Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 16th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, asks what the purpose of the Bill is. We all know what the purpose of the Bill is: it is to advance the agenda of people who believe in the existence of animal rights and to embed them at the heart of government, bossing everybody about. It is a bad Bill, not simply for that reason, but more importantly, as I will explore in a moment, because it changes the moral basis on which we have habitually treated animals well in this country. I will come back to that in a moment, because I am going to leave to others—some who have already spoken—comments on the practical difficulties of putting this Bill into effect and the problems it is likely to give rise to. I always thought that it was the responsibility of this Parliament to hold Ministers to account, but we are now to have a committee roaming around Whitehall doing the job for us, it seems.

The clause that strikes me as most extravagant, however, is the one that gives the Secretary of State the unfettered power to declare, should he wish, that an earthworm is a sentient being. This is a power greater than that given by God to Adam in the Garden of Eden, which, as I recall, was restricted to the power to naming animals. Here, we are giving the Secretary of State the power to reclassify them almost without check.

I come back to my point about the moral basis on which we treat animals well. I have always loved this quotation from Lord Keynes:

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”


Of course, I do not mean to refer in any sense to my noble friend on the Front Bench in that regard, but the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, put his finger on who the academic scribbler is. I well remember, in my first year as an undergraduate, walking past Blackwell’s and seeing prominently displayed in the front window a copy of Professor Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. He had, in 1975, as a young man, undergone a sort of convulsive conversion to vegetarianism, and this was his attempt to work out some rationale for what he was doing.

There were three points, essentially. First, people are not better or superior to animals. Secondly, what we have in common is that we sit on a spectrum of sentience. This puts us on the same level as the animals. The third point, as indicated by my noble friend Lord Herbert of South Downs, was a sort of crude utilitarianism which makes no distinction between humans and animals. Now, 45 years on, this book has spread throughout the world and become a text for all those who wish to promote the rights of animals. The logical consequence is that we are driven in the direction of veganism and the consumption solely of non-sentient plants.

I could not have asked for a more convenient introduction, in that sense, to what I was about to say, than the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sarfraz, who, with consummate commercial skill, pointed us entirely in the direction of that veganism—and not only veganism but behaviour which respects and prevents harm to any sentient creature. That goes well beyond what we eat, as other noble Lords have said.

That is all okay: if Members of the House of Lords want to drive the country, without asking, in the direction of veganism, which we are told is hugely popular, although I do not know where the evidence for that comes from, on such a basis, and on the basis of some movie I have not yet seen about an improbable friendship between a scientist and an octopus—I am sure it is a tearjerker—that is absolutely fine. The House of Lords is free to do that, but what worries me is that we have cited here in the House a whole swathe of humanitarian legislation going back 200 years protecting animals. Contrary to what Singer and those people would say about the abolition of the distinction between humans and animals, all that legislation has been based on our moral obligations as human beings, rational and endowed with conscience. It is why it is called humanitarian legislation. It is not based on some assumed rights of animals.

All that—not the legislation but the moral basis for the legislation—is now to be swept away by a Government embedding at the heart of our legislation the notion of sentience as the driver of how we should treat animals. The whole moral basis is being changed and replaced by this calculus of sentience. This is a very bad step. It reduces our obligations as people to something that will be the subject of endless judicial review and footling arguments about rules and laws, whether ganglions are the same as brains, and whatever else might come up in the course of these discussions.

I am really very concerned about the Bill. It does nothing at all good for animals, but it does a great disservice to the moral foundation of our society.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I have tabled three amendments in this group. The first is Amendment 19, supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and my noble friend Lord Mancroft, which seeks to exclude from the scope of the committee any policy related to the advancement of medical science.

British medical science is at the forefront of the world, as we have seen over the last year or so, as it leads on genomic sequencing, vaccine development and large-scale randomised trials for therapeutic purposes. It must be a cause for concern that the actions and inquiries of this committee could create a degree of inhibition in the advancement of medical science and the actions of medical scientists in continuing to promote medical science, because in some cases, and under the strictest controls and with the greatest degree of humanity, it is necessary for animal experimentation to be undertaken in order for drugs to be established as safe and for other processes, which are beyond my medical knowledge but I think what I am saying is well understood, to be validated and found to be safe.

