Fur: Import and Sale

Debate between Iqbal Mohamed and Danny Chambers

Tuesday 10th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I thank the hon. Member for Newport West and Islwyn (Ruth Jones) for securing this important debate.

I think that we will rightly repeat several of the key issues and reasons why the import of fur products should be banned in the UK and those points are absolutely crucial. As we have heard, the United Kingdom banned fur farming over two decades ago because Parliament rightly recognised the extreme and unnecessary cruelty it inflicts on defenceless animals. Yet today we continue to allow the import and sale of fur products produced using precisely the same methods that we judged unacceptable within our own borders. That contradiction is simply impossible to defend. If fur farming is rightfully recognised as too cruel to permit in this country, then it also should be considered too cruel to profit from its proceeds.

Every year, tens of millions of animals across the world are confined to small wire cages or trapped in the wild solely for their fur. An estimated 85 million to 100 million animals globally are farmed or trapped for their fur. Investigations and scientific assessment have shown repeatedly that such conditions fail to meet animals’ most basic behavioural needs and cause severe and inhumane suffering; but do we really need scientific studies to prove that the way in which fur is farmed and animals are trapped is inhumane and causes suffering? Of course not; we can see it with our own eyes.

These are wild animals who should be allowed to roam free in the wild, but are instead kept locked up in tiny cages in deplorable conditions. Once their pelts are ready, they are gassed or anally electrocuted, as we have heard. Many of the animals are killed at about the age of one year, when their pelts are in their prime. That is the real nature of the system that continues to supply the global fur trade. While the UK banned fur farming domestically, we remain inextricably connected to the system through the import of furs.

As we heard from the hon. Member for Newport West and Islwyn, figures from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs show that the UK continues to import about £30 million to £40 million-worth of fur products each year, which equates to an estimate of about 1 million animals annually. That raises an obvious ethical question.

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

Last year, I was pleased to promote a private Member’s Bill—now the Animal Welfare (Import of Dogs, Cats and Ferrets) Act 2025—to stop puppy smuggling, specifically given the issue of ear cropping. It has been illegal to crop a dog’s ears in the UK since 2006, but it was legal to import dogs with cropped ears. We thought that it was unacceptable to do that in the UK on welfare grounds, but people were getting around the loophole by acquiring dogs from abroad. This seems to be exactly the same thing. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we should not be offshoring our ethical animal welfare issues by banning something in the UK but allowing people to get those products from abroad? If we think something is unacceptable here, it should be unacceptable anywhere.

[Iqbal Mohamed]

I completely agree, and I was happy to support the hon. Gentleman’s private Member’s Bill and speak in the debate. Anything that we deem unacceptable or cruel in our country is unacceptable or cruel wherever it is done, and we should not help to perpetuate that cruelty elsewhere around the world.

The ethical question is, as the hon. Gentleman just said, why are we comfortable outsourcing animal cruelty to other countries simply because it then occurs beyond our shores? Increasingly, the general public recognise the incoherence of that perverse position. There has been a profound sea change in British public attitudes to the fur trade. A YouGov survey found that 93% of people in the UK do not wear real fur and, as we heard, 97% would never wear real fur. A 2023 poll found that 77% believe that when a type of farming is banned in the UK for being too cruel, we should also ban imports of products produced in the same way overseas. An easy win for the Government would be to implement a policy that is widely popular: such cruelty is unacceptable to the people of our country. In other words, that is not a controversial position among the public, but reflects a widely shared, common-sense position that the fur trade is outdated and unnecessary in the 21st century.

The economic case for maintaining the fur trade is increasingly weak. The UK fur market has been in steep decline over the past decade. Fur imports now represent just a tiny fraction of the UK’s overall clothing trade. Many major brands and global luxury houses have already turned away from fur entirely, and London Fashion Week banned its use in 2023. The direction of travel is clear: the industry is dying, consumer demand is collapsing and alternatives are widely available.

Environmental and public health concerns are also associated with fur production. Studies have shown that the carbon footprint of fur significantly exceeds that of many other materials used in fashion, given the intensive farming of carnivorous wild animals and the process it entails. Meanwhile, outbreaks of SARS—severe acute respiratory syndrome—and avian influenza on fur farms have highlighted the risks that such facilities can pose as potential transmission hubs for zoonotic disease, thereby increasing the likelihood of future pandemics.

