to the hon. Gentleman that I am not only a customer of Welsh Water, but a great fan of the model. Welsh Water is just about the only public utility company which receives letters of support that outnumber its letters of complaint, and its credit rating is higher than those of all the other water companies. It can borrow at almost the same rate as the Government.

The water company that serves Wales, and much of Herefordshire and Deeside, is owned, financed and managed on behalf of its customers. Glas Cymru has a strong board with a majority of non-executive directors, all of whom are individuals of high standing. It complies with corporate governance best practice, although it has no shares listed on the Stock Exchange. It accounts for its performance to its members and other stakeholders and measures its performance against things that really matter to customers: drinking water, reliability of service, protecting our rivers and coastal waters from pollution, and customer satisfaction. The pay of everybody who works for Glas Cymru is linked to performance against those measures, and because Glas Cymru is one of 10 large water and sewerage companies in England and Wales everyone can judge whether it has done a good, bad or middling job on the measures that matter to customers and the environment. Welsh Water is unique in the water industry. Its employees are rewarded on the basis of customer satisfaction rather than shareholder value. The Bill does not address the structure of the water industry—that may be for another day—but I welcome its broad thrust and look forward to working on the Bill Committee with my hon. Friend the Minister.

Oral Answers to Questions

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Sadly, the disease continues to increase in his constituency. It is absolutely our intention to continue the policy of bearing down on the disease in wildlife, as well as continuing our severe policy of bearing down on the disease in cattle. We will be announcing further measures in the new year.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

The inconvenient truth for the Secretary of State is that there has been a fall in TB in new herds and in TB-infected herds since 2008, before the badger culls began. Now that we know that nearly half the board of Natural England, including its leading scientific officer Professor McDonald, challenge the badger cull extensions, is it not clear that the Secretary of State is a complete stranger to evidence-based policy, but a master of moving the goalposts?

[Mr Paterson]

Sadly, the hon. Gentleman is wrong. The number of cattle slaughtered has gone up by 22,512. These herds are closed up, which means that they are already in a TB area, and the shadow Minister has to understand that. We are following a clear policy that has worked in every other country where there has been a problem of disease in cattle and in wildlife. I have cited Australia, New Zealand, Michigan, with the white-tailed deer, and badgers in the Republic of Ireland. I just wish that those on the Opposition Front Bench would join us, as they did back in the 1970s, in getting this disease under control.

Food Contamination

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Miss McIntosh]

Perhaps I could set the scene in terms of the food industry. As of last year, there were more than 490,000 food businesses in England. In 2011-12, spending to protect consumers from food incidents was £241 million, 75% of which was spent by local authorities to enforce food law.

One issue the Committee identified was that the Food Standards Agency reports to three key Departments with responsibility for aspects of food policy. Furthermore, there has been a marked fall since 2009-12 in the number of local authority food samples tested. In addition, there are 12 different national and European databases on food intelligence.

Let me record a little of the history. In November 2012, there was a routine meeting between the Food Safety Authority of Ireland and the UK’s FSA. At that meeting, the Irish FSA mentioned that it was developing a new methodology for checking the composition of meat products. The first question the Committee asked—we are asking it again today—was why it took two months for our own FSA to authorise and conduct any testing.

Tests then found that there had been contamination; it was small in the UK, but it was widespread in the EU. In the UK, horse and pig DNA were found in a variety of beef products, including samples of Findus lasagne, which contained more than 60% horsemeat; Aldi lasagne and spaghetti bolognese, which contained between 30% and 100% horsemeat; and beef products certified as halal and supplied to prisons in England and Wales that contained pork DNA.

Those findings emerged only after extensive testing of beef products across the EU and by local authorities and industry in the UK. The EU tests revealed that 4.66% of products contained more than 1% horse DNA. The UK incidence of contamination in products tested was less than 1%. Although the contamination was small, and the principle was that this was a labelling and a fraud issue, there could so easily have been a food safety scare and a food safety scandal.

Complacency is not the best word to use, but we have seen no sense of urgency among the Government, which is why we welcome my hon. Friend’s appointment as Minister. The Secretary of State or another Minister told us in evidence that the perpetrators of this crime—if it was a crime, and everyone generally understands it is a crime—would face the full force of the law. What arrests have therefore been made? What is the role of Europol and, possibly, Interpol? What charges and prosecutions have been brought by the City of London police to draw a line under this issue?

If we are to boost consumer confidence, which I think we all want to do, we must show there is no further contamination and no prospect of further contamination. We therefore need to know at what stage the contamination and adulteration entered the food supply chain. We talk a lot in the two reports about controls in the food chain, to protect consumers from contaminated and potentially unsafe food, which did not work in the case in question.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the matter, as something following on from the BSE crisis, is that every 10 years we have either a food scare or a food crisis. In the early 1990s, it was BSE; in 2001, it was foot and mouth disease; and in 2012—we know that it started in 2011—it was the scandal to do with horsemeat contamination and pork DNA being found in halal meat. That was completely unacceptable.

One worry is identifying the supply chain, and traceability, and we drew some clear conclusions from the evidence. The chief executive of the FSA told us the contamination and adulteration could have been going on for almost a year, from March 2012, when desinewed meat production in this country was banned—there was also a so-called ban in the EU, although we believe it was being produced in the EU.

We concluded that the system for food traceability, including the requirement that at every stage in the supply chain operators must keep records of the source and destination of each product, has been breached; that retailers and meat processors should have been more vigilant about the risk of deliberate adulteration; and that trust is not a sufficient guarantee in a system where meat is traded many times before reaching its final destination. We have also noted our concern about the length of supply chains for processed and frozen beef products. We welcome the efforts of some retailers to shorten those whenever possible.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

I commend the hon. Lady for securing the debate. Perhaps I can bring together two strands of her thinking. There will be public discontent if only a relatively few small players are investigated and prosecuted and become scapegoats for the industry. If larger players—whether they are meat processors, retailers or others—can be proved not to have used due diligence, or to have been negligent, ignorant or downright culpable, the size of the operation or its importance to the European market should not preclude investigation, including by Governments working together, if necessary.

[Miss McIntosh]

I welcome that intervention. The hon. Gentleman’s Front-Bench colleague, the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), led a line of questioning in that regard, and we met a brick wall. I agree that the action taken should not be symbolic, against small retailers. We must go through the supply chain. When a major supermarket takes a supply chain on trust year after year, without inspecting identities and its integrity, there is definitely something wrong. As to traceability and the so-called labelling issue, I confess to being disappointed with the Government response. We have identified a problem of traceability and labelling, and I urge the Minister to go a bit further, so that we have concrete suggestions.

I have mentioned the number of relevant businesses and the food industry’s importance to the economy. We must accept, with respect to testing, the need for a risk-based assessment, but when we are told that there is a risk in a particular country we need, for goodness’ sake, to wake up, liven up and respond, because of the potential for a problem in this country.

The people we need to go out and do testing—the first in line—are food analysts. We learned in evidence that most of those are in the Association of Public Analysts. I want to dwell on that point for a moment. We found out that insufficient testing has been done by local authorities since 2009. We need to accept that, although testing must be risk-based, there should be some random testing to ensure that nothing slips through the net.

We also identified an acute potential shortage of public analysts. I want to take issue with the Government response to our second report at point 13:

“Officials from both FSA and Defra meet regularly with representatives from the Association of Public Analysts and local authorities to ensure sufficient laboratory capacity exists and suitable methods are in place”.

I want to quiz the Minister on that. The Association of Public Analysts has meetings with FSA officials twice a year. That is not “regularly”—it is only every six months. One meeting was attended by a DEFRA official, the implication being that the other was not, and laboratory capacity is not discussed. Even if it were discussed, it is not within the gift of individual public analysts, or the association, to prevent laboratory closures or to ensure sufficient capacity.

The Government response is flawed because it does not deal with the Committee recommendation that they should ensure that there are sufficient properly trained public analysts. Why does that matter? It is not only the Committee, which heard powerful and compelling evidence about it, that concluded that it is important. The National Audit Office report, published earlier this month, leant heavily on—I would like to think—our work and on the report’s conclusions and recommendations. It stressed, as we did, that budget cuts coupled with a two thirds rise in reported food fraud have increased the risk of another horsemeat scandal. The NAO also said that the cuts in testing led to a loss of intelligence information, so that the Government

“failed to identify the potential risk of adulteration of beef with horsemeat, despite indications of heightened risk.”

The NAO report questions whether there will be sufficient capacity to respond to future incidents. I am mindful of what the previous Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), said about DEFRA being the fourth emergency service, and of the possibility that, given the dramatic decline over recent years in the number of public analysts and laboratories, there will not be the capability for detecting food fraud. I urge the Minister to respond to that concern.

I have covered the question of Europol, Interpol and our police bringing people to book, and discussed traceability. I want to make a final point. There is a richesse before us, and I could dwell on every recommendation and conclusion; I am sure that the Minister will remember the passion with which the Committee adopted the recommendations. I want now to focus on what the FSA’s role should be.

In our first report, we conclude:

“Whilst Ministers are properly responsible for policy, the FSA’s diminished role has led to a lack of clarity about where responsibility lies, and this has weakened the UK’s ability to identify and respond to food standards concerns.”

We found that the FSA and Government reacted in a “flat-footed” way and were

“unable to respond effectively within structures designed primarily to respond to threats to human health.”

We did not much care for the Government response, but I am sure that the Minister will try to justify the rather disappointing response that the

“Machinery of Government changes in 2010 led to some changes”.

The response went on to tell us what they were.

In our more recent report, to which we have only recently received the Government response, we reiterate our previous conclusion and confirm that we need greater clarity about the role of the FSA in major incidents. The point is that we accept that this is primarily a food-labelling issue, but there is the suggestion of fraud, to which the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) referred, on a massive scale, and we need the reassurance that the FSA is, in my words, fit for purpose. However, the Government response does not fit the bill.

We are told:

“The Government is concerned that the Committee may have misunderstood”—

I say to the Minister that that is a very dangerous allegation to make—

“the status and constitution of the FSA.”

We know, as the response states, that the FSA,

“as a non-Ministerial government department, does not report to any other department. The FSA is accountable to Parliament and reports…through Health Ministers.”

The National Audit Office confirms our initial conclusion that the problem is that the FSA reports to three different Departments. That is a source of concern. It is compounded by the fact that we are having review after review after review. We came to conclusions quite early on—in March, I think—about our fundamental concerns. We are now hurrying towards the end of the year. We have the benefit of Professor Pat Troop’s response to the incident. Her conclusions back up entirely what we say.

The question for the Minister is why the Government are not responding to our conclusions, to the review by Professor Troop and to the National Audit Office findings, but have called for another review. This is something that we used to say in opposition; it is not unfamiliar to me. Under the last Administration, as I am sure the hon. Member for Ogmore will remember, if there was a problem, we would have a review, then another review and then another review. Now, we need to see some action, so the fact that the Elliott review has been set up, will make an interim conclusion and will report finally only in the spring of next year is very disappointing and missing the point.

I would like to draw the strands together and confirm that this is not the time for another review. We need a fundamental rethink on the infrastructure, composition and role of the Food Standards Agency, what its relationships with the Departments are and who goes out and gives explanations to the public and to the industry in the event of an incident.

We need to see some movement on reducing the likelihood of future contamination by improving the traceability provisions and ensuring the integrity of each supply chain. It is very pleasing that in local butchers’ shops in my constituency and, I understand, across the country and in farm shops and at farmers’ markets, the purchasing of food has gone up incrementally. Everyone is buying local, because they know what they are buying. They know that it is beef or whatever the label says. As I said, that is very pleasing, but we need to restore public confidence in what is a multi-million-pound industry through supermarkets. We also need to look at the vexatious issue of there being a shortage of analysts and insufficient testing to put the consumer mind at rest.

I commend our two reports to the House. I have dwelt on three issues, but I would like to bring to the attention of the Minister and the shadow Minister our main concerns, which are set out in all our recommendations. Those have been supported by Professor Pat Troop’s review. She does not disagree with them one iota. We have also had the very powerful—it uses very strong language—report from the National Audit Office on “Food safety and authenticity in the processed meat supply chain”. I therefore now say to the Minister that this is a call for action, rather than for another review.

[Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Osborne, at this late hour on a Thursday afternoon. I should begin by declaring an interest. I am still involved in a farming business that produces red meat: beef and lamb. I commend the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), and the members of the Committee for the work that they have done on this very important matter. I also commend the NAO report that has recently been published.

The sound and fury has gone out of this matter for now, but that does not mean that it is not extraordinarily important. It is extraordinarily important for our farming communities that their product should not be contaminated again in the future and extraordinarily important for consumers that they should have the ability to choose what they want to eat, knowing that it is as described on the label. Sadly, however, the history of food is full of examples of contamination and adulteration. The watering down of beer is a heinous crime, but it has been perpetrated everywhere. It is not the only one, unfortunately.

I would like to draw a distinction between contamination and adulteration. As far as I am concerned, contamination is when a small quantity of extraneous material finds its ways into foodstuffs. That usually occurs because of negligence or carelessness in the preparation or processing of food, in relation either to buildings or to equipment. Sometimes contamination may not be serious. It may involve inert material. But sometimes, of course, it can be very serious indeed. One example is the poisonous material ergot in rye bread; I can think of other examples. It is also very serious when infective material gets into foodstuffs. Sadly, there are outbreaks of E. coli from time to time in this country. Of course, the Chairman of the Select Committee mentioned the presence of pork in food that is supposed to have been processed to an halal standard, which is grossly offensive to the Muslim community. That is particularly serious as well.

I define contamination as something that does not take place deliberately, but it quickly became apparent to me during the so-called horsemeat scandal that what was happening was not happening through carelessness. In the main, it was a deliberate attempt to make money out of fraud, and we should see it in that light. People from time to time do see the opportunity to do that. If they can introduce something into a foodstuff that does not necessarily alter its appearance, taste or consistency, they can get away with it for a short time before more sophisticated tests can be done on that foodstuff. The Chairman of the Committee mentioned the changes in the way in which certain foodstuffs, including meat, could be included in other foodstuffs.

Adulteration also occurs when we have high commodity prices for meat or for any foodstuff, and of course the price of meat has risen quite considerably. If it rises quickly, there are opportunities for the less scrupulous to introduce a cheaper product into what is a fairly expensive product. My criticism of the supermarket and meat processors still stands: rather than accepting that the price of the commodity had gone up, they were scouring the European markets and probably the world markets to find a cheaper product. That gave an opportunity for less scrupulous people to get involved and make money.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good contribution. He has a great background in this area. Does he agree that a signal change of the past few decades has made good governance necessary, as the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton said? Whereas a previous outbreak to do with either food providence or safety may have been relatively isolated in a region—I have had them in my area—nowadays the potential danger and risk are much greater, because they are transnational and affect the plates of far more consumers, potentially in many different countries? That is why governance is important.