The difficulty with having a committee that can go roaming around, checking all these things in advance, which this committee in practice could, is that it trespasses on a well-worn, established set of mechanisms for ensuring that those experiments, where they are absolutely necessary, are carried out with a proper purpose and in proper circumstances.

We lead in medical science with the full support of the Government, not primarily because we see it as a source of great lucre flowing into the country—the Government’s insistence that the vaccine developed under their sponsorship should be available at cost is a good instance of that—but for the benefit of humanity as a whole. The whole human race will benefit from what we do. I think most people would recognise that that is a worthy objective and certainly one that could be settled on alongside any claims that may be made on behalf of animals and their rights. I would therefore strongly recommend, suggest and hope that this amendment can be made and medical science excluded so that the current position remains as it is. That is all I am really asking.

Moving on to the two other amendments, Amendment 26 has the support of my noble friends Lord Trenchard and Lord Hamilton of Epsom, while Amendment 33 is merely consequential on Amendment 26. Amendment 26 needs a little explanation. Clause 1 requires the committee and the Government to have regard to “the welfare of animals” and then adds the words “as sentient beings”. It is worth reflecting on what that adds to the claim. When you think about it carefully, it does not add anything at all; it actually subtracts. It is perfectly possible to do harm to animals and to damage their welfare in a way that does not affect them as sentient beings.

The example that most readily comes to mind is to do with background radiation. We know that parts of the country have high levels of background radiation, which can affect humans and, I assume, animals—mammals, at least—detrimentally, but you do not know that it is happening to you. You do not feel anything. You feel neither pleasure nor pain; there is no interaction with the concept of sentience. Your health may be deteriorating, but you have no sentient knowledge of it. It would simply be plainer, and would allow the committee to look at things in the round, if it did not have to be excluded, which it would be, from considering something such as the effects of background radiation on animals. It would simply not be permitted to look at that under this legislation. I thought there might be some support from those who thought that perhaps it should. The deletion of those words would restore us to a more common-sense position of looking at the welfare of animals in general.

Those are my other two amendments, but, before I finish, as this is such a large group I shall comment briefly on three others. Amendment 31, in the name of my noble friend Lord Forsyth, seeks to ensure that the committee at least gives due account to, or respects,

“legislative or administrative provisions and customs relating to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage.”

That is an important point. On Second Reading, I tried to say that there is definitely an attempt here—one may support it, one may not—to shift the hierarchical balance, if you like, between humans and animals to put us more on the same level. I do not think that is too outrageous a claim to make. Of course, part of being human—not for everybody, but for many parts of humanity—is an awareness of, an adherence to and a sensibility about religious belief. With religious belief inevitably comes community adhesion and a certain amount of ritual practice. It takes things too far for the committee to be able to trample over that in the interests of animal welfare, with or without sentience being taken into account. That area should be preserved. The amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Forsyth has that effect. I think that Amendment 35 tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, would have a similar effect but, as he explained, he approached this more on the basis of restoring the balance that existed in the previous legislation. I am glad to be able to support that as well.

That leads me to what is in some ways the most important amendment in the group, put forward by the noble Earl as Amendment 16. I have heard it said informally by Ministers that all the Bill seeks to do is to carry forward into current legislation the legislation that previously existed that has almost been dropped by accident as a result of the legal manner in which we left the European Union, which he explained, so all that the Government are doing is restoring that position. That, of course, is not the case, because the previous position had clear limitations. If the Government were to take Amendments 16 and 35 from the noble Earl into account, a great deal of the legislation, although not all of it, would cease to be controversial or difficult. In some ways, those amendments are the key to the whole thing. If the Minister were able to say that he would accept them, we could all have a fairly short afternoon and declare victory on all hands.

[Lord Howard of Rising (Con)]

My Lords, I have a number of amendments in the group. Amendments 24 and 30 both probe why “all” is required. Would not “due regard” by enough, as in other legislation? The extra word may risk the committee not reporting on whether due process has taken place but instead starting to opine or comment on the merits of policy and government decision. That is not its role, but it has the potential to create unnecessary delays and complications for legislation, as the remit of the committee is widened to such a degree that there is almost nothing on which it cannot express views.