Taken together, the case for a more comprehensive ban is compelling. I welcome the efforts of colleagues who have brought forward proposals to prohibit the import and sale of fur in the United Kingdom, including the Fur (Import and Sale) Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Newport West and Islwyn. Such legislation would close the obvious loophole that currently exists in our animal welfare framework.

The UK was once a global leader in banning fur farming. Many other countries followed our example. We now have an opportunity to lead again, by ending our association with a trade that is morally repugnant, environmentally harmful, economically marginal and overwhelmingly rejected by the public. There is no such thing as humane fur farming, wherever it takes place, and it must end now.

AI Safety

Debate between Iqbal Mohamed and Danny Chambers

Wednesday 10th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered AI safety.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Butler, and it is an honour and a privilege to open this really important debate. Artificial intelligence is the new frontier of humanity. It has become the most talked about and invested in technology on our planet. It is developing at a pace we have never seen before; it is already changing how we solve problems in science, medicine and industry; and it has delivered breakthroughs that were simply out of reach a few years ago. The potential benefits are real, and we are already seeing them; however, so are the risks and the threats, which is why we are here for this debate.

I thank my colleague Aaron Lukas, as well as Axiom, the author of the book “Driven to Extinction: The Terminal Logic of Superintelligence”, and Joseph Miller and Jonathan Bostock from PauseAI for their help in preparing for this debate. I encourage all MPs to read the briefing they have been sent by PauseAI. AI is a very broad subject, but this debate is focused on AI safety—the possibility that AI systems could directly harm or kill people, whether through autonomous weapons, cyber-attacks, biological threats or escaping human control—and what the Government can do to protect us all. I will share examples of the benefits and opportunities, and move on to the real harms, threats and risks—or, as I call them, the good, the bad and the potential end of the world.

On the good, AI systems in the NHS can analyse scans and test results in seconds, helping clinicians to spot serious conditions earlier and with greater accuracy. They are already being used to ease administrative loads, to improve how hospitals plan resources, to help to shorten waiting lists and to give doctors and nurses the time to focus on care rather than paperwork. The better use of AI can improve how Government services function. It can speed up the processing of visas, benefits, tax reviews and casework. It offers more accurate tools for detecting fraud and protecting public money. By modelling transport, housing and energy demand at a national scale, it can help Departments to make decisions based on evidence that they simply could not gather on their own. AI can also make everyday work across the public sector more efficient by taking on routine work and allowing civil servants to focus on the judgment, problem solving and human decisions that no system can replace.

AI has already delivered breakthroughs in science and technology that were far beyond our reach only a few years ago. Problems once thought unsolvable are now being cracked in weeks or even days. One of the clearest examples is the work on protein folding, for which the 2024 Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded—not to chemists, but to AI experts John Jumper and Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind. For decades scientists struggled to map the shapes of key proteins in the human body; the AI system AlphaFold has now solved thousands of them. A protein structure is often the key to developing new treatments for cancers, genetic disorders and antibiotic-resistant infections. What once took years of painstaking laboratory work can now be done in hours.

We are beginning to see entirely new medicines designed by AI, with several AI-designed drug candidates already reaching clinical trials for conditions such as fibrosis and certain cancers. I could go on to list many other benefits, but in the interests of time I will move on to the bad.

Alongside the many benefits, we have already seen how AI technology can cause real harm when it is deployed without care or regulation. In some cases, the damage has come from simple oversight; in others, from deliberate misuse. Either way, the consequences are no longer theoretical; they are affecting people’s lives today. In November 2025, Anthropic revealed the first documented large-scale cyber-attack driven almost entirely by AI, with minimal human involvement. A Chinese state-sponsored group exploited Anthropic’s Claude AI to conduct cyber-espionage on about 30 global targets, including major tech firms, financial institutions and Government agencies, with the AI handling 80% to 90% of the intrusion autonomously. Anthropic has warned that barriers to launching sophisticated attacks have fallen dramatically, meaning that even less experienced groups can carry out attacks of this kind.