[Roger Williams]

I agree. My hon. Friend—he is a Welsh MP with me, so I will call him that—reiterates the words of the Chair of the Select Committee. That was a conclusion the Committee came to.

I was going to say that part of the complexity with the process was that the contamination was not happening in only Britain or one region of Britain. Very long and complex food chains were undoubtedly involved, and part of the problem is that we do not know where some of the products originated. For me, one of the key things to come out of the NAO report is on page 5:

“Six months on, inquiries are still ongoing and the original source of the adulteration has not been identified.”

It goes on to say that some people have been arrested. For all that our Government have done and for all that Governments on the continent have done, we still do not know where the horsemeat entered the food chain. Until we can establish that, we will not have done a good job and we will not have deterred other people from trying to make opportunistic profits.

If we do not know where the meat came into the food chain, we have no idea what its provenance was. We do not know whether the animal was slaughtered in a registered slaughterhouse or the back shed of a farm somewhere. We have no idea about the safety of the meat. It appears to many of us that the crisis did not involve any human illness, but if we do not know the provenance of the meat, we do not know if that was by luck alone. It is key that we continue our work and work with our European partners on a governmental as well as a police level to identify where the horsemeat entered the food chain.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

What are the hon. Gentleman’s views on the need for deep intelligence across Departments in analysing what is going on? There could have been a moment when the contamination could have been picked up. It is all very well saying that in hindsight, but it could have been detected. We had massive shipments of horses from Ireland and Northern Ireland into Britain for transport out of the UK, but they were not transported. They were disappearing. There were numbers in, but no numbers out. At some point, a good intelligence operation would have spotted that and flagged up the fact that those horses were going somewhere.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is good to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Osborne. I welcome the new Minister to his place; we worked well together on the Select Committee and I look forward to him having views entirely consistent with those he had in Committee now he is a Minister. I am partly teasing him, but I look forward to working with him. I enjoyed his friendship on the Committee. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), the Chair of the Select Committee, on securing the debate, because it is necessary for us not to forget exactly what happened.

I want to concentrate on the consequences and on the many lessons that we need to learn. For many years, I have been saying that we have not had proper labelling of the origins of processed food, especially meat products, and the contamination has highlighted that hugely. Basically, the product was travelling all across Europe from the Republic of Ireland, Poland and Romania into Luxembourg and France—it was travelling all over the place. The trail—exporting from one country and importing to another—was almost impossible to follow.

As the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) highlighted, the value of the processed meat is key. If someone bought a joint of beef and a joint of horse—we cannot do that in this country, but in many European countries they can—they would immediately be able to tell the difference. If we minced them up and put them in a burger, however, I suspect that when we actually looked at it physically, we would not see a great deal of difference. If horse meat is trading at a quarter to a third of the price of beef, it is tempting to the unscrupulous in the food processing industry to substitute one for the other.

Not only the Government but the large retailers should keep a check on the situation. If retailers are buying beef burgers for less than the cost of the beef that should be in them, they should ask how on earth a company can produce that product for that price. That is a lesson for the industry and the big retailers to learn. The hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire probably shares my view that although the big retailers are necessary, they have used their muscle over the years to drive down prices for primary producers and farmers. They have spent their lives doing it. This time they drove the price down too far, and people came in who said, “Okay, these big retailers want cheap burgers; well, we’ll mix in a bit of horse meat, and it’ll be fine.” That is where questions need to be asked.

My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton made the case that the Government need enough public analysts, but retailers also need to employ such people or franchise out the work to somebody else. When I go into a large supermarket, I expect to buy a product that is made of what it says on the label. That is the retailer’s responsibility; the Minister may well make that point later. Yes, it is the Government’s responsibility, but it is also very much the responsibility of the retailer.

I noticed that the Chair made a bit of a face when I said that one could tell the difference between a joint of horse meat and a joint of beef. Ethically, we in this country do not eat horse meat, but it is eaten in many countries across Europe, and it is legal. It is necessary to be able to slaughter horses for meat. There are so many horses in this country, some with huge welfare problems, that if we could not slaughter them, the welfare problems would be even larger. I would much rather those horses be slaughtered humanely in this country than taken on vast journeys across the continent in poor conditions to be slaughtered. We must remember that slaughtering and trading horse meat are not crimes in themselves.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The hon. Gentleman is making a good and cogent point. We must guard not only against inhumane transport but against the possibility that imports of horse meat from places that previously discarded the slaughter of horses, such as the United States—they are now slaughtered in other countries instead—might find their way back to us through Poland or the Czech Republic, with added ingredients such as phenylbutazone, known as bute.

[Neil Parish]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It leads me neatly on to the fact that, as I said, horse meat must be traceable. It is not only a case of what is imported into this country. In America, there are many racehorses and other sorts of horse that are more likely to have been treated with all sorts of drugs throughout their lives. We must be careful of that.

We in this country must also be careful to ensure that we know where the horses that we slaughter have come from. At the moment, under the passport system, many horses have one, two or several passports, one of which is clean and says that the horse has not been injected with anything, and another one of which may have been used when the horse has been injected with various drugs throughout its life. We need a better passport system and a central database, so that we know where horses come from, to ensure that when they are slaughtered, we know that they are healthy. Although we may not eat the meat, it will be exported for someone else to eat. It is essential.

I believe that some good things will come out of this situation. As other Members have said, it would have been terrible if the contamination had led to a public health issue, but fortunately it did not. One or two horses slaughtered were found to have levels of phenylbutazone, but not enough to hurt anybody eating the meat. We must learn to ensure that horse meat is traceable in future, not because it should be mixed with beef and sold fraudulently but because the meat should be safe.

The other great lesson to be learned concerns the traceability of our own meat. People like farm-assured schemes, such as the red tractor promoted by the National Farmers Union and many others. As soon as horsegate—the problem with horse meat in beef burgers—occurred, people wanted meat from this country. I do not wish to be churlish, but Tesco did not decide to source all its meat from the British Isles out of the goodness of its heart; it decided that that was a good way to make consumers buy at Tesco.

--- Later in debate ---

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

It is a delight to be here, as always. I congratulate the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) and all her Committee members on securing this debate and on the sterling work that they have put in throughout this year. As a critical friend of the industry and of Government, they have scrutinised the causes and effects of and response to the food contamination scandal in a frank and honest way.

It is a great pleasure to follow the contributions from the hon. Members for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) and for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish). They have great experience in terms of their personal backgrounds and in terms of Select Committees. The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton made the point that we got away with it. That is the point that we want to focus on. It is not adequate to say that we got away with it. We need to ensure that, within the realms of all the identifiable risks that we can think of, we do not simply get away with it again. We need to put the right things in place to avoid it happening again. As has rightly been pointed out, fortunately there was not a major public safety scare, although there could have been. This was an issue of provenance. We need a fleet-footed response from all the agencies and Government and everybody else.

I also welcome to his new position as Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth—

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

indicated dissent.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

My apologies. I was expecting to see the other new Minister. I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson). It is a great position and a great Department. I am sure he will do a wonderful job. I am beginning to think that DEFRA Ministers have taken against me as they keep disappearing in front of me. His previous role as a member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee stands him in good stead. As I draw on evidence and recommendations from the Committee’s two reports, I am conscious that he is a collective author of those words, findings and recommendations.

[Dan Rogerson]

One of the reports.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The Minister is a collective author of one of the reports, and there is no way in which he would seek, for whatever reason—under pressure from officials or his Secretary of State, or the lure of the red box or the trappings of a Minister—to resile from the positions that he laid out so very recently. He is a good and honourable man and will stand by his words.

This is a timely debate to look back at the lessons learnt to try to avoid repeating the same mistakes and to return confidence to an industry that was shaken badly. To put it bluntly, consumers were tricked, deceived and defrauded by criminals operating within or alongside the food chain. It is the same food supply chain that we trust to supply safe, nutritious, affordable food and drink to our household tables, our schools and hospitals, and our care homes and cafeterias. That supply chain betrayed us—nothing less. It would be wrong, particularly while criminal investigations are ongoing, to delve too deeply into specific companies and individuals. I think the public and consumer organisations will be rightly outraged if the criminals who infiltrated the supply chain are not brought to book. If complicity or duplicity is identified within the supply chain itself, those companies and individuals should also be brought to book.

[Miss McIntosh]

It would be interesting to know what the hon. Gentleman’s potential future Administration would do to check the integrity of the supply chain. I am mindful of the fact that it was a Labour Government who set up the Food Standards Agency, and one of the difficulties that I highlighted is that it reports to at least two, potentially three, Departments. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point about the retailers, but we rely hugely on the work of the FSA to test the supply chain.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I welcome the hon. Lady’s intervention and the focus that she and the Select Committee have put on not only the FSA, but the overall issue of food governance and the integrity and coherence of it. We have repeatedly made it clear from the early days when its responsibilities were split up that we had concerns about what might happen. Her Committee’s report and the report of the National Audit Office have made it clear that those concerns did not cause the crisis, but contributed to a delayed reaction, which I will come to in a moment. There is confusion at national, local and intergovernmental level. I shall not call for a review today. I shall echo her call for action and for the Government to introduce proposals to change the structure of food governance.

Tesco, the UK’s market-leading supermarket, notably and admirably fessed up to its responsibilities. It said, “We get it.” It took out full-page advertisements coinciding—coincidentally, I am sure—with the NFU conference in February, and it is seeking to re-engineer its supply chains and get closer to primary producers. It has a way to go, as has already been mentioned. I visited Tesco’s headquarters and we went through this in detail. Although it has a journey to make, I do not doubt its sincerity and ambition to do so. It is consumer-focused; there is a reason why it is doing this. Other large retailers have already developed shorter supply chains or other methods of ensuring the provenance of their food.

In the early stages, many took a different approach and frankly said, “Not us, guvnor.” They pointed to abroad or to smaller suppliers, international criminals, other third parties and, frankly, anybody but themselves. It is clear that the criminal activities of some have damaged public confidence in the whole supply chain. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee spoke for many in the country, when it reported that it could only

“conclude that British consumers have been cynically and systematically duped in pursuit of profit by elements within the food industry.”

Whether that was criminality, negligence, complicity or failure of due diligence through the whole supply chain, from major processors and supermarkets down to the very small players, all were to varying degrees at fault in causing the failures, and all have responsibility in rectifying them and restoring trust and confidence.

I welcome the letter that I received yesterday from ABP, a dominant player in the UK and European beef processing market, which tells me that it supplies more than 20 countries and has a network of over 15,000 farmers. In the letter, the company acknowledges—it cannot deny—the presence of horsemeat in some of its frozen beef products over the past year, but states:

“It was certainly not an activity sanctioned by ABP in any way at any level”.

It goes on to make it clear that the company is not subject to any ongoing investigations.

In some ways, it is unfair to pick out ABP, because it was not alone in a complex and vulnerable supply chain that put beef adulterated with horsemeat and, for good measure, with trace elements—thank goodness, only trace elements—of phenylbutazone or bute into our homes, hospitals, schools and canteens, as well as, through food distribution companies, into Royal Ascot and the royal household. When it comes to food adulteration, we are genuinely—and right royally—all in it together.

As the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton said, those who came out well from the crisis were the butchers, local abattoirs, and those in local food networks and short supply chains, whose customers could prove where their food came from and what it was. The upside of the crisis is that it has reignited a major debate about our relationship with the food we eat, which I hope will lead to changes in how we produce and value our food.

Much of the modern supply chain is long, complex and international, with multiple handling and processing operations and multiple opportunities for adulteration. The lesson for those in wider supply chains, especially the major and dominant supermarkets, processors and distributors, is that no one can escape responsibility for the mess we got ourselves into or avoid responsibility for restoring trust in those supply chains. It is not good enough to say, “It wasn’t us, guvnor,” because as far as the consumer is concerned, it was.

I want to turn to the issues of food governance identified by the Select Committee’s two reports and highlighted in a timely report by the National Audit Office, on 10 October, entitled, “Food safety and authenticity in the processed meat supply chain”.

I tell the Minister that the Government must clearly now take responsibility: they are also in the dock and must fess up. They must answer criticisms of their role in failing to ensure effective governance of the food manufacturing sector. Although I commend the industry for working alongside UK, Irish and EU agencies to strengthen the testing and tracking of food products in response to the horsemeat crisis, I cannot yet commend the UK Government, whose response to the crisis was hampered by structural problems of their own making. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, of which the Minister was a member, put that succinctly in its first report, stating that

“the current contamination crisis has caught the FSA and Government flat-footed and unable to respond effectively within structures designed primarily to respond to threats to human health.”

The National Audit Office’s No. 1 key finding was:

“A split since 2010 in the responsibilities for food policy in England has led to confusion among stakeholders and no obvious benefit to those implementing controls.”

That split in responsibilities is, of course, the one that was devised and implemented in 2010 not by the Minister, who is only just in post, but by his coalition Government. They are the architect of their own misfortune, but more importantly, of what others have described as the flat-footed response to the food adulteration scandal. The food sector and the consumer deserve better. It is not the fault of the FSA, but of the Government who split its responsibilities.

[Neil Parish]

I accept, to some degree, the hon. Gentleman’s assertions about changes to the FSA, but there had been no testing of horsemeat for 10 years or more, and the situation arose only when we started testing horsemeat. What matters is not the structure, but the fact that we were just not testing. All through his watch and that of his Government, nobody was testing horsemeat. That is why I think that he is being a little disingenuous, if I may say so.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I utterly refute the idea of my being disingenuous, because I am citing the words, evidence and recommendations of the Select Committee and National Audit Office reports. The criticisms are not mine, although I entirely agree with them, because we said the same from the outset, after the FSA was split up. I am not being disingenuous, but frank: I am saying what I have consistently said month after month, and year after year, and that is what our position has been.

I understand what the hon. Gentleman says, but I am hammering the Government because governance is central to how we resolve the situation. We can ask the industry to do many things—we have done so, and the industry is getting on with them—and agencies are helping it, but unless we resolve the fundamental issue of how to bring together the entirety of the food industry coherently and not split it between Departments, we will be back here again. That is what his Committee concluded.

The Government response to the concerns is worryingly complacent. The document states, on page 7:

“The Government is concerned that the Committee may have misunderstood the status and constitution of the FSA”,

and it then defends the FSA in the following three paragraphs. If the Select Committee has misunderstood the FSA, so have the National Audit Office and many other well-informed, critical friends of the food industry who want the Government to look more fundamentally at the FSA and to review the cack-handed way in which its responsibilities were diced and sliced in 2010.

The Government should adopt the Tesco approach: fess up to this aspect of their responsibility, learn the lessons that they must learn and deal properly with the role of the FSA and food governance, instead of tinkering at the edges. It takes a big man or woman to accept that they were wrong, but I hope that the new Minister, in whom I have confidence, will be able to do so.