Amendments 25 and 32 would give the committee a further remit—the power to consider both a positive and a negative impact on the welfare of animals. That is crucial when we consider policy that relates to pest control. The formulation and implementation of policy, having all due regard for the welfare of animals as sentient beings, must consider the particular circumstances of all animals, the welfare of which the committee is considering. Lawful pest control activities are undertaken to stop the spread of diseases and to protect livestock. The positive effect of those actions should be noted if the policy is to be reported on.

As I am sure the Minister knows, the animal world can be pretty brutal. If some of the gentler species are to survive, there needs to be control of predators. It is no accident that, where there is such control, there is a far broader range of species. I hope this will be recognised by the committee. How it seeks to balance the demands of the various sentient species is of great importance.

Amendment 34 would limit the remit of the committee to future policy and prevent it considering existing law. Amendments 18, 23 and 29 in my name, to which I shall speak later, cover the point of existing law. Limiting reports to future policy would be a sensible limitation, because if the committee was suddenly given the job of reviewing all existing policy, large amounts of government business might have to be stopped for review by the committee. Such a standstill could cause severe disruption and would place a huge burden on government departments and the committee. It is difficult to think how the committee could possibly cope from scratch with looking at large swathes of policy. The potential damage and the massive cost of stopping government work would be immensely onerous and impractical.

Amendment 36 probes why the Bill does not cover the devolved Administrations. There seems to be somewhat of a blind spot in that reports of the committee may not include any policy falling within devolved competence. After all, this debate on animal sentience only began with our departure from the European Union, as there would no longer be an explicit reference to law applicable in the United Kingdom on the sentience of animals. Should the Bill therefore not apply to the policy of all Governments?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, tempted as I am to make all the same arguments about why we need details of how the committee is to be composed and its terms of reference, and the regulations under this clause having to be made by statutory instrument, we have probably done these arguments to death. I hope my noble friend will take them on board.

I am conscious of the hour—it is 5.50 pm—and I thought it was pretty optimistic that the Government thought they could conclude this Committee today. I am always happy to help the Government and assist the Whips in their efforts, so I do not propose to add anything further to what I have said in support of the principles contained in Amendment 4. I beg to move.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, there are two amendments in this group with my name on them. The first is Amendment 8, which is also supported by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, and which goes to the question of the composition of the committee. I have some sympathy with what my noble friend Lord Forsyth just said, but I would like to develop a slightly different point on the basis of this. One can say that there is almost universal agreement across the Committee that this topic should be addressed in the Bill. The question would be what it should say, if there were questions of difference. However, I do not think there is support on the Committee for the idea that the Government should simply have a clear run and be able to make it all up when it suited them.

The proposal here is that at least 50% of the members of the committee should have recent commercial experience of animal husbandry, livestock farming, the management of abattoirs and the management of game and fishing stocks. It may be thought that this is a sort of ignoble attempt to stack the committee in one direction rather than another, but it is not at all. I want to make a rather different point.

We will have an opportunity in the penultimate grouping, whenever we get to it, to discuss the science and indeed the metaphysics of sentience. However, I want to make this point now, anticipating that. One can approach sentience as a neurological phenomenon: that is, the central nervous system of the animal, the brain and the other features work together to create something which can be tracked by way of the movements of electrical signals, changing chemical compositions and things like that. All that can be tracked to some extent by science. However, it is also the case that sentience as we talk about it is a lived experience; it is the experience of pain and the undergoing of suffering. We as humans, ourselves undergoing pain and knowing that suffering, can sympathise with it when we see it in animals, vertebrates and mammals—different classes of animal.

For us to understand and for a committee to benefit from a real understanding of sentience, it is terribly important that people who have a direct experience of working with the animals that are in the scope of the Bill should be fully represented on the committee. Otherwise, we risk the possibility that it simply ends up as a sort of neurological exercise, and the direct and lived experience of sentience is ignored by the committee as it is packed with all these scientists. That was the point I wanted to make about that. It is not a question of stacking the committee but of trying to understand what sentience is and how we translate it into policy.

While the Minister wants to move away from this topic, and I understand that, he must realise by now that, given the almost total absence of any definition of what the committee is doing or any constraint on its activities, the question of who is sitting on it is about 90% of the meat of the Bill. Therefore, it is not possible for him to carry on brushing this away.