Mental health professionals are now treating AI psychosis, a phenomenon where individuals develop or experience worsening psychotic symptoms in connection with AI chatbot use. Documented cases include delusion, the conviction that AI has answers to the universe and paranoid schizophrenia. OpenAI disclosed that approximately 0.07% of ChatGPT users exhibit signs of mental health emergencies each week. With 800 million weekly users, that amounts to roughly 560,000 people per week being affected.

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

On that point, I was alarmed to hear that one in three adults in the UK has relied on AI chatbots to get mental health advice and sometimes treatment. That is partly due to the long waiting lists and people looking for alternatives, but it is also due to a lack of regulation. These chatbots give potentially dangerous advice, sometimes giving people with eating disorders advice on how to lose even more weight. Does the hon. Member agree that this needs to be controlled by better regulation?

[Iqbal Mohamed]

I completely agree. We have to consider the functionality available in these tools and the way they are used—wherever regulations exist for that service in our society, the same regulations should be applied to automated tools providing that service. Clearly, controlling an automated system will be more difficult than training healthcare professionals and auditing their effectiveness.

Non-stun Slaughter of Animals

Debate between Iqbal Mohamed and Danny Chambers

Monday 9th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dr Chambers]

If the RSPCA has different figures, I would ask it to explain where its figures come from. Not all non-stunned meat is halal. Some of it is shechita slaughter, and the hind quarters are not considered kosher, so they would go into the normal food chain. That could be why there are some discrepancies, but I am not familiar with how the RSPCA generated its figures, so I would take it up with the RSPCA.

I acknowledge that, as many hon. Members have rightly pointed out, there are failures in stun slaughter as well. That is sometimes due to bad practices and inadequate training in abattoirs, and is one reason why I was pleased to be part of the successful campaign to put CCTV in all abattoirs. We should ensure that legal standards are upheld, that anyone breaking those standards is held to account, and that adequate training is given.

I share the concerns about slaughter in which pigs are stunned with CO₂. I eat pork, but I am aware that such slaughter is a welfare concern in the veterinary world. We are looking at how we can improve that experience for pigs.

[Iqbal Mohamed]

On CCTV and enforcement of existing humane slaughter processes, does the hon. Member agree that the Government must ensure that there are adequate resources for inspectors’ visits and audits of abattoirs so that the right level of treatment of animals is maintained?

[Dr Chambers]

I totally agree. The resourcing of trading standards and the veterinary profession is a hugely important issue. We know that we are short of vets working in public health and farm animal medicine.

As many hon. Members have pointed out, the British Veterinary Association has made several sensible recommendations, including that the UK Government should introduce

“a non-stun permit system to ensure that the number of animals slaughtered without prior stunning does not exceed the relevant demand of the UK’s religious communities”

and that they should

“stop the export of meat from animals that have not been stunned before slaughter.”

The British Veterinary Association and the National Farmers Union also support greater uptake of the demonstration of life protocol for sheep and goats. Although that protocol is not perfect, it can help improve welfare outcomes, even in non-stun contexts. I urge all abattoirs to adopt it.

The Liberal Democrats believe that consumers deserve full transparency. That is why we back clear and honest labelling that includes information on whether the animal was stunned before slaughter, the conditions in which it was reared and the environmental impact of the product. Our goal is simple: to give people the information that they need to make informed choices—not to stigmatise any group, but to raise welfare standards across the board. Religious consumers who wanted halal meat, for example, would be able to see whether it came from stunned or non-stunned animals. That matters deeply to many of the individuals in those communities with whom I have spoken.

There have been many calls for a way to know whether meat is stunned or non-stunned, and for freedom of choice. I point out that British consumers already have the freedom of choice to ensure that they eat only meat that has been stunned. All farm assurance schemes, including Red Tractor, Soil Association, and RSPCA Assured, have minimum welfare standards throughout the animal’s life, and require stunning before slaughter. Someone like me, who wants to ensure that they eat only animals that have been stunned, can do that with current farm assurance label systems.

The hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) made a very important point about the need for more local abattoirs, to reduce transport time and stress, and to ensure that more meat is produced and sold within local communities. I commend him for that point.

Let us move forward with a science-based, respectful approach that works in partnership with, not against, religious communities; that improves welfare without fuelling division; and that ensures the UK remains a world leader in compassion and evidence-based policy, while allowing for expression of religious freedom.