Let me ask the Minister some questions that stem from the Select Committee and National Audit Office reports. Coming new into the post, does he accept, from what he has looked at, that the Government’s and the FSA’s early response to the crisis was flat-footed and slow, as has been said, partly thanks to the Government’s machinery of government changes? Does he accept that the Government’s decision to split the FSA roles directly led to confusion and a lack of clarity about responsibilities at the outset of the crisis, both between Whitehall Departments and agencies and between local government enforcement and the FSA?

Does the Minister accept that, as highlighted by the National Audit Office, confusion at local and national level still exists today, despite the Government’s well-meaning reforms, which signifies that deeper reforms or the unwinding of some of the 2010 reforms might be needed? Does he accept that, despite strong Government rebuttals back in February and March, the introduction of the banned substance phenylbutazone or bute into the food chain via horsemeat, albeit in trace elements, might have turned the situation from a food provenance issue into a food safety crisis? If he does not accept that, I ask him to read the National Audit Office report.

How does the Minister respond to criticisms that intelligence sharing, especially between food authorities and Departments in Ireland and the UK, has been weakened by the coalition’s machinery of government changes? Does he believe that reducing food testing by local authorities by a quarter, linked to cuts in funding and budgetary stresses, contributed to a lack of deeper intelligence from local sources that might have picked up the risks earlier? To turn to the point made by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton in his intervention, one of the things that the National Audit Office picked up on was the lack of deep intelligence down on the ground. Although it applauds a risk-based approach, deep intelligence would have flagged up these sorts of incidents at an early stage.

How does the Minister respond to fears that the closure of four public control laboratories in the past three years combined with a reduction in public analysts from 40 to 29 since 2010 raises the potential risk that we will be unable to respond to any future incident of this type?

My final question echoes a concern of the Select Committee and of the wider public. Where are the prosecutions, the fines, the penalties, the custodial sentences, and the naming and shaming of the guilty parties? I realise that the Minister will not be able to go into detail about the ongoing investigations, but we need to know whether we are talking about one or two bad apples or a fundamental problem with a rotten barrel. The Select Committee asks whether this is

“a complex network of traders and processors acting fraudulently to deceive consumers and retailers.”

The longer we wait for conclusions to the investigations, the more the feeling grows that people are escaping justice and that the networks that caused this criminality are also delaying that justice. We cannot expect the Minister to comment in detail on investigations that are under way, but I hope that he can at least inform us of some progress.

At the outset, I reiterated the justified criticism by the Select Committee of the flat-footed response by the FSA and the Government. Its call for stronger powers for the FSA were re-emphasised by the head of the National Audit Office only last week. He stated:

“The January 2013 horsemeat incident has revealed a gap between what citizens expect of the controls over the authenticity of their food, and the effectiveness of those controls on reality. The division of responsibilities for food safety and authenticity has created confusion.”

In conclusion, while Labour rightly demands—I know the Minister will demand this as well—that the food sector step up and take responsibility for its failures and commends the sector for the work it has done so far in recent months, it also demands the same response from our Government. The sins of the father do not have to be visited on the son. The new Under-Secretary of State can acknowledge that the 2010 FSA machinery of government changes were wrong-headed, that they played a contributory factor in retarding the early response to the crisis, that they are a risk factor, as the NAO says, in any future large-scale food adulteration or contamination episodes, and that he should now step up and act for the good of consumers, the food sector and farmers and for his own peace of mind. Last week, the head of the National Audit Office said:

“The Government needs to remove this confusion, and improve its understanding of potential food fraud and how intelligence is brought together and shared.”

I look forward to the Under-Secretary of State doing just that, beginning with his response. I wish him well in taking forward the Government’s action on this matter.

[Sandra Osborne (in the Chair)]

The debate must end by 16.43, and it would be appreciated if the Minister would leave some time at the end for the Chair of the Select Committee to respond.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

It is a pleasure, Mrs Osborne, to serve under your chairmanship and to stand here as both a Minister and a member of the Select Committee—at least in name, if not in application. The House will remove me from the Committee in due course.

Before I get on to substantive matters, let me say that it has been an absolute pleasure and an honour to serve on that Committee for more than eight years, under the excellent chairmanship of the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) and also of Michael Jack, who did fine work as Chair of the Committee in the previous Parliament. It is also a pleasure to follow all those who spoke in this debate; they spoke with passion and brought insight. I may not agree with all the conclusions that the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) has drawn, but I pay tribute none the less to his experience and the care that he has taken in preparing for this debate. As he knows, I have family roots in his constituency, so it is always a pleasure to hear from him.

I am grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee and colleagues for securing this debate, so that we can explore this issue in some depth. As highlighted, the incident has been the subject of a number of reviews and reports, which reflects the level of public concern and the fact that it is essential that consumers have confidence in the food that they buy or are served.

Food fraud is completely unacceptable, and that is what we are dealing with here. Consumers have every right to expect food to be correctly described. It is up to the whole food supply chain to ensure that such an incident does not happen again. As the Committee’s report says, industry’s assurance measures and the action that it takes to ensure the traceability of products are key to a sustainable food chain.

As the Committee is aware, the industry is taking its own steps to build consumer confidence. Although the Government should not be closely supervising the industry or limiting its ability to react to market signals, they do have a role in helping to restore consumer confidence and in enforcing EU law.

To help restore consumer confidence, the Government have encouraged industry to continue to give high priority to the testing of processed meat products and the sharing of information. More than 36,000 industry test results have been reported, covering manufacturing, processing, retail, catering and food service, which demonstrates the seriousness with which the industry is taking the need to remain vigilant and to restore consumer confidence in its food.

The Government agree that they have a role in working with businesses from across the food supply chain to identify ways to strengthen the industry and to enable it to respond to the challenges and opportunities that it faces. Regular meetings are being held, chaired by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, to ensure that British food is recognised for its rigorous standards and traceability and that our farmers and producers do not get a bad reputation as a result of incidents such as the one involving horsemeat.

Research shows that in the wake of the horsemeat incident, UK consumers have a greater level of trust in British produce, and the industry must welcome and build on that. That point was made by my hon. Friends the Members for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) and for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams), as well as my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee in her opening remarks.

During the incident, the Government’s role focused on working with industry and local authorities to establish the scale of the problem, investigating and taking enforcement action against those responsible and prompting action at a European level to deal with some issues that have again been raised today. Our focus is now on learning and sharing the lessons from the incident and on improving the current approach to food authenticity and fraud.

The UK Government reacted quickly when they were alerted to the presence of horsemeat in beef products on sale in the UK by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. That is backed up by the findings of the Troop review, mentioned by the Committee Chairman and others, into the FSA’s response to the incident.

The Committee has questioned whether the FSA should have done something sooner when the Food Safety Authority of Ireland mentioned that it was developing testing methods to detect horsemeat. I would like to clarify that a competent authority in another member state informing the UK that it is planning to develop a detection method is not the same as a member state informing the UK that it has found evidence of contamination or food fraud. We would hope and expect that any intelligence that another member state had would be shared with us at that juncture. Nothing was brought to the Government’s attention at that point; it was only that the FSAI was developing a test.

Just as we have a programme of work to develop testing to support our enforcement of EU food law, other member states develop methods for testing the authenticity of food. In its evidence to the Committee, the FSAI stated that it was “surprised” by the results and retested and reconfirmed the results before informing its Government officials and Ministers.

Once the presence of horsemeat in beef products had been identified as potential fraud, rather than unintended contamination, the UK’s response to the incident was rapid and extensive—more rapid and extensive than that of any other member state. An unprecedented level of testing was carried out quickly by industry and local authorities, the results of which were communicated to consumers and shared with the Commission and other European countries. It is to the credit of the industry and enforcement officers that that activity was carried out at pace and effectively, and to UK laboratories’ credit that they demonstrated the ability to up their capacity to meet demands.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I commend the Minister for making a very good first stab at it; I know that he will be excellent in this role—I genuinely mean that. However, I want to clarify that he is now distancing himself firmly from the recommendations and findings of the Committee and the National Audit Office. He is turning 180°.

[Dan Rogerson]

I am seeking areas of common ground between the two—between the Committee and the NAO. Having had the opportunity to discuss this matter with officials in preparation for this debate, having looked at the report from the Committee of which I was a member, having looked at the other report that the hon. Gentleman mentioned and having sought the evidence, what is clear to me as a Minister is the important distinction between the notification that a test was being developed and the discovery that horsemeat had been found. That is an important distinction.

The Government share the Committee’s desire to see those responsible for the situation brought to justice. I note the Committee’s concerns about the pace of those investigations and the number of arrests. However, it is a criminal matter and so is being dealt with by the prosecuting authorities—not something in which the Government should intervene. However, the police Gold Group, chaired by the City of London police, is taking the matter very seriously and the necessary steps are being taken.

Another point to make is that if we wanted a faster response, we might well have ended up with lesser fines, of the sort that Members have been concerned about today. We would have had a local authority response at a lower level, which would have been swifter but would perhaps not have picked up on the issues. I want to reassure Members present here that these investigations are live, that—as we know—arrests have been made and that these matters are being taken very seriously. However, it would not be proper for me to seek to jump to conclusions ahead of the report on those investigations.

We will continue to share information from the UK with Europol and other enforcing authorities, and we are mindful that a number of businesses in the UK have been victims of this fraud and will also be keen to see action taken against those responsible. People along the chain could be said to have been victims of the fraud.

As I said, the Government’s focus is on learning from and sharing the lessons from the incident, both through formal reviews and internal discussions to strengthen current activities. Following the publication of Professor Pat Troop’s review of the FSA’s handling of the incident, the FSA and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are working together to address the issues raised. In particular, they are looking at ways to strengthen and improve intelligence sharing with relevant partners, and to clarify the responsibilities and roles of the two organisations.

Horsemeat fraud is unacceptable, but that does not mean that the Government were not effectively identifying food contamination and fraud. Meat fraud and product substitution are not new; as my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton pointed out, across the centuries and across the sector as a whole these are things that unscrupulous people have attempted to get away with. In 2012, local authorities carried out more than 18,000 tests for food authenticity, including tests for meat substitution. However, enforcement officers were not looking for the presence of horsemeat. Instead, the focus of testing was for product substitution with more widely available products, such as chicken and pork.

What the horsemeat incident has demonstrated is the widespread and international nature of food fraud, and the need to consider products that are more readily available beyond the UK, to protect consumer confidence. The Government agree that to understand and robustly assess the risks, we need better intelligence sharing. The FSA and DEFRA are jointly working to achieve better intelligence sharing between Government, industry and local authorities. Intelligence is not solely about testing, and given finite resources it is right that sampling and testing by enforcement bodies should remain targeted and risk-based.

The increase in the number of reported incidents of food fraud demonstrates the effectiveness of that targeting, as well as the successful development of detection methods and the priority given to authenticity. The Government also agree that it is unacceptable for any local authority not to carry out food standards sampling, and the FSA will continue to work with local authorities to ensure that all of them meet the standards set out in the framework agreement. Although we all understand the pressures on local government, the matter is very clear and the FSA has also been clear about working with partners in local government to ensure that those standards are delivered.

The Government recognise that they have a role in horizon-scanning for the unknown risks, but this should be done in a manner and on a scale that still represents good value to the taxpayer. That is something that we will need to consider further and it will still need to be based on intelligence for it to be justified. We are already strengthening information sharing between departments, by linking the emerging risks programme and the authenticity programme to improve our ability to horizon-scan the next unknown risk. The FSA has also reviewed its own operational structure to give greater direction and priority to identifying and combating food fraud in the future.

On the issue that a number of hon. Members raised about the report line for the FSA, we have to be absolutely clear that the FSA is a non-ministerial department of Government. It advises other Departments and shares information with them, as I have been saying, but it is not subject in any way either to my own Department or to the Department of Health. It is independent, and its independence is welcomed. Obviously, that it would be independent was the intention of the previous Government in constituting it.

Although we are looking to communicate better the roles and responsibilities of the FSA and DEFRA, the Government do not accept that machinery of government changes in 2010 impacted on the Government’s handling of the horsemeat incident or on the independent status of the FSA. The FSA led the response from day one, with DEFRA and the FSA working closely together throughout to deliver an effective response. It is right that Ministers were held to account for updating Parliament on the situation during the incident; it is right that Ministers took the lead in initiating action at a European level; and it is also right that the FSA led on investigating the incident and taking enforcement action. The FSA leads on enforcement, and it has in place the necessary framework and relationships with local authorities to instigate sampling and testing.

There will always be boundary issues for the Government’s interest in food, and it is our responsibility to ensure that these issues are understood and that we have the measures in place to make them work. The recent horsemeat incident has demonstrated that the FSA and DEFRA can work together to address issues such as food fraud, but we recognise that there is always more to be done to ensure that stakeholders understand where those boundaries lie and why, even if they do not agree with them.

As the Select Committee is aware, the Government’s independent review, “Integrity and Assurance of Food Supply Networks”, will focus on consumer confidence in the authenticity of food products, identifying any weaknesses that could have implications for food safety and authenticity. The review will consider the efficiency of current frameworks and operations, and I am sure that stakeholders will have taken the opportunity to raise their concerns or highlight issues.

The Chair of the Select Committee raised the issue of reviews. It is important to point out that this is a separate review. The Troop review was into the incident itself; this review will now set out where we go from here. It is looking at what we need to do to ensure the integrity of the supply chain right the way across, and we look forward to the interim publication of its findings later in the year.

The “Integrity and Assurance of Food Supply Networks” review is not only focused on Government but will look at the roles, and responsibilities to consumers, of the industry, and at what businesses need to do to support consumer confidence. That is the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton made when he was talking about the responsibility of the industry. As the Government, we are engaging with this issue and seeking to reassure people that the food chain is secure, but ultimately those involved in the food chain are responsible for it. They are the ones who are selling products to consumers, engaging with producers and taking part in that chain.

My hon. Friend was absolutely right to raise that issue; the Government have a role in this process, but we must ensure that it is those who are involved in the chain itself who guarantee its integrity. The food industry is ultimately responsible for making sure that food is authentic and meets the required standards expected not only by the Government but most importantly, as hon. Members have said, by consumers.

I am sure that, as I am, the Committee is looking forward to seeing Professor Chris Elliott’s interim report in December.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dan Rogerson]

The hon. Lady is absolutely correct. When I was responding to the hon. Member for Ogmore earlier, I thought that he was referring to the NAO report when he talked about “two reports”, rather than the two phases of the work that the Committee did.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Are you in the NAO report as well? [Laughter.]

[Dan Rogerson]

No—absolutely not.

Oral Answers to Questions

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

We are consulting on the future of the publicly owned forest and management of forestry issues generally and looking at what we will take forward. There are many excellent landowners, such as the Woodland Trust and the National Trust, who encourage public access and enjoyment of woodland and I look forward to working with them and other landowners to ensure we increase access for everybody.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

A National Audit Office report today shows the response to the horsemeat scandal was hampered by confusion caused by the coalition Government splitting the Food Standards Agency’s responsibilities in 2010. It also raises concerns over the reductions in food testing, public analysts and local officers working on food law enforcement since this Government came to power. So will Ministers now accept their share of responsibility—or is this the fault of the badgers?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

The Department will look at this report from the NAO and study its recommendations very carefully, but I have to say there is no evidence that the division of the FSA’s role has contributed to this, and, more importantly, we have appointed Professor Chris Elliott to look at this whole issue in great detail and his report will be key.