My second amendment, Amendment 9, concerns the term limit. Again, there seems to be almost universal acceptance that the Bill should impose some term limits on the membership of the committee, and there seems to be a sort of consensus that three years is a good idea for a term. If there is a matter of difference, it is simply on the question of whether it should be non-renewable, which is what my amendment says, or whether it should be perhaps renewable for one single further term, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said. I am sure that some consensus on that point can be achieved by the Committee, even if the Government themselves do not want to do so. That was simply the second point; it is a sensible amendment, and I hope that the Government respond to the widespread views on this topic in the Committee.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

I am delighted to follow my noble friend. There is some coalition of thought behind his Amendment 8 and my Amendment 10. I have known my noble friend the Minister for a substantial number of years and we served together on the Front Bench in opposition. He is not normally this shy in coming forward and sharing details with us; he is normally only too keen to pay tribute to the excellent department in which he finds himself. I am delighted to see him back in his place.

The purpose of Amendment 10 is to tease a little out from my noble friend. I know he is reluctant to, but he could share a little soupçon of who he imagines will be on the committee. I hark back to what my noble friend Lord Marland said in connection with the first group of amendments, and the pressures and challenges facing farmers. I echo that and pay tribute to their devotion to livestock and animal rearing and their sense of animal husbandry. They feel they are facing an onslaught from the department and this Government, the likes of which we have never seen before under a Conservative Government. I hope my noble friend gives some reassurance to the Committee that he imagines the animal sentience committee will at least have a veterinary surgeon, an active farmer or person with knowledge of livestock production or land management, and a person with knowledge of slaughterhouses.

I pay tribute again to my noble friend Lord Moylan, who managed to extract the animal welfare policy paper, which seems almost to be shrouded in mystery. If the Government really wanted us to share the enthusiasm they no doubt feel for this Bill—which at the moment is fairly weak on my part—surely they would shout this from the rooftops or at least pay passing reference to it in the context of the Bill before us. With those few remarks, I hope the Minister will look favourably on the plea to see the three categories I have set out, in addition to those set out by my noble friend Lord Moylan, appear in some shape or form when the committee is set up.

--- Later in debate ---

We have raised a number of issues during the debate that have been left very unsatisfactorily hanging in the air. I would like to hear compelling reasons from my noble friend why Clause 1 should remain part of the Bill.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I have a few slightly disconnected remarks that fit in well here. It is a delight and a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering and to support her in this course of inquiry.

The first is that noble Lords might be under the impression, from references made earlier in the debate and at Second Reading, that we are under the cosh of the 2019 Conservative Party manifesto. My recollection of that manifesto is compendious but, in case noble Lords did not believe that, I have looked it up in the course of the afternoon. All it says on this is:

“We will bring in new laws on animal sentience.”


That is a very fine pledge but nothing at all committing us to a committee, or indeed to laws that did not abolish animal sentience. As far as the manifesto is concerned, we are under no obligation to take forward any particular measure in the Bill; we just have to pass some legislation.

The second thing is—as I say, these are slightly disconnected points—that I have heard Ministers involved in this, although not my noble friend, say that this committee will roam across Whitehall, holding the Government to account. There is a real constitutional question here. I am very new in this House, but I was brought up to believe that it was Parliament’s job to hold Governments to account. Although I have every sympathy with my noble friend Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, I have a slightly different take on this topic. It is not that I am worried that this committee will go off making decisions that the Government have delegated to it, but I am really dispirited that it is going to go off to hold the Government to account on the basis of something that we have effectively delegated to it as a Parliament.

The right role and location and the proper place for this committee, if it is to exist at all, is not as a statutory body holding government to account; this committee should be a creation of Parliament reporting to us and giving us expert advice on how we should do our job holding the Government to account. I very much hope that my noble friend will take that on board and pursue it, because it would certainly allow us to get rid of Clause 1 very easily and put in place something that was much more constitutionally reputable.

