Charitable Sector

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Tuesday 5th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Black of Brentwood]

My Lords, with seven maiden speeches being the icing on the cake, this debate has proved to be exceptionally stimulating—and understandably so. Charities touch every part of our lives—from our time as children, when at school we first begin to understand charities’ role in a civic society, to our final days when so many depend on the kindness of volunteers and caring organisations as life becomes more complex.

As my noble friend Lord Brooke said in his eloquent speech, if you come far down the batting order a great deal of what you wanted to say will already have been said, so I will look at a practical example of everything that we have been talking about and highlight the role of a specific group of charities whose work is often unglamorous, sometimes deeply distressing, but ultimately exceptionally rewarding. I refer to those concerned with the welfare of animals.

It has been asserted so often that perhaps it has become trite that care for animals is one of the hallmarks of a healthy civil society of the sort that we have been talking about. However, that does not make it less true. It is right to pay tribute to the work undertaken by many different animal charities, and above all to the tens of thousands of volunteers, in caring for sick, vulnerable, lost or unwanted animals. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, they work tirelessly in caring for animals in need. For instance, in 2009 more than 7,000 volunteers from Cats Protection, of which I am a member, helped to rehome or reunite more than 55,000 cats. Thousands of volunteers assisted the Dogs Trust in rehoming 14,000 dogs and providing shelter for an equal number. At the Blue Cross, 1,500 people devoted 150,000 hours to rehoming thousands of animals. As the noble Baroness, Lady Young, reminded us, more than 13,000 volunteers assisted the work of the RSPB at more than 200 nature reserves. Those are all phenomenal figures and a sign of the great and selfless good in our society of which we have heard so many other examples today.

The importance of these charities goes far beyond the remarkable care that they give to animals. They are—in a phrase used earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury—facilitators of change. For instance, many of them play a vital role in the education of children, teaching them from an early age the importance of caring properly for animals. The Dogs Trust ran more than 3,000 workshops in schools last year, while Blue Cross information campaigns reached 45,000 children. The reason why this is vital is because of the symbiotic relationship between animal welfare and the deeper problems in our society. The awful link between cruelty to animals in early life and harm to fellow humans in later life is well documented, and I do not need to dwell on it here. It has been well known ever since Francis of Assisi asserted:

“If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men”.

This is pertinent when we look at how to build a big society. By deploying local volunteer action to tackle deep-seated social issues, which is a central part of how we will achieve it, animal welfare charities have a pivotal part to play. Often, animal welfare can be a catalyst to garner support among communities and agencies to tackle more intractable problems. It is therefore crucial that these charities are included in the wider social and economic policy debates that we have touched on today—for instance, on subjects such as youth crime, anti-social behaviour and deprivation—because the animal welfare issues that they deal with are bound up intimately with the problems that affect so many communities, whether it be bullying in schools, vandalism or more brutal offences. Regrettably, it is no coincidence that over the past few years, at the same time as there has been an increase in the incidence of such matters, the RSPCA has had to deal with a twelvefold increase in complaints about anti-social behaviour with dogs.

In this area as in so many others, and as we have heard a number of times this evening, there are tough times ahead. With the scale of the country's economic problems and the real difficulties that many families and households will face from the cuts that have to be made to salvage the economy, the pressures on animal charities will increase. It is a sad fact that, as economic problems hit at home—redundancy, cuts in pay, house repossessions—it is often animals that will suffer first. Last year, more than 107,000 dogs were picked up as strays by hard-pressed local authorities—the noble Lord, Lord Rix, was eloquent about the problems that local authorities will face—which was an 11 per cent increase on 2008. Tragically, 9,000 of those unclaimed strays had to be euthanised. So just at a time when we need animal charities to be plugged into the important debate on how we build the big society in all its forms, economic circumstances are going to be piling ever more demand on them.

We have heard a great deal in this debate about funding, and rightly so, but in this area there is much that government can do without cost to help to alleviate that. Is it not time, for instance, that there was compulsory microchipping for dogs in the UK to help with the problem of strays? Furthermore, why cannot we begin to change the heartless rules that prevent many elderly people who go into care taking their pets—mainly beloved cats—with them? It is a restriction that means that thousands of animals that could still have a loving owner need rehoming every year. These are all some practical steps that could be taken to ensure that in the very tough times ahead the pressures on these vital charities are eased a little, allowing, as we have just heard, the real energies, skills and passions of those who work in them and the thousands who volunteer for them to be focused not just on the vital day-to-day work of caring for vulnerable animals but on helping to knit together the components of the compassionate society that we should be striving to build.