Oral Answers to Questions

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

My hon. Friend is right, and through the recently announced third phase of the Courtauld commitment, the Government are working with retailers and manufacturers to design products in ways that help households reduce food waste and save money, including improved storage instructions. The Waste and Resources Action programme—WRAP—is working directly with consumers through the Love Food Hate Waste programme, to help people know how best to store different foods.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

The Government spent £25,000 on a consultation into sky lanterns which concluded that the fire risk is significant, and that they pose a risk to planes and a significant risk to the operation of coastal rescue services. With an estimated £6 million damage caused by a single sky lantern at Smethwick, and a fire that needed 200 firefighters and left only one spare fire tender to cover the whole of the west midlands, are the Government still seriously saying they will do absolutely nothing?

[Mr Heath]

The hon. Gentleman knows all about doing absolutely nothing on sky lanterns. I asked questions about sky lanterns year after year from the Opposition Benches, and within a month of taking office I commissioned a report into the potential harm they cause to farm animals. The report concluded that it was not possible to quantify the damage to animal welfare in ways that would justify a ban, but it indicated that there was a significant danger of fire. I have communicated that to my colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government, and I plan to meet them to discuss further action.

Beef Cattle and Sheep (Carbon Footprint)

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 26th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend refers to the amount of permanent pasture in Wales. Much of the land may well be too steep to be ploughed, and from an environmental point of view, we would not want to plough it. I do not wish to over-labour this point, but if we are not going to graze livestock on that pasture, what are we actually going to do to manage that land successfully? So livestock farming is not only important from an aesthetic point of view; it produces great meat and it does a great service for the landscape. So I very much agree with him. Parts of the west country and the north of England likewise have much permanent pasture.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

May I draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to something that he might find interesting, which is the reintroduction of the little-known Welsh White beef cattle up on the Plynlimon hills with the Wildlife Trusts? The reason that those cattle have been reintroduced in those areas, which are vital for holding carbon emissions in peat bogs, is that they trample the right sort of way—better than sheep—in that environment and they eat the right sort of vegetation to keep the biodiversity right as well. So the Welsh White cattle are doing a good job up there.

[Neil Parish]

The shadow Minister raises an interesting issue about not only carbon sequestration but the management of grassland, but not only Welsh White cattle are important in that regard; there is an argument that sheep do not do the same job on certain pasture land as suckler cows and beef cattle do. That is perhaps the subject for a debate for another time, but it is relevant to the fact that, if we are to have good-quality grassland, we need the right type of stock to graze it.

The inquiry found that no current methodology exists to include this factor in an assessment of carbon footprint, despite the fact the loss of hedgerows and pasture land, for example, would evidently impact on the amount of carbon removed from the air. Of course, more carbon would also be emitted if that pasture land were to be destroyed.

Grazing livestock, particularly on uplands, makes a valuable contribution to biodiversity and the preservation of ecosystems. For example, hedgerows provide wonderful habitats for many species that are vital for the diversity of fauna and flora. As numerous witnesses pointed out, it is important to bear that in mind when considering the overall environmental impact of agriculture. Quantifying the carbon value of biodiversity is incredibly difficult and is not something that life-cycle analysis takes into account. The evidence suggests that it will be a major challenge to find an agreed way of quantifying this benefit in the short or medium term. This exposes the weaknesses of simply looking at carbon footprint as a measure of environmental impact, and we urge the Minister to consider this point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford)—I very much enjoyed her speech. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on calling the debate.

I should mention that I keep Hereford cattle, which are the finest, tastiest, most adaptable and most popular breed in the world—no need for any of these Welsh Whites.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Bill Wiggin]

I would be delighted to give way after challenging the hon. Gentleman.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Welsh Whites are a very small breed, with little panda eyes that look up at you. It would be very difficult to eat them, because they are gorgeous little creatures.

[Bill Wiggin]

It is difficult to justify having these wonderful animals if they have no purpose. One key point is that if we did not have a healthy, nutrient-rich diet, largely from meat, it would be hard to justify having these wonderful breeds, from many different parts of the United Kingdom, which would be a great loss.

There are two primary causes of climate change: one is chopping down trees in our rain forests to plant soya beans, and we are doing what we can to mitigate the impact of that industry; the other is emissions from the front and the back of the cow, which release methane into the atmosphere. While the emissions from our cattle are regrettable, we have taken steps to control the phenomenon, and we are currently taking further action.

A report called “The English Beef and Sheep Production Roadmap—Phase 1”, from 2009, states:

“Steady improvements in beef and sheep production efficiency have taken place over the past decade, with 5% fewer prime animals required to produce each tonne of meat in 2008 than in 1998.”

Emission levels from British cattle have therefore been reduced due to lower cattle numbers.

Regardless of where the emissions come from, however, the inquiry undertaken by the all-party group has clearly highlighted the fact that there are specific issues surrounding the way in which we in England measure carbon emissions from grazing livestock on our farms. In some cases, we go so far as to disadvantage our farmers, our industry and even our country, in terms of its ability to meet the agricultural industry’s global targets. It is outrageous that there is no international consensus on sequestration, and I am sure the Minister will want to see one. Having a consensus is absolutely fundamental; indeed, there is an old saying: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” We have to move forward on that.

Britain excludes sequestration from its assessments, whereas France and Wales, which is next to my constituency, include sequestration. That means that when we make comparisons between the three countries and measure how close each is to reaching its targets, we in England find ourselves at a disadvantage. While the inquiry by the all-party group, which is led by my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton, has told us many things we already knew, it has also revealed sequestration to be the primary issue of contention.

England has one of the most efficient livestock production systems in the world, in the form of our rain-fed pastures. Yet, grazing cattle and sheep comes in for undue negative criticism, with the focus fixed firmly on emissions from animals. Those animals actually have a positive part to play in landscape management and the utilisation of land that cannot, as many colleagues have said, be used for arable crops. Many fellow Members would support us in the view that our sheep and cattle contribute meaningfully to our environment, and the all-party group report rightly acknowledges that. One of the contentions revealed by the report is that if we, like France and Wales, took such issues into account, our carbon footprint could be significantly lower, and our farmers would be at less of a disadvantage.

The report suggests we need more robust scientific evidence and data to move the debate forward constructively. National Farmers Union climate change adviser Dr Ceris Jones acknowledged that the report highlights the exclusion of sequestration from the majority of our calculations of greenhouse gases. As the report recalls, “a number of witnesses” supported the idea that pasture land had the ability

“to sequester carbon from the atmosphere”.

It goes on to point to research being done in France by Professor Jean François Soussana on carbon sequestration, which may point to why several countries now include carbon sequestration in their calculations.

In my constituency, farming is a major employer and a huge part of the local economy. I therefore find very troubling anything that hampers my constituents or that might prevent their businesses from growing or from being as successful as they could be.

Carbon sequestration is set to be a significant issue for the industry, particularly because of the different attitudes towards it in different countries. As I explained, those differences could have a significant negative impact on our industry. If we could offset the methane emissions from grazing livestock, as happens in France and Wales, that could have a positive implication for our understanding of our livestock’s carbon footprint. Additionally, as the report explains, that

“would render the current PAS 2050 model incorrect and would mean we should move to a model closer to that used in France.”

Before such a drastic move is contemplated, and with the science unresolved, further investigation should, of course, be our first course of action. Dr Luke Spadavecchia, of DEFRA, has explained to the all-party group the complexity of the sequestration calculation. Even if the science on sequestration was unanimous, however, the inquiry would still have raised several valid and vital points on, for example, sustainability and the role our cattle and sheep play in feeding the world’s growing population.

Ultimately, there is still much debate to have on this matter. I hope the inquiry and our subsequent debate will enable us to find common ground so that we can move forward and give our farmers the best opportunity to succeed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

It is a delight to serve in a debate under your stewardship, Mrs Brooke, and to respond briefly, before the Minister takes the stage. I thank the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) and other members of the all-party group on beef and lamb for their work on the report. I note for the record my membership of the group, although I can take no credit or praise for this report. I was absent from the proceedings during witness statements and so on. My absence in no way diminishes the report; in fact, it probably strengthens it.

I will mention the contributions before I make some detailed points. The chair of the all-party group, the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton, went in some detail through the report, which I will discuss in a moment. I should make it clear that I used the example of Welsh White cattle for a particular reason. He made the point ably in his contribution that we should consider not only issues such as carbon reduction, emissions and sequestration, but the wider benefits of particular livestock in certain landscapes and environments.

The reason why I gave the curious example of the fairly rare Welsh White—a small beef animal—is that its footprint is slightly lighter than other cattle but slightly heavier than sheep. It does a perfect job of breaking up the upland peat bogs of the Plynlimon hills, but not breaking up the ground too much. Combined with excellent work done by local farmers and the Wildlife Trusts to re-block some of the drains dug during the second world war to dry out the land so crops could be planted, which never quite worked successfully, the breed is now yielding great dividends. The right creature in the right habitat helps biodiversity as well.

The hon. Gentleman made the point well in his contribution that there is a wider range of issues, some of which are interlinked. Often, we talk about carbon on this side and biodiversity on the other side. We need to pull the strands together intelligently.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made a varied contribution. He always speaks well, and not only about the interests of Northern Ireland and his constituents. He rightly raised food security and food production, as did other Members. We are focusing increasingly on meeting the need for good nutrition and affordable food on the tables of a growing population both within this country and in terms of exports. Export markets are growing for Northern Ireland, Scottish, Welsh and English produce.

The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) added an extra dimension to the debate when she said that we need to consider both sides of carbon. Again, that came out in the all-party parliamentary group’s report: this is not simply about carbon emissions, but about sequestration within different types of landscape. The point was well made, and I will return to it.

The hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) made a good contribution, although I should pick him up on one point. He referred to Wales, “which is next to my constituency.” It is a little larger than simply being next to his constituency; it is next to a few others as well. I understand that Wales is often used as a unit of international measurement, but I would not want to think that it is only the size of North Herefordshire. It is a little larger.

[Bill Wiggin]

It is definitely still next door to my constituency, though.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

It is, but it is next door to a lot of others as well. We may be slightly smaller than other countries, but we are a proud nation, as the hon. Gentleman knows.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) rightly challenged the farming sector with its responsibilities in terms of climate change and carbon emissions, saying that it could do more. She was eminently reasonable on the contribution that farming could play as part of the wider UK and global drive to tackle global emissions. She also widened the debate to the issue of biofuels versus food, which other hon. Members also raised, and to diet and other reports that challenge or contradict what we are debating. Those reports were useful for this debate and probably deserve separate debates, which I am sure she will seek; it is right to have challenge.

This is more than simply an applied academic argument about how we measure and compare the carbon footprint of livestock. It is about effective measures to improve the performance of different types of farms in different farming sectors, and we can seek that improvement only if we measure the right thing in the right way and make like-for-like comparisons both within the UK and its devolved Administrations and internationally. As hon. Members have said, it is also a matter of food security and providing for the demands of a growing global population, and as I am sure other members of the all-party group are aware, it is a matter of reputational importance to the livestock sector. It recognises the work that the sector can do and its role in reducing carbon emissions, while putting good, wholesome British food on consumers’ plates in all parts of the UK and increasingly in other countries, which demand outstanding produce from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

The all-party group’s report raises questions about the accuracy and appropriateness of measurement, the lack of consensus on standard methodologies of measurement and the lack of comparability between measurement approaches domestically and internationally, as well as about how carbon sequestration can and should be taken into account with a standard approach. The all-party group has done a great service to the House by raising those issues, so that the Minister can respond to them domestically and internationally. I will turn briefly to some of the specific issues.

I am grateful for the information provided to all hon. Members by the National Farmers Union and others. One interesting dilemma within the discussions on carbon emissions and sequestration is illustrated in upland hill farming, which is part of my family background. The NFU makes the good point that such farmers could be particularly disadvantaged by how we currently measure, assess and compare carbon impacts. Some of the hill farms are on poor land without any real alternative uses. Such farming is also extensive in nature; it takes far longer to raise lambs to carcase weight. The finishing period is far longer, and generally, the vegetation and forage are of a much lower standard. That has a significant impact. When we look at the farming sector as a whole and say, “You’re not doing well enough,” the question comes back, “What alternatives do you have for that environment?” It is an interesting question. I am glad that I am speaking up for sheep, rather than cattle, after my earlier intervention. As we mentioned, it is also a question of the benefits for landscape management and biodiversity of having the right livestock in the right place.

On the international comparators raised by the all-party group and others, can the Minister give us an update on what progress has been made towards standardising international measures? What is happening on the common carbon footprinting methodology for the lamb meat sector? What is happening on the slightly earlier-stage beef life-cycle assessment white paper by the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef? How are those things progressing? They and similar transnational interventions might provide some solutions to what the all-party group seeks.

Some issues raised by the NFU include the uncertainty still associated with agricultural emissions—it existed while we were in government, and it is still ambiguous now—the need for good data about the wider aspects of on-farm activity, the choice of unit used to assess on-farm activity and carbon emissions, where the boundary lies and whether farm-specific mitigation measures should be part of the overall measure of a farm’s carbon impact. If a farm takes measures, including on renewable energy and so on, should they be included?

Finally, the NFU has broadly welcomed the recent call by the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board to develop and deliver a computer-based environmental impact calculator for use by UK farms. It sees that as a way to achieve less ambiguity and more confidence. Will the Minister give us an update on that as well?

I thank the all-party group for its report and for securing the debate this afternoon. The right questions are being asked, and I am sure that the Minister will give us some assurance on them. Much more work needs to be done on measurement and comparability, but while recognising the real issues of food security and affordability, there are also things on which the farming sector—if we can get the measurements right—will want to deliver. Such work will show not only what a good job farmers do, but what more they can do to help us in our drive to tackle carbon emissions and climate change.

Common Agricultural Policy

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 18th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Heath]

I am afraid that is an area where the National Farmers Union and the Government simply do not agree. I believe that we currently have extremely good higher level stewardship schemes within pillar two, and I want those to continue and to prosper. I want us to ensure that we can continue payments on some of the older schemes, where we have accrued benefit, which I do not want us to lose. I am absolutely clear that where we use the pillar two payments in the most effective way, we will be doing so to enhance the position of those who work the land and confer on it public goods. For instance, one of my priorities will be to see what we can do in upland areas, where people farm in less favourable conditions and where it might make all the difference, but I simply do not agree that the best way to distribute money is necessarily through pillar one.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

Will the Minister expand on that? Farmers have expressed their concern to me in recent weeks and months over the transfers to pillar two. How can more effective use be made of the arrangements so that those farmers are not put at a competitive disadvantage? What fine-tuning can be carried out? How can we get more bang for our buck in the pillar two funding?