I come to a third slightly disconnected point, which will be my last, more or less. The Minister has correctly stated the position—and, no doubt, I can already hear him preparing to state it correctly again a number of times before we rise this evening—that this committee will not make or change any laws and that that is entirely for Ministers and Parliament and, therefore, we need have no fear because Ministers will always have the final decision—or at least Parliament will, or some combination of the two—and they can be trusted to hold everything in balance. But of course, although that is the correct constitutional position, I suspect that my noble friend the Minister is perfectly aware that that is not the point of this Bill at all.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who is a seasoned campaigner and activist, does not support this Bill because she thinks that it will allow the committee to make laws that we will all live under. She is perfectly well aware that this Bill in itself does nothing for animal welfare. She wants it because she wants to see a group of like-minded people—I am not saying violent activists—installed at the heart of Whitehall, going round, summoning Ministers and holding them to account. What she wants is to shift what I think is called the Overton window so that we all have to discuss animal welfare the whole time and it becomes impermissible not to discuss it every time a Bill comes up.

My noble friend may not understand that that is what drives concerns—not that we are worried that the committee will itself go and make laws and impose decisions on us, since we are perfectly well aware that it will not have the power to do that, but that Ministers will find themselves constantly on the back foot on topics like this, constantly giving ground and accepting what is still a relatively narrow agenda. That is what we are worried about. Sadly, I do not believe that my noble friend, to whom I have listened with great attention in the course of this afternoon, has so far either today or at Second Reading made the case as to why this committee, which is there to advise him and other Ministers, needs to be on a statutory footing at all. Therefore, I am very comfortable in supporting my noble friend Lady McIntosh in suggesting that this clause be removed from the Bill.

[Lord Howard of Rising (Con)]

I support what my noble friends Lady McIntosh and Lord Moylan have said, especially on the role of the committee. Having listened to the Minister speak confidently about the committee just reporting and having no other role, he underestimates the inherent growth of any form of Whitehall committee: it never reduces its power; it constantly expands it and its role, and interferes in things in which it does not necessarily have a place. The efforts that have been made to concentrate on reducing the role of the committee and placing its remit statutorily, so that it cannot expand outside of what it was set up to do, are of fundamental importance. I urge the Minister to consider the many very good points that have been made.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th July 2021 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

28: Clause 2, page 1, line 16, at end insert “, but such recommendations may only be made after the report referred to in subsection (1) has been published in an academic journal following peer review.”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment aims to ensure the academic robustness of the Committee’s work.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 28, which is supported by my noble friends Lord Trenchard and Lord Hamilton of Epsom, and Amendment 42, which is linked. The purpose of these amendments is to require that any report of the animal sentience committee be peer-reviewed academically before publication and, connected to that, that the period for the Minister to respond to any such report be not three months after it is published, but three months after it is published in the said peer-reviewed journals. The second amendment is tidying up and consequential.

Science is at the heart of the Bill. Every proponent and supporter of it would agree that the claims for animal sentience must be scientific, not merely a sort of infantile anthropomorphism. At Second Reading, my noble friend Lord Inglewood said rather tellingly, and rightly I thought, that Bambi was an illusion. If our approach to animal sentience is simply that animals feel and look nice—what I would call Bambi-ism—then the whole Bill is pointless. The Bill has to rest on a proper scientific basis. I thought it was worth having a few moments while we are in Committee to discuss some things about the science of animal sentience because they have not as yet been debated. These amendments give an opportunity to do that and a rationale for them as well.

When we met a couple of weeks ago, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, pushed back against any suggestion that there was no science behind animal welfare. Before she becomes too worried or excited, I am going to agree with her on this: there is indeed science behind it. She cited courses in animal welfare at the University of Glasgow and the University of Winchester and the Royal Veterinary College’s animal welfare science and ethics group, which specifically researches in the field of animal welfare, animal behaviour, veterinary ethics and law. What is notable and revealing about that list—as I say, I agree with everything the noble Baroness said, as a matter of fact and a matter of opinion on this point—is that nowhere in it is animal sentience.