[Mr Heath]

A simple answer—I appreciate that it might be considered a simplistic one—is that we target the funding better towards the places where it will have the most effect. We have a highly efficient and effective agriculture industry and we do not need to target funding at all sectors. We need to ensure that it reaches the places where it will have the greatest effect. As I have said, this is where we part company with the National Farmers Union, which would like us to maintain the maximum funding within pillar one. We believe, however, that pillar two is the most effective vehicle for benefiting environmental interests, which are important, and for directing support to the areas of this country’s agriculture that need it most.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Heath]

I should perhaps continue with my speech for a few minutes, rather than take any more interventions.

We do not believe that the original proposal for greening direct payments offered the same value for money as our existing agri-environmental schemes, and we have been working hard to move the negotiations in a positive direction. Any greening must be meaningful, administratively simple and deliver real environmental benefits for the taxpayers’ money that is spent on it. Value for taxpayers’ money is vital, which is why I am also opposed to proposals under which it would be possible to get paid twice for carrying out the same greening measures under both pillar one and pillar two.

No decisions have been taken on how greening will be implemented but, importantly, the position we agreed at the March Council included, as I have said, increased flexibility for member states and regions to deliver greening through a national scheme, if they so wish.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The Minister is being very generous in taking interventions. Will he respond to the concern of many farmers that the flexibility that the UK Government have understandably negotiated for our farmers could be interpreted very differently by farmers in other member nations and that it could, in fact, be interpreted to the disadvantage of our own farmers?

[Mr Heath]

Obviously, we try as far as possible to eliminate potential disadvantages. I cannot say that we will be successful across the board, because this is a negotiated settlement. Where possible we try to make sure that we all play to common ground rules, but with local interpretation. It is clear, for instance, that lowland dairy farming in this country is very different from growing olives on a Greek island. Different criteria apply and we want to make sure that we recognise the differences as well as the common basis.

--- Later in debate ---

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

We welcome this opportunity to scrutinise progress towards reform of the common agricultural policy. I was going to say to the Minister that it seems like we debated the CAP only yesterday, but then I recalled that we did so in Committee.

The Secretary of State and the Minister may regard it as a measure of success that they have not faced criticism from one side in their negotiations, but they have in fact faced criticism from all sides, including farmers, farmers unions, Ministers in devolved Governments—particularly, but not exclusively, the Scottish Government—and environmental groups. Perhaps the Secretary of State is attempting a divide and conquer strategy—splitting the competing interests in order to diminish their effectiveness and leaving him free to argue his own way in European Union negotiations—but such a strategy has real dangers that can only diminish the outcomes for the UK. Being surrounded by attacks on their negotiating stance leaves Ministers looking weak and vulnerable. I am sure that the Commission, the President and the European parliamentarians involved in decision making will have noticed that isolation at home and will continue to utilise that weakness in negotiations.

That is just on the home front. Likewise, in Brussels and Strasbourg, the days of the UK being at the vanguard of progressive, like-minded nations on CAP reform are, as in so many other areas of policy, a fond but distant memory. The Government are trying to lead and to build on the collaborative approach to previous negotiations, but they have alienated far too many former friends.

No one can have failed to notice the intervention today in The Daily Telegraph—my daily reading—of the Minister without Portfolio, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who draws an analogy between the Government’s approach to Europe and the heroic but doomed charge of the Light Brigade. The Secretary of State, like his Prime Minister, is boldly and valiantly galloping into the field of diplomatic battle: he and the Prime Minister are the Lord Raglan and Lord Cardigan of CAP reform and European relations, charging headlong into the cannons of Brussels and being scythed down, but nevertheless riding heroically into Eurosceptic mythology, mayhem and madness.

The Government have done their best to alienate potential diplomatic partners with their swivel-eyed lunacy—not my words, Mr Speaker—on the EU. That cannot but affect the negotiations on CAP reform and, as important, lessen the outcomes for UK farmers and consumers and for sustainable production here, in other nations and in the developing world.

[Wayne David]

On that fundamental point, does my hon. Friend agree that the idea that the CAP can be reformed in a big bang is nonsense? Reform must be predicated on sensible negotiations. The Minister without Portfolio, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe, says that there cannot be sensible negotiations if the British Government are confused about their position in Europe and send the message that they are essentially Eurosceptic.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

My hon. Friend, who has great knowledge of this area, is right. It is as though the Government are playing with one hand behind their back. I have great sympathy for the Minister, because although he has great knowledge and wants to work in the best interests of UK farming, his colleagues are not making it easy for him.

[Mr Heath]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for those kind words. I am interested to know what is the position of the Labour party today. Does it support or oppose the budget reduction? Would it have failed to argue for the budget reduction, or does it agree that the Prime Minister had a success in those negotiations?

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The Minister ought to go back and look at the voting record, because the Labour party voted collectively on that matter.

The thrust of the Minister’s speech was about a more competitive farming industry. We do have a strong farming industry. The question is whether he and his Eurosceptic colleagues can carry that forward through the negotiations. I commend the work of UKRep officials in trying to get the very best outcome from a misguided ministerial approach to the EU. They have stuck their fingers in diplomatic dams, while Ministers have been digging away the foundations. I suspect that the Minister has been somewhat dismayed and has done his best among a very bad lot, but it has been a model exercise in how not to win friends and how not to influence people.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He has a vision of the perfect negotiating strategy that his side might have. Might that include giving away half our rebate to get a fundamental reform of the agricultural policy? Will he remind me how successful that was?

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

There, once again, speaks the historic Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party. We have always had the clear position that negotiations on the CAP, the common fisheries policy, on which I negotiated, and on Europe more generally are best served by honesty, transparency, frankness and collaboration. I must make some progress, given your dictate, Mr Speaker.

The Government’s approach both in the UK and in the EU has been wanting. Where does that leave us at this critical stage of the negotiations? At EU level, we are taking not two steps forward and one back, but one step forward and three back. The Secretary of State put it well when he wrote to the Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee in February:

“overall I am disappointed in the outcome of the vote in Agriculture Committee”.

So are we. He continued:

“The amendments turn back the clock in terms of achieving good value for money from rural development, especially agri-environment, and do nothing to continue orientating European agriculture to the market.”

We agree, Secretary of State, we agree. He continued:

“There is a significant watering down of the greening proposals”.

It is all getting a bit gloomy, but there is worse:

“I would emphasise concern on the outcome of the vote on the single CMO where the compromises put a halt to, and even reverse, the direction of reform that CAP has been on”.

Yes, the direction of reform and the progress towards reform that had been achieved, including by Labour Secretaries of State working effectively, collaboratively and intelligently with like-minded progressive member states, are being reversed. How times have changed; how progress has stalled and even been reversed in some areas.

I remind the Secretary of State and his Ministers that his criticism of the lack of progress must be laid fairly and squarely at his own door. It is not enough to bemoan a lack of progress, or even a regression into old-style CAP production support, when that has happened under his leadership of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, his Prime Minister’s leadership of the country and his party’s little-Englander, banner-waving, terrified-of-UKIP style of leadership. They have contributed to our current position. “Speak softly but carry a big stick,” has been replaced by, “Shout loudly and antagonise the neighbours.” Despite all that, we will continue here and in Brussels and Strasbourg to support the Government when they try to do the right thing. We just want them to try harder and negotiate cleverer. That is the backdrop to where we are now.

Many of the detailed contributions today will rightly be focused on farming and technical in character. Before I put some questions to the Minister, it is worth reiterating that Labour strongly believes that farming goes hand-in-hand with sound, sustainable farming practices. In addition to delivering food security and affordability, this CAP reform should not shy away from its broader sustainability remit. Profitable farm businesses are based on sustainable farming practices such as protecting and enhancing soil quality and the water environment; conserving special and priority species and habitats, landscape features and archaeological sites; minimising the carbon footprint of farming; promoting access to the countryside, high animal welfare standards and links to the wider rural economy and communities, and much more. That, by the way, is why pillar two and rural development cannot be overlooked while we strive to ensure the productivity and competitiveness of farming.

Collectively, the Government and their agencies have worked with farmers, landowners and non-governmental organisations throughout the UK over many years to deliver food security for this country; to produce affordable food for the consumer; to protect what we, visitors and tourists love aesthetically in our landscape and countryside, which boosts the wider rural economy; to conserve our habitats, wildlife and biodiversity; to enhance the wider public goods in management of our ecosystem and biodiversity; and, in all that, to adapt to the challenges of climate change. On top of that, farmers have been asked to work with the Government as the CAP moves towards a more market-oriented system, with less reliance on payments for production and more transparent use of public money for public goods.

The head of the National Farmers Union, Peter Kendall, is not alone among the farming unions in his concern that farmers are being left high and dry, confused and condemned by a Government who are as out of touch with farmers as they are with the EU negotiations. He states:

“Instead of delivering a genuine policy framework that embraces and fosters a modern, market orientated, competitive farming sector, free of unnecessary red tape, I fear we will be left with a complex mish-mash of competing and contradictory policy components which will leave farmers facing more bureaucracy and more distortions in the market than ever before.”

I ask the DEFRA ministerial team, who are leading our negotiations, how that came to pass on their watch.

How likely is it that the ongoing dispute over co-financing and the movement of funds between pillars one and two could scupper progress at the June negotiations? Equally important, if there is a delay, are there specific improvements that the Minister will seek in the time gained? Is there any possibility of using that time to reverse the undoubtedly backwards steps towards more old-style market support? Will he say whether the farming unions’ argument is correct that, because of the differential application of the transfer of funds between pillars one and two among nations, their members will unavoidably be placed at a competitive disadvantage? If so, will the Minister share with the House his analysis of how that is likely to affect profitability and competitiveness in each sector, as well as UK farming as a whole against our European neighbours? How will the Government ensure the level playing field to which the Minister referred? Our farmers are not afraid of competition, but it must be fair and open.

We have considered competitive disadvantage across the EU, but how will the Minister deal with the same question across constituent parts of the UK? For example, Scottish Ministers have made it clear that they want maximum flexibility to extend their support—including to sectors such as livestock—well beyond the levels of support that may be given to English or Welsh farmers. What is the Minister’s thinking on that and how will he respond to requests from Scottish Ministers for complete, up-front devolution of funding to the Executive? Will he argue against further use of coupled payments in devolved Administrations, or accept that that is part and parcel of devolution? If the latter, how will he explain that to farmers in England?

How will the Secretary of State respond to the view of the Country Land and Business Association, Tenant Farmers Association and farming unions in England that the introduction of greening elements reduces the need for such a substantial transfer of funds from pillar one to pillar two for environmental measures? Does the Minister believe that such transfers are essential to maintain environmental benefits and not substitutable for pillar one measures, or that they are additional and will extend the future scope of environmental measures?

Farmers want clarity on DEFRA’s position on opt-outs from greening proposals. Does the Minister intend that our farmers should be able to opt out of the specific greening measures proposed, forgoing just the 30% proportion of the new payment but without any further penalty; or will he hold them to complying with the whole package, with no opt-out other than a full one? I trust he can explain his position today.

It comes to something when the president of the NFU remarks candidly that “negotiators have come back from Europe with less than we started with.”

That is hardly a ringing endorsement of Ministers’ batting for British food, farming and rural communities. With the Secretary of State as Lord Raglan in this assault, UKRep and DEFRA officials are playing an heroic role as negotiators, unquestioningly negotiating through the valley of diplomatic death he has made for them. There is confusion and misdirection aplenty as UK interests get cut down again and again by the well positioned, well dug-in cannonades of other European nations. The French commander, Marshal Pierre Bosquet, exclaimed of the futile but spectacular charge of the Light Brigade:

“C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”

It is magnificent, but it is not war. Russian officers offered less praise and more regret, saying of the headlong charge, “C’est la folie.” It is madness.

Labour will continue to engage directly with farmers, farming unions, environmental organisations, MEPs, colleagues in devolved Administrations and Governments, and all who want to see CAP reform deliver for food security and affordability, environmental and wider public benefits, and rural communities. We will support the Government to get the best deal, despite a cack-handed approach to negotiations thus far. I wish the Minister good luck. Where he gets it right he will have our support, but there is a long way to go.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

Dog Control and Welfare

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Miss McIntosh]

I think that the Committee would like to record our disappointment that it took so long to produce the draft legislation yet the Government were unable to wait. As Members will know, the one time when a Select Committee cannot meet is during Prorogation, between the House rising to represent the end of one parliamentary year and it reconvening.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

Could the Government make good that slight on the Committee by introducing draft guidance—they have plenty of time—on the provisions introducing not dog control notices but other measures? Then we could see the draft guidance not on Report but in Committee. There is plenty of time and the Committee could give the scrutiny that it has given to the wider range of measures needed.

[Miss McIntosh]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and I am sure that the Minister will have heard his remarks; I hope he will endorse what the hon. Gentleman has said.

We had only eight sitting days to conclude our work. We are grateful to the 40 or so individuals and organisations who sent written evidence on a tight time scale, and to those who gave oral evidence. That demonstrates the importance that many attach to finding better ways to tackle dangerous dogs. In our pre-legislative scrutiny report, we made numerous recommendations for improving the draft Bill, which we now expect the Government to amend. As I said to my hon. Friend the Minister, the Committee stands prepared to table amendments to improve the Bill if we think fit.

We feel that the Bill shows that the Minister has not fully understood the public concern about dangerous dogs, nor have Government policies matched the action required. Our headline findings are that the Government have failed to respond adequately to public concern about dog attacks and poor dog welfare; that legislation must be amended urgently to protect the public from dangerous dogs; that current laws have comprehensively failed to tackle irresponsible dog ownership; and that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs proposals published belatedly in February are too limited.

The evidence we received from DEFRA and the Home Office did little to reassure us that either Department is giving sufficient priority to dog control and welfare issues. The Home Office approach to tackling antisocial behaviour is too simplistic. Indeed, when we were in opposition, the Conservatives felt that antisocial behaviour was not the right vehicle. The legislation fails to reflect the impact that poor breeding and training by irresponsible owners can have on a dog’s behaviour.

We recommended that DEFRA should introduce comprehensive legislation to consolidate the fragmented rules relating to dog control and welfare. New rules should give enforcement officers more effective powers, and our key recommendation is to include dog control notices, such as those already in use in Scotland, to prevent dog-related antisocial behaviour.

We also found that local authorities need to devote more resources to the effective management of stray dogs or else consideration should be given to returning responsibility to the police. We stand by that recommendation. The Committee agreed that all dogs should be microchipped, as much for animal welfare as for controlling dangerous dogs, and that being able to link an animal to its owner was essential to clamp down on irresponsible dog ownership.

On a personal note, may I remind the House that when we had dog licensing—I am sure the Minister will confirm this—only 50% of dog owners bought a dog licence in any one year? The House and the public expect us to bear down on the irresponsible dog owners who did not purchase a licence and who may not microchip.

--- Later in debate ---

[Miss McIntosh]

The Committee and I welcome what the hon. Lady says. When I visited the Blue Cross home in my own constituency, which looks after stray cats and dogs, I saw how massive a bullmastiff is. It would easily have pushed me over if it had leapt up. It is a worrying issue, especially for those who cannot enjoy the safety of their own home and garden. We need to distinguish between responsible dog owners, who, for example, secure the gates to their back or front garden, and those who are negligent over whether their dog is allowed to cause injury.

We also recommended that the definition of an assistance dog be amended to prevent the erroneous application of the assistance dog measures to dogs that are not genuine assistance dogs. We are pleased that the Government amended the draft clauses to allow the exemption from prosecution for householders whose dog attacks a trespasser to apply whether or not someone was home at the time of the attack.

The Committee believes that the current legislation before the House has gaps and needs to go further. We concluded that the Government’s proposals were insufficient and that a comprehensive overhaul of the legislation is needed, including the consolidation of the several dozen statutes that impinge on the issues, and that remains our view. I am talking about not just the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 but the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) Act 1953 and a whole host of legislation that pertains to that area.

On Second Reading of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill on Monday, there was unanimous support for our recommendation that targeted dog control notices such as those in place in Scotland be introduced to give police and local authorities effective measures to tackle irresponsible dog owners before their dog inflicts harm. It is that preventive measure that is the key to controlling dangerous dogs and potentially dangerous behaviour.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Once again, I commend the Chair of the Select Committee on her contribution. Does she agree that the Government have listened to many of the evolving concerns and have acted to respond to them, but the one remaining thing they need to do is listen to the Committee and not be governed by the directives of the usual channels? Should there be overwhelming consensus on a point such as dog control notices, they should listen and respond accordingly. We are not daft, because we have based our views on what we see in Scotland and elsewhere.

[Miss McIntosh]

I welcome the intervention by the hon. Gentleman; I am tempted to call him my hon. Friend. On a number of issues, this Government have proved that they listen. As I have mentioned, my hon. Friend the Minister is indeed a deeply reasonable man and I am sure that he will pass the test of reasonableness as the Bill goes through. It is, of course, a Home Office piece of legislation, but the clauses that I have referred to relate to DEFRA.

In our pre-legislative scrutiny report, we made a recommendation that a dog attack that injures any protected animal—such as other dogs, cats, horses or livestock—should be deemed an offence. I pay tribute not only to the dog charities but to Cats Protection, which supports this recommendation. It is very important that attacks on other animals—such as other dogs, cats and horses, whose riders might be seriously injured, and especially livestock—should be addressed.

The Committee was also concerned about the provisions under the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 that currently ban certain types of dog, regardless of temperament, while excluding other aggressive breeds. In our pre-legislative scrutiny report, we called for a focus on the owner rather than on dog type, given that any dog can cause harm if it has an irresponsible owner—deed rather than breed.

To tackle stray dogs, we need to have a properly resourced dog warden service in all local authority areas. We also need to be aware of the increasing number of aggressive dogs that are being abandoned and of the additional burden on local authorities and dog charities, which are already overstretched. I have mentioned the provisions of the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005 that might be leading to more stray dogs coming on to our streets.

On dog breeding, we criticised the Government for doing too little to tackle poor breeding practices. Relying on voluntary action has not delivered sufficient reform, and the Advisory Council on the Welfare Issues of Dog Breeding should be given a formal regulatory role to enforce standards.

--- Later in debate ---

[Julie Hilling]

I agree, and because the proposals are subsumed in antisocial behaviour legislation, not enough priority will to be given to dog attacks. I understand that the police are, potentially, dealing with drugs or other issues, so when somebody is just complaining about a dog barking, for example, how much attention will that get?

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point about prioritising the matter among the wide range of measures that police and community safety agencies have to deal with. There is also the technical, but important, issue of how much time during the progress of a large, complex Home Office Bill will be put aside for debating these issues, which have not been debated enough, technically and in detail. Does she agree that we should definitely find time to do that, and that introducing guidance as rapidly as possible would help us?

[Julie Hilling]

I agree. My hon. Friend raises some important points.

The dog control notice could say, “Keep that dog on a lead”, “Keep it muzzled”, or “Keep it away from children”. I hope that it would state, where necessary, that the dog owner needed to reduce the number of dogs in the household, because the home was not suitable for them. A range of actions could be taken.

We still cannot talk about Jade’s case in detail, but the one complaint we know of was about noise. Had a properly trained person who understood dogs been able to go round at that point, perhaps action could have been taken. I would be the last to say that action could have saved Jade, but the fact that we do not take action at all, apart from saying, “Keep your dogs quiet”, means that we are liable to have more and more of those terrible attacks and tragedies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

I am delighted that we are able to debate this important issue in response to the seventh report of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, on dog control and welfare. I welcome the report, which was exhaustive in the evidence it took and in its comprehensive insights on dog control and welfare.

The point has been well made that one difficulty we are experiencing, both in this debate and in governmental terms, is about who champions the matter in Government. A forthcoming Home Office Bill deals with one aspect, while other aspects, such as sentencing, are dealt with elsewhere. In his response, the Minister—good chap that he is—might want to identify the individual who champions the whole remit. In the absence of a holistic reform of dog welfare and controls, and given that we are dealing with it in a more piecemeal way, who champions the issue right across Whitehall? Who bangs heads together? Who chairs the committees in Government? Who drags the Home Office and others together and says, “This is the way it is all going to hang together.”? I think that role is vital, and it would be good to have information from the Minister.

I welcome the debate and thank the Committee members and its Chair, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), for their truly excellent work on this report and others that relate to such issues. It is right to recognise, as hon. Members have done, the intense suffering of many families who have been traumatised, not only through injuries, but through deaths in their families because of attacks by dogs. That includes most recently Jade Anderson, John Paul Massey four years ago and the 79-year-old pensioner, Clifford Clarke. It is true that they and others personify the tragedy of dog attacks, which has been so ably and eloquently set out here today by my hon. Friends the Members for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) and for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) and by other hon. Members, and in other debates. That gives us the stimulus we need; it is why we need to get this right.

I give immense credit to all the dog and animal welfare charities, the police, the Royal College of Nursing, other health care professionals, veterinarians, postal workers, represented by the Communication Workers Union, and many assorted others who have come together to campaign with immense unanimity and sense of purpose on the issue. I remember at one point a Minister—I am not sure whether it was this Minister, but certainly it was a predecessor—saying to me, “One of the difficulties is that there isn’t a unified voice.”

Well, there has been one for some time, and the people concerned are still pretty unified in demanding what they want; I shall refer to some of the details in a moment. They have played an excellent hand, and for the right reasons. That has to do with the issues that have been mentioned by all hon. Members here today, including the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), who has great experience in this area. Those issues include animal welfare and breeding, as well as dog attacks and responsible ownership and what we can do in that respect.

On a personal level, I thank not only the CWU and Dave Joyce, but Mark, a postal worker from Pencoed, who took me out on his rounds delivering letters in my local patch and talked to me about this and other matters. I also thank Tina, who took me around Euston blindfolded with a guide dog. She took me through Euston and across the front of the station, through busy areas, to show me not only the expertise of guide dogs, the immense amount of training that they receive and how easily it can be lost if they are attacked by other animals or scared in other ways, but the real bond of trust that develops and how that trust can be so easily broken by an inadvertent or a deliberate attack on a precious companion animal or guide dog. Jonathan, a black lab, took me round the course, with Tina instructing me as we went. Jonathan was a black lab—not black lab as in Labour, but as in Labrador, although he could have been Labour. I do not know; he did not tell me at the time.

I also thank Blue Cross, the RSPCA, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and others for the time they have spent with me on frequent visits to their institutions to see their work and how a multifaceted approach is needed to dealing with abandonment, stray dogs and breeding; I will come to some of the detail in a moment. On that basis, one message I have for the Minister, or one thing that I would like him to ask today and when his colleagues go into Committee with the Home Office Bill is, why not consolidation? I suspect that his civil servants, good people as they are, will have said, “There is a more pragmatic way to do this. Let’s do a little bit here and a little bit there and so on.” But there are real concerns about that.

It comes down to this point: how do we pull together a very comprehensive range of issues? They are not simply about sanctions, penalties and stepping in after the event. They are about education, early intervention, stepping in at an early stage when we see that there are problems to prevent them from getting worse, and dealing with what is now in some ways the factory turnover of dogs, and other animals, through the internet and elsewhere. How is that to be dealt with if we do not pull things together in a consolidated Bill? We come back to these points. First, who is championing the issue, and secondly, where is the overall strategy? We have little bits here and there. Many of those things I will welcome in my contribution, but other things could easily be lost. We have to do this properly.

One of the biggest lessons for us on the issue comes from what we did with the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991. That was a classic case of well intentioned legislation that had perverse consequences, which is why we need to get it right this time. The DDA was poorly targeted, which has led to good dogs being seized from good owners and all the personal trauma and inconvenience that go with that. We see dangerous individual dogs that are not from the four proscribed breeds and thus cannot be seized under the Act.

There is confusion. Veterinarians regularly tell us, “We find it hard enough ourselves to identify whether that dog is from one of the four proscribed breeds, but we know that that one needs to be lifted up, taken away and either retrained or kennelled for some time and re-homed with someone who will look after it.” Alternatively, they say, “We think that dog is dangerous, but we can’t actually get to it to lift it.”

The DDA was a classic piece of well intentioned but not well designed legislation. To get the legislation right this time, I urge the Minister, including in discussion with Home Office colleagues and others, really to think about it, because we may not have another good opportunity for a while to get the detail right and to work on the measure with very experienced organisations outside the House, with the EFRA Committee and its members, who have a great deal of knowledge, and with other hon. Members. Working with those people means occasionally giving way and acknowledging that some points that are well and democratically made from the Floor of the House may trump what the Minister is being told by his very able and expert civil servants.

[Mr Graham Brady in the Chair]

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that this is precisely the type of issue that needs to be widely consulted on, and that it is much better if there is broad consensus, just as it is much better if there is broad consensus on how the whole dog issue is to be regulated?

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Very much so. The hon. Gentleman made that point well in terms of the organisational structure that is now giving input to Government and advising them. He is also right in terms of parliamentary consensus and outside organisations. There has been a fair degree of consensus on the holistic way to take this forward. Blue Cross is not the only organisation that is very strong on education and early intervention; so are many others. There is a degree of consensus on the issue, so the hon. Gentleman is right to urge me, as the Opposition Front Bencher, and the coalition Government to work together and to continue it. That might mean a bit of give and take on some things.

There are many points on which we agree with the Government. I have made it clear to the Minister and his colleagues in the other place that we want to provide support and ensure that the legislation goes through in the right shape. However, on the broad principles, in the long term we have to focus on deed, not breed, and replace crude lists of proscribed breeds with a much more holistic approach.

As to the medium term, we are with the Government, and the police, in their argument that we cannot scrap the DDA, despite my criticisms of it—because it is fundamentally flawed—without looking much more at causes than symptoms, without that holistic approach. For the moment, we have to focus on both deed and breed. We will have to do that until we get the whole package in place. In many ways, I regret saying that. I would like to say that we can turn a switch and do it now, but we are in a process. If we can get it right, we will get to the idea of focusing on individual owners and individual dogs, rather than castigating whole breeds or castigating pet owners or dog owners generally, but we are not quite there yet.

An overhaul of our approach is long overdue. We cannot yet discard one of the few tools that we have in the DDA, crude as it is, but I have to say to the Minister that it is more a blunderbuss than a rifle; it is more a cutlass than a rapier. Innocent owners and innocent dogs get caught up in it as well, which is a matter for regret.

On that basis, great care should be taken in extending the range of the DDA. This is one area where we are concerned about the line that the EFRA Committee has taken, because I understand that it suggested that we might extend it and add to it. I have some concerns about that, because we would be reinforcing the use of the blunderbuss approach. With all the concerns of veterinarians about identifying the right breeds and the development of mongrel mixes—huskies with other dogs and even wolf hybrids and so on—I wonder whether extending the DDA is the right approach. We should be ensuring that we get the mix right: we should be looking at the individual dog, looking at the individual owner and getting the packages in place to intervene very early before the dogs attack and we have to lift them. I am sure we will explore that in the Committee.

[Miss McIntosh]

To put the hon. Gentleman’s mind at rest, I can tell him that when we looked at the issue in our second bite of the cherry, we focused much more, as I and hon. Members have said this afternoon, on the deed rather than the breed, for the simple reason that people can breed round a particular breed, so we would only be creating another loophole.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I welcome that intervention, and the fact that the Committee’s thinking has evolved based on more evidence. That is the right approach. We should explore such things to get the right evidence-based policy outcomes.

I want to spend a little time on the detail in dog control notices. The other day, I pointed out on the Floor of the House that we are not convinced by the Government’s explanations why dog control notices are not necessary and will not work. I will go through some of the reasons. Neither the Secretary of State for the Home Department nor her Minister could respond in detail to some of my questions, but my point was that they need a pretty compelling case why the Government’s approach is better than the one everybody else has lined up behind—all the organisations I spoke about. Everybody is arguing against it on the basis of not only what the Scottish Government have done, but the other examples of similar animal welfare measures that are used effectively in England already, and to which I alluded in the debate the other day.

We will have to test the measure to the point of destruction in Committee and test the Government on why they are sticking with it. We will try to persuade the Government of the arguments and persuade them to go further, and I shall explain why. We are far from being convinced that the Government’s proposals based around community protection notices and public space protection orders will deal with the individual circumstances of problem dogs and problem owners, rather than tackling all dogs and all owners in an area, district or region and so on, or that the proposals can be individualised to allow for early intervention.

We need to see that the proposals can be personalised and individualised, including aspects such as an individual dog needing to be muzzled in certain circumstances, a fence around a garden being maintained to an adequate condition, an owner being sent on a training course, a dog being neutered or restrictions placed on off-lead activity. We will be testing all those things.

We also need to see that the response before there is an attack and public safety is compromised is flexible and proportionate, so that the proposal does what all the organisations have been asking for: protects public safety and the dog’s welfare, rather than steps in afterwards. We are trying to get at the owners who are repeatedly termed “irresponsible”, which could be for a number of reasons, such as ignorance, lack of awareness or general malicious intent. We need to go towards them and their dogs, rather than having a blunderbuss approach.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

indicated assent.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The Minister is nodding, so I know he is going to say a lot of good things in his response.

Are CPNs and the PSPOs—sorry for the jargon—a version of what has been termed a “DOGBO” for problem dogs and owners? If so—the shadow Home Office team will also ask Ministers about that in Committee—given the scale of the challenge and problem identified by the EFRA Committee and other hon. Members, what assurances do we have that such measures will be prioritised among the plethora of other powers in the Bill? An individual police chief constable, or his officers on the ground, must decide with the local authority and other community safety partners that dogs, among all the other challenges, are the pressing priority on an estate or in an area where there is a problem. Without a focus on dog control notices, the worry is that the issue will not be a priority and will become mixed up in the whole.

[Mr Heath]

indicated dissent.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I see the Minister shaking his head and I know that he will come back on that issue. I am glad to see him suggest that that will not be a problem. He will explain today why that is the case.

Will there be adequate resources? I asked on the Floor of the House whether the problem with the dog control notice is that it instantly sends shockwaves through Whitehall and down to local government that resources must follow. If that is the case, let us be honest about it. If that is the problem, which it is, and if we agree on the scale of the challenge and the need to turn things round, which we do, let us have a frank discussion about how we resource this. We have rising dog attacks, injuries and fatalities; rising kennelling costs for local authorities and the police; and more people washing up in A and E units and costing the NHS money. The proposal has to be resourced; otherwise, we can pass all the legislation and regulation and employ all the nudge factors or whatever in the world, but we will not have an effect on the ground, as the hon. Member for The Cotswolds pointed out.

In the absence of dog control notices, how will the Minister ensure that the measures he proposes, among the plethora of measures in the Home Office Bill, will be adequately understood, not only by the police and community safety agencies, which are expected to enforce them, but by the public, who will come to our constituency offices and say, “We know of a problem,” or by a postal worker who says to my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West, “We’ve identified a dog; I don’t know what to do about it.”? Will it be properly explained and understood, so that they can use the mechanisms at hand?

Are the measures too bureaucratic? One great advantage of a flexible early intervention approach is that we can get in early, without having to go back to a magistrates court or get another type of permission that requires 20 forms to be filled out. There can be early, gentle, soft, clever interventions, such as saying to an owner, “He hasn’t done anything yet, but there is a problem. You’ve had a visit from the RSPCA and the local health worker. They have both said that there is a problem. When you have visitors in your property, will you please muzzle that dog. What you do otherwise is up to you.” Will it be that sort of approach, or will a massive bureaucracy have to be gone through to take any action under the proposal?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way again, but I believe that we have time to debate these matters, which is a good thing. Does he agree that, if at all possible, such issues should be framed in legislation to keep people out of court but to have the desired result? A system of police warning, followed by a ticket with a substantial fine, if breached, would be one way of doing that.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will be on the Committee—I will not be—because I think that is an intelligent observation. If he is not on the Committee, he ought to ensure that that point is raised at that stage. The idea of proportionate intervention may avoid the heavy-handed, further-down-stream measures, if we can get in early with a lighter touch. We also do not want to take unduly disproportionate measures against individuals who might be identified by a neighbour who says, “I’ve had enough of this one. I’ll go in and sort it out.” There must be some evidential test and measure to say whether there is an issue that we need to deal with. I agree entirely with what he said, both in terms of sanctions and the types of measure that could be deployed. We need flexibility, before we lift a dog or take stronger, more punitive action against an owner. In that way, we hope to reduce the number of attacks, rather than wait for them to happen and then take punitive action.

I asked in an intervention when the guidance will be issued. The proposals have been quite a while in fruition in the Home Office, and DEFRA Ministers have been involved as well. I am absolutely convinced that some form of draft guidance is being worked up in DEFRA, the Home Office or both combined, and that that can be presented at the earliest opportunity. For the benefit of taking the measures through and getting them right, the guidance needs to be presented in Committee, not on Report. If the Minister says that he cannot do it, I can tell him that I regularly did it as a Minister. I have been told by a Committee, “We need this next Monday,” and I have had to do it and tell my civil servants, “Do it.” I do not mind how rough and ready it is; we need it to be done.

I hope that the Minister and his expert team of civil servants will be able to provide that guidance so that the Committee can take the provisions apart. If he has difficulty with that, the Committee should, even in the absence of dog control notices, simply lift the current Scottish Executive guidance off the shelf and say, “How do we apply this to the Government’s proposals?” If the DEFRA measures are similar to those in Scotland, and they are going to do the same job, the Scottish Executive guidance should perhaps be the basis for the guidance DEFRA introduces.

I have one final, important point on DCNs. We need to know what protections and appeals mechanisms will be in place for owners. We need to get the balance right to protect good owners and good dogs. What protections will be there for them?

In short, we are not convinced that the Government have got this issue right or that their opposition to dog control notices is well founded. The Committee must urgently be given draft guidance so that we can test not only the Minister’s words and aspirations, but their tangible expression in black and white.

Let me turn briefly to a couple of other issues. We welcome the proposals to extend to private property the ability to prosecute somebody for an attack by a dog. We also welcome the fact that the Government have listened on the issue of trespass, but we will need to test in Committee what trespass entails, and that will include the issue of a property’s curtilage. Sheep dogs or other dogs belonging to farmers, but not just farmers, will often be free to roam in outbuildings. Such buildings are private property, and the dogs will be there for good reasons—often for animal husbandry reasons, because they are working dogs, not pets. We need to test how that will work, because we need to get it right.

In another expert contribution, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) mentioned attacks on innocent political canvassers, although I am not sure there is such a thing. He made a very good contribution, and I hope he is also on the Committee. I will be down in his patch at the weekend, although not on an official visit; I am taking my son down to visit Exeter university’s Camborne campus, which is a fantastic mining, engineering and geology campus. I hope the weather there is good at the weekend.

Attacks on livestock and protected animals are another issue on which we agree with the EFRA Committee, and we need to look at it. Again, this is partly about taking a holistic approach. How do we pull things together so that not only guide dogs, assistance dogs and companion dogs, but a wide variety of other animals, are protected? Such animals are quite easily defined under the protected animal provisions of the Animal Welfare Act 2006. That may be the approach the Government want to look at, or there may be some other way. We certainly do not want to create a new list of animals—“We’ll have llamas, but not alpacas,” and so on. There is a ready-made opportunity under the Act to deal with the issue.

Several Members have mentioned the breeding and sale of dogs, and they are absolutely correct that we have far too many poor breeders. The EFRA Committee is correct that the threshold for licensing dog breeders needs reviewing, and I hope that will be part of the Government’s overall approach. Good dog breeding is to be welcomed, and good prospective owners welcome the fact that a dog has been reared and looked after well and that it has had all the medical treatment and some of the early elements of training, if appropriate, before they take it. However, through ignorance or sheer greed, far too many individuals out there are breeding to no good standard or to no standard whatever. Unfortunately, much of that spills out on to the internet. It amazes me—perhaps it should not—that there is now a trade in all sorts of animals on the internet. We have to accept that.

That takes me to my next point, on which the EFRA Committee also made some wise recommendations. We need to look at how we promote good, responsible advertising for animals on the internet, and the Government are doing some good work on that. We accept that there will be some advertising on the internet, but how do we stamp out the practices of those who are churning out dogs and other animals that will end up abandoned and wasted? Those dogs will wash up in kennelling, with all the costs that go with that, or in places such as Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, or they will be euthanased. That is an absolute tragedy.

I have touched on breed-specific legislation. I want now to touch on education, because we often miss this aspect. Many charitable organisations are doing great work on education, including in areas that commentators will stereotype, saying things such as, “The problem is on that working-class estate down the road.” Such views are not always true; there are plenty of problems with poor ownership and poor welfare conditions across all social groups. Organisations such as Blue Cross and the RSPCA are going into areas where they perceive there is a problem. They use the generous funding people have given them to do educational work. I would like to hear from the Minister how the Government tie that together. How do they assist and encourage that work? What do they add to it? If we are seriously going to tackle this wide-ranging issue, the Bill cannot simply be a Home Office matter—it must cover the other elements I have mentioned.

That comes back to my point about the Minister standing up and saying, “I am the one who is championing this through the whole of Government. I am the one who is banging heads together.” I strongly support the idea that a DEFRA Minister should be doing that, and I hope the Minister can do it. If he does not, I will be more than happy to speak to his colleagues, to bang their heads together and to say, “You should listen to the Minister as he brings forward a more holistic approach.”

There are some great initiatives out there, including Respect-A-Bull, which works with youngsters who go around with what they think are tough-looking dogs. The organisation promotes a responsible approach to dogs welfare and to taking out in public. There is some great work going on there.

I commend the Government on their microchipping proposals, although I repeat my criticism, which the Minister hates, that we have waited some time for them. However, they are there. I also commend the Government on the fact that they have gone further than we anticipated, which is welcome. They are not simply rolling things out stage by stage; they are saying that, on a certain date, we will have only mandatory microchipping.

The Chair of the EFRA Committee wisely said, “Let’s get microchipping right. If that requires until 2016, so be it.” However, I would like the Minister to answer the question posed by other hon. Members: why could this not have happened a little earlier? Are things not in place, and are they preventing us from getting this right by 2015? Is something really holding the process up? There may be good reasons for the delay, but I would like to hear them. I agree with the Committee’s Chair that we need to get this absolutely right. It is a welcome move, but it does raise a number of points, which were mentioned earlier. What do the microchipping proposals mean for the link between the dog and the individual? What do they mean for liability, culpability and people being held to account?

I do not have a dog, although I used to have loads of Jack Russells. I have cats now—I do not know what that says about me as an individual, but there we are. I will have a dog again at some point, when I am back home and retired, and it will be a Jack Russell. They are little dogs; they are lovely, great dogs—I am appealing directly to anybody who is listening who likes Jack Russells. Owners of other kinds of dog are saying, “We hate this guy. Those aren’t proper dogs.” That aside, I like the idea that owners should microchip their dogs and take full responsibility for them. If the dog is lost or strays, the owner should pass the information on, whether to a database or whatever. If the dog washes up in Swansea dogs home, Battersea or wherever, the owner should pay for the kennelling and take the dog back. That raises some interesting issues, but I welcome the Government’s moves, and we will test the proposals.

The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) raised the issue of liability and sanctions not only for owners who do not microchip, which is a very valid point, but for those who microchip, but do not control their dog or lose control of it. The fundamental question is whether microchipping is a stick or a carrot. Is it simply part of a lost and returned service, or is it more than that? The hon. Gentleman also mentioned adequate enforcement, which was discussed by other Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West.

The hon. Member for The Cotswolds raised important issues about the bypassing of the existing Dog Advisory Council, and equitable access to DEFRA and Ministers. I hope that the Minister will respond, because although the process has been long and arduous, lasting decades, for some organisations, the great success that has now been achieved has been predicated on effective collaboration and getting people to agree. Anything that signals that priority is being given to one or other group would pull that apart, and none of us would want that. I commend the hon. Member for The Cotswolds for his long interest in issues such as breeding and hereditary health problems, and for his well known support for the work done by his constituent, Carol Fowler, to raise the profile of those issues.

I thank all hon. Members who have taken part in the debate. They have shown great expertise. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West on the passion she showed, and my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree on her interventions; she has spoken with families affected by this issue, and has provided them with access to decision makers including members of the EFRA Committee, Ministers and the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh). It is important to listen to such families and to try to get things right for them.

Fundamentally the issue is about tackling those owners who for one reason or another do not understand about the control and welfare of their dogs—their pets or companion animals. It is also about recognising that the majority of owners are good. We need to design policy that does not unduly affect the responsible owners while leaving the others aside: that must be its thrust. We look forward to working with the Government, and thank the EFRA Committee for its continuing work, which has flushed out some of the issues. I hope that in a few months we will be able to introduce part of what is required, and that the Minister will deal with all the other aspects of the matter. Then we can genuinely and radically take the action that we should have taken at the time of the Dangerous Dogs Acts. They were flawed: let us get this one right.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

We have had an excellent debate. I commend the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) on introducing it and on the work of her Committee on a crucial issue. I am also pleased to commend the Liaison Committee on choosing the subject as suitable for debate today.

Perhaps I should start by saying that there is much more that unites us on this subject than divides us. We are working to the same end, and have shared much thinking in policy formation. The hon. Lady was kind enough to point out areas where the Government have not only listened, but acted, to bring in measures that will, I hope, make a difference to the minority—I agree with the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) that it is a minority of dog owners—who, whether through ignorance, neglect, or sometimes, I am afraid, malice, end up with dogs that are a danger to others and a nuisance to the community. Such measures are what we need to achieve.

The hon. Member for Ogmore repeatedly asked me to declare myself “the one”, in a Mourinho sort of way —“the special one”—in relation to dogs. Rather shamefacedly, I must say that I am not actually “the one”: my noble Friend Lord de Mauley is. He has responsibility for those matters in the Department. However, I am happy to be “the one” as far as this House is concerned, and to respond to the debate.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Will the Minister confirm that Lord de Mauley—great chap that he is—chairs some cross-Whitehall group that pulls all the strands together?

[Mr Heath]

Lord de Mauley has certainly been working closely with others, including the devolved Administrations, but particularly with the Home Office. There is a shared responsibility with the Home Office, and it is important that we speak with one voice, and come to the same conclusions. I assure the hon. Gentleman that such liaison has happened.

A Bill is before the House that will enact parts of our response to the undoubted issue raised by hon. Members, on which some have campaigned for a long time. I welcome the support that the Committee has been able to give to the Government’s position. There are several aspects of the matter on which we have gone further than was perhaps originally intended, in recognition of the strength of the Committee’s arguments. There are some areas on which we still do not have 100% agreement, and I shall deal with those.

The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, which amends the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, had its Second Reading on Monday, and there was an excellent debate. The House broadly endorsed the Government’s approach. The Bill includes provisions that will extend the 1991 Act to all places, including private property. It provides legislative backing for the police and Crown Prosecution Service to pursue prosecutions for attacks on private property. That will reassure victims and their families that the law is on their side. I hope that once the Bill is passed the circumstances that the hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) is all too familiar with, and which she spoke about forcefully in the House, will never again arise.

The Bill for the first time incorporates an aggravated offence, under the 1991 Act, of an attack on an assistance dog, recognising the terrible consequences of such an attack. That is important: an assistance dog is almost an extension of the person with whom it works. It is part of that person’s being, and an attack on a guide dog or hearing dog makes a huge difference to their life. It is right to clarify and extend the law in that way.

The Bill will also clarify the fact that courts should consider the character of the owner when taking decisions about dogs of prohibited types, and dangerously out-of-control dogs. That point was raised by several hon. Members: it is not the breed, but what the individual dog is doing, that is important. There is no breed that cannot be dangerous in the hands of an irresponsible owner. Sometimes that fact is taken to considerable lengths, because there are people—a very small number—who deliberately have dogs that they use as weapons, to intimidate and on occasion actually cause hurt to another person.

That leads me to a point raised by the hon. Member for Bolton West: new legislation is not needed to deal effectively with a dog being deliberately set on a person to injure them. It would be covered by the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, and the maximum penalty would be life imprisonment. The question of the appropriateness of the maximum fine level does not apply: the law treats such action as a very serious offence, and the prosecuting authorities have the capacity to deal with it.

The Bill would also provide the police with discretion to use the civil route in cases involving prohibited types of dog, with improved welfare, reduced kennel time and police savings in time and money. It would provide comprehensive powers for the authorities to take preventive action to stop dog attacks and nip issues in the bud, through, for example, a community protection notice.

That issue was raised by many hon. Members in the debate, and we need to discuss the fundamental question whether our proposed measures in the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill treat the same issue and have the same rigour as the so-called dog control notices that many advocate. My answer is that they do. In fact, they are an even more flexible tool.

I accept, however, that we need to substantiate that position and satisfy people’s concerns. One thing I would say to everyone involved in the debate is, “Please let us not get hung up on the label of dog control notices.” It is profoundly unhelpful to the debate about providing protection if the only thing people are arguing for is something with that name, rather than something that does what they want to see done. That is my first point.

Secondly, many people have pointed with approbation to what is available in Scotland, saying, “That is the answer. Why on earth are the UK Government so stupid or obstinate as not to follow the Scottish route?” Of course I respect what the Scottish Government do and the measures they introduce, but we need carefully and critically to consider whether the dog control notice legislation in Scotland achieves the objectives it was set. There is some evidence from Scottish local authorities that the notices are not working as well as hon. Members would believe—if, indeed, they believed everything that was sent to them.

At the 21 May meeting of the cross-party group on animal welfare in Edinburgh, Scottish local authorities expressed a number of concerns, which highlighted the ongoing problems with the dog control notice—or DCN—system. The meeting was also attended by a number of dog welfare organisations from across the UK, and a series of detailed problems were identified.

A dog control notice in Scotland must be served by two officers, and any breach needs corroborated evidence from two officers to pursue a case, which is a limiting factor in bringing successful conclusions. A person who is served a dog control notice must attend the council offices, or two officers must visit their home, so it is hardly the on-the-spot mechanism that some have suggested it is. A dog has to have been out of control on at least one occasion before a DCN can be served, so the measure does not nip the issue in the bud. Since some people have strongly advocated that we need to be able to identify the problem before it happens, I am not sure that the notices satisfy that test.

Another problem is that the police in Scotland have no powers to serve DCNs; only local authorities do. Importantly, there is no requirement for a dog owner to advise their local authority if they re-home a dog with another owner, or to inform it of the new owner’s address. A potentially dangerous dog, therefore, can easily appear in a different local authority area with absolutely no recourse.

We need to make clear what the DCNs in Scotland do that we do not and, likewise, what we can offer that DCNs do not. When we have done that critical comparison, I hope that hon. Members will take a view as to whether we are working on the right lines. I perfectly understand the concerns, but I ask people to treat the arguments with the necessary respect and care, rather than simply adopting the slogan that this is the only possible solution to the problem.

[Mr Heath]

That is where we need detailed and careful examination of the proposals. I accept the point that the hon. Member for Ogmore made—that part of that process will be to consider the guidelines—but I cannot give him an absolute commitment that the guidelines will be ready for Committee. I wish I could, but there is a very good reason why I cannot: we are working carefully through the issues, with the various dog welfare interests, the police, the local authority associations and everyone with a professional interest in the matter, so that we get the guidance and the compass of the notices right, and the hon. Gentleman’s demands are met.

I do not want to speak out of turn or put words into the mouths of other organisations—that would be inappropriate—but we have generally found that when we have been able to explain the benefits to interested organisations, and have done a “compare and contrast” between what they hope could be achieved through dog control notices and what we believe we can achieve through the new orders, they acknowledge the facts.

I hope that hon. Members do not see this as patronising, because that is not my intention, but there is sometimes a lag between what hon. Members are aware of as concerns and the solutions to those concerns. I hope that there will be a catching-up regarding the briefings that some people have received—from the Local Government Association, for instance, which now welcomes the antisocial behaviour measures and accepts that they will enable local authorities to do a lot for dogs.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I am tempted to use, or subvert, an old adage, and say that I have been patronised in better places—as indeed I have.

If the Minister cannot introduce the guidance at short notice, I suggest that he introduce in Committee, or even before, the comparisons he has talked about, along with any other detail. The more we have in black and white to work with, the more we might be assured. Alternatively, we might say that we are far from assured; nevertheless, we need in front of us whatever he has.

[Mr Heath]

I very much understand that, having sat in more Bill Committees over the years than I care to enumerate. I recognise that that is exactly what the Public Bill Committee will wish to do, in examining the notices. What I hope will emerge is that the antisocial behaviour measures provide a flexible package that will deal effectively with irresponsible dog owners, and will do everything available under a DCN, and more.

When the hon. Gentleman was saying, “Will it do this, will it do that?” he saw me nodding. That was because I had a sort of mental checklist, and was thinking, “Yes it will do that, yes it will do that.” It could include, for instance, positive requirements for an individual to attend training classes or to keep their dog on a lead—that sort of specificity.

There is a view that we are talking about a broad-brush area-based measure, but that is not the case. The measures are intended exactly as we are saying—to address the issues of a person with a dog that might get out of control, and to be able to deal with that at an early stage. Crucially, they are personal to the owner and not the dog—a point stressed by everyone—which is an important difference between our measures and the dog control notices. The focus must be on the individual understanding of the person’s responsibility for the animal under their control, and what they need to do to improve their management of that animal.

My expectation is that once people understand both the flexibility and the compass of the proposals, they will accept that such matters are covered. However, it is not for me to pre-empt discussions in Committee. I simply invite Members in each place to approach this with an open mind and to see whether the items on their individual mental checklists are ticked off.

Incidentally, public space protection orders will directly replace dog control orders, which will enable local authorities to impose the same restrictions, while also consulting on other issues in the vicinity.

I think that all that will do the job, but I completely recognise that Members need to be persuaded, which is why I invite them to consider the evidence carefully.

[Mr Heath]

That is difficult for me to answer, because it will be in the hands of local authorities in combination with the police. I can only express the hope that such behaviour will be a key area, but we will not give it a greater priority just by giving it a different name. Either it will be seen as something that local authorities and constabularies need to address, or it will not. I hope and expect that local authorities will address it because of all the cases that hon. Members have recited, which we all recognise as extremely serious. If they do not do so, I hope that they will swiftly be reminded by their constituents that they need to give that matter proper care. It would be meaningless for me to give her a blanket assurance, other than to say that that is certainly my expectation.

Another issue that has repeatedly been raised, with several Members covering common ground, is consolidation of legislation. I perfectly understand the argument that it is nice to have a neat legislative bundle with everything that relates to a particular subject. The fact is that English and Welsh law is not like that, and never has been. Consolidation is quite difficult to achieve, and we have sometimes found that consolidated legislation misses out important elements of former legislation. To be perfectly honest, I am not convinced that the substantial resource required to consolidate legislation is worth it, because practitioners perfectly well understand the legislative tools at their disposal.

We should instead concentrate on consolidating our approach to, and our strategy for dealing with, dog control and welfare issues. That is different from getting the legislation into some sort of legal Napoleonic code. For instance, when we considered consolidation, we found that the provisions are reasonably accessible and that there is no great confusion. It certainly has not been brought to my attention that there are significant confusions in existing legislation.

If we consolidated, would we retain all the civil and criminal options currently available? Some people ask why on earth we rely on legislation from 140 or 150 years ago, but such legislation is sometimes a good basis for dealing with illegal activity. Many practitioners have told us that it would be a great mistake to consolidate the Dogs Act 1871 into current legislation because it is very useful and covers some areas that are not obviously covered by other legislation.

I hear the arguments for consolidation, but, first, we could not have introduced the measures before the House in the time scale available—that is important, because this is urgent—and secondly, it would not necessarily achieve anything. I agree with the hon. Member for Ogmore that we must ensure that we provide perhaps a single set of guidance—I shall talk to my noble Friend Lord de Mauley about whether that is appropriate—so that everybody knows what applies, how it applies and how best to use it to achieve Parliament’s objectives.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I thank the Minister for his explanation. To give him some comfort, when I was in his position and I was asked to consolidate legislation, wise civil servants always said, “Keep well away from it. If you do that, we will not be able to do a dozen other important things, because of the timing.” If that is his approach, I urge him to consider how to bring forth a more consolidated strategy across Government, and not just have a piecemeal approach. All the issues that we have talked about show the clear necessity of having a joined-up approach—not just in Whitehall, but in local government and agencies—to deal with a range of measures. If we are not going to have consolidated legislation, we certainly need a joined-up strategy that is down in black and white.

[Mr Heath]

Having now conceded the fact that when the hon. Gentleman was in my position in government he received exactly the same advice about consolidated legislation, which he has just called for, he has now mirrored my advice to him that there is a case for a consolidated strategy. That is a clever bit of opposition—he first asks for something on which he knows that the answer will be no, and he then, when I give him something on which the answer is yes, asks me to do it.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Will you do it?

[Mr Heath]

I will certainly discuss with my noble Friend whether the matter commends itself to him, and he will need to work on it with other Departments. I can see the strength of the sentiment behind being very clear about how we bring together holistically the various elements relating to dealing with dogs. I simply reject the view that we should spend a lot of parliamentary time on trying to fit together various bits of legislation that do not fit well together, some of which have criminal standards of proof and some of which have civil.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

It would be a great test for the Minister’s civil servants.

[Mr Heath]

It might be a good examination question—we sometimes refer such matters to the Law Commission for their erudite musings—but I do not particularly want my Department to spend time on that at the moment. I am not being flippant; I am simply saying that that is not the most pressing thing, because it would not improve the effectiveness of what we are doing.

On microchipping, which several Members mentioned, I am grateful for the support expressed for what we are doing. It is absolutely essential to get it right and that implementation is successful. We are working closely with everybody who has a direct interest, such as the Association of Chief Police Officers, local authorities, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, Blue Cross, the British Veterinary Association, Dogs Trust, the Kennel Club and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. We will ensure that, as far as possible, we get the message across to the great bulk of the public that they now need to do microchipping. We are working with database operators and the microchip manufacturers and implanters to address standards and ensure quality and consistency.

My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) made the point that the onus is on owners to maintain the data on the microchip. It will be an offence not only not to microchip a dog, but, just as for a vehicle registration, to have inaccurate information on the registered database.

We have addressed the issue that some dog owners do not have much financial resource available and may see microchipping as a difficult cost to bear: free microchipping is accessible through Dogs Trust, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and Blue Cross centres—35 in total—and some local authorities also offer free or discounted microchipping. I am grateful to everybody working on that, and to the Kennel Club for providing free microchip scanners to all local authorities.

This is a good opportunity to promote national microchipping month. Its launch a week ago was most successful. It was hosted by my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton, who is not in the Chamber at the moment. We are progressing on the issue in what I hope is an effective way.

I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury—

[Mr Heath]

I am sorry; I am behind the times. It was Tewkesbury. I say to my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) that we would love to move more quickly, but all the advice says that we are moving at the most sensible rate to get to our objective. We will ensure that microchipping starts with puppies and is extended to the whole dog population. In my view, the most important thing is to get it right and have something that is usable in tracing back to their owners not just all the dogs that go missing each year, but those that cause nuisance. Hopefully, we will be able to connect them to an owner rather more easily than at the moment.

Of course, some owners will not microchip, just like the huge number of people mentioned by the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton who ignored dog licensing procedures when they were in place. There will be some who will simply not want to do it, but at least now there will be an offence. When a dog is found, if it does not have a microchip and we can trace it to an owner, that owner will have committed an offence. No licensing system is perfect, but this will certainly go a long way.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I thank the Minister for his detailed responses. I do not want to pre-empt subsequent Committee consideration of the Home Office Bill, but if a microchipped dog identified to have been part of an attack on a companion dog or an individual is traced back to an owner, what will the repercussions be?

[Mr Heath]

That pre-empts not only the legislation, but the secondary legislation that we are introducing, although of course we will answer in due course. It will be an offence, so there will be a penalty. The offence, in the first instance, will be failure to keep the information up to date, but if the information is there and we can trace the dog back to the owner, it will depend what the dog has done and the circumstances.

I should mention an important point. Having discussed the circumstances, I should give some reassurance to my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) that the courts will be able to take into account the circumstances of the case. We will have to return to the discussion about what comprises curtilage of a property, what a dwelling is and so on.

There is a difficulty of definition. We certainly want to deal with the issue of the postman or the political canvasser who gets bitten by a dog out in the yard or garden, where they have perfectly legitimate business, but we also do not want to penalise the householder whose dog is doing its job of protecting property against an intruder who has no business there. Getting that balance right is critical. When someone is within a house, it can reasonably be assumed that unless they have been invited in, they must give a strong argument for why they have legitimate business in the house rather than being an intruder.

It is different for a garden, or sometimes even a shed. A child going to pick up a football that has been kicked into a garden should not be set upon by a dangerous dog. They may be an intruder, but they are nevertheless not a burglar or anyone with malicious intent. A public interest test must be satisfied before a prosecution can be brought. I hope that the guidance to the prosecuting authority will make that distinction clear. It might satisfy the difficulty that Members have correctly spotted with the definition of what exactly comprises the area that we are discussing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Heath]

I cannot answer that because the council is not a body of Government; it is independent of Government. Perhaps my hon. Friend needs to have a discussion on this matter with Michael Seals, the chair of the Animal Health and Welfare Board for England. I am happy to try to arrange that for him if it would help. It would be wrong for me as a Minister to assume responsibility for something that is not within my control, but I am, none the less, happy to try to oil the machinery that allows him to get the answers he wants.

I have, as my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds reminded me, spoken for some time now.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

rose—

[Mr Heath]

Obviously, the hon. Member for Ogmore feels that I have not spoken for long enough, so I give way.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The Minister is being generous. I do not want to take time away from the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton who will be responding to the debate, but I am not sure whether I missed the Minister addressing the question of cattle, horses, llamas and alpacas. Will he explain the Government’s current thinking on them?

[Mr Heath]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because I did miss that out. At the moment, there is no evidence to support the necessity of extending the definition of livestock in the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) Act 1953 to include camelids. Obviously, we will keep the matter under review. I do not wish to trivialise the matter, but, in my experience, camelids generally are quite capable of looking after themselves in most circumstances and would not take kindly to a dog yapping round them. If there is evidence that they need adequate protection, I am happy to provide that.

I reassure hon. Members that we do not need specific legislation if there is an emerging problem, because there is recourse to justice through the Dogs Act 1871, which I mentioned earlier, the Animal Welfare Act 2006, and the Criminal Damage Act 1971. Indeed, the new antisocial behaviour measures that we are introducing could be brought to bear as well. We will continue to talk to all the organisations that are involved. If there is a strong view that further protection is needed, we will give it consideration. At the moment, though, we do not feel that a case has been made. I absolutely agree that we do not want a new prescribed list; that is not the way to do this sort of legislation. The generic protections that are in place are more useful than anything else.

I hope I have answered exhaustively all the questions that have been raised—looking at the exhausted faces around the room I think I probably have done so. This has been an extremely useful debate. I thank the Committee for its care in introducing the report and the valuable points it raises. I hope that during the proceedings on the legislation before the House we will be able to tease out yet more details of what is proposed, and that at the end of the day we will have in place exactly the sort of holistic legislation that people have been calling for and which is crucial to deal with the small minority of dog owners who simply are not up to the task.