It might be easily thought by the Committee that “Ah, you see, animal behaviour generally must include sentience” and so forth, and that it must be all wrapped up in there, but there is a genuine conflict between animal behaviourism and animal sentience as a scientific methodology. If one goes back, in the great part of the 20th century, studies of animals and animal welfare were based on behaviourism—the study of behaviour. So if you apply a stimulus, the animal reacts in a certain way; if that is repeated in other cases and experiments, you begin to establish a body of knowledge about the behaviour of animals. That scientific approach specifically eschewed trying to delve into what was happening in the animal’s mind, so to speak, because there is almost no scientific way in which one can establish that. It dealt with the epiphenomena of behaviour in trying to understand how to deal with animals and how to do so in a kind and humane fashion.

The origins of animal sentience science come much later. At Second Reading I mentioned the work of Professor Peter Singer and his seminal book Animal Liberation, published in 1975. I remind noble Lords that when a young man, Professor Singer was suddenly converted to vegetarianism and then, as a professional philosopher, later wrote a book trying to justify the choice he had made. At the root of this was the concept that what animals and humans had in common was sentience. It is not surprising that studies of animal sentience science as a discipline originated in that last quarter of the 20th century, but it is at odds with the traditional and established behavioural approach, which has not been abandoned, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, illustrated when she listed the subjects of study there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question. It would not be our intention to edit the committee’s membership by their eating habits or by any other habits or disciplines. We want a balanced committee that draws together a wide range of expertise across the whole field of animal welfare.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords who have spoken in support of the amendment, and to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, for contributing to the debate. I reiterate the point that the science that underlies animal sentience is of crucial importance to the Bill and deserves further debate, which may come at a future stage in the Bill. To be absolutely clear on my own position in case it was not, I am not saying that there is no such thing as animal sentience science—I believe there is such a branch of science—but I am saying that it is a relatively new, relatively specialist and slightly political branch of science. It needs the buttressing of peer review.

In that regard, I was disappointed by the response of my noble friend the Minister. He said that the Government did not want to dictate to committees such as this because they usually did well-reasoned reports. I thought “usually” was interesting. I quite understand that the Minister does not appear to want to dictate to committees that do badly reasoned reports; he wants to stand aloof from good research, from good reason and from bad reason alike. But that is not a very good basis for carrying the public with you. When this committee comes into existence and produces its reports, I think that much of what it says will be met by the challenge, “Well, that’s not really science anyway.”

It is slightly remarkable that, given the opportunity by these modest amendments to rebut that challenge and say, “No, this is science at the cutting edge. It is the best science we have and we know that because we have ensured that it is properly peer-reviewed”, the Government have turned away in distain and said that they would rather have uncertain science and not have any checks on what the committee is going to do. I am sure that, if they reflect, they will think that that is not really a sustainable or credible position. For the moment, to allow them time to reflect, I am happy to see my amendment withdrawn.

Amendment 28 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I would be going down a very dangerous path if I moved on to cats and how many songbirds they account for, and would probably find this getting out of hand, but my noble friend is absolutely right. What we seek to achieve through not just animal welfare provision but other legislation and regulation is a balanced countryside. We do not get it right; we are suffering a cataclysmic decline in species, which means that our children and grandchildren will not see the species that we have perhaps relied on seeing regularly. That is a tragedy that we are seeking to reverse through a variety of other policies. At the same time, when it comes to pest control, we can do it as humanely as possible, and we can have management techniques that protect both species and landscapes. It is not an exact science and it will be got wrong at certain times, but, by and large, I think there is a great unity of purpose in trying to reverse these tragic declines in species.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, given our discussion at our earlier session two weeks ago about the composition of the committee, I was struck by the Minister’s certainty that he could describe the members of the committee in such paradigmatic terms. I cannot recall his exact words—I will look at them in Hansard—but he said that the members of the committee would be knowledgeable, balanced, cautious, restrained and unwilling to rush into areas where they were not wanted. This must narrow the number of people who would qualify to sit on the committee to the point where I suspect the Minister must have a list of names already. If he has not, or is not willing to disclose it, is he at least willing to assure us that, when the public appointment process is launched and the person description drafted, the words that he has used now will be carried over verbatim into the person description for the applicants so that we get exactly who he appears to be promising us?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am very worried about my noble friend. He appears to have a very jaundiced view of human nature. There are a great many people with those skills whom we meet every day, whether we are having our dog treated at the vets or talking to farmers or discussing wider policy areas in this field. I hope I can prove to him that his glass should be half full on this; we will find the right people.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

48: Clause 5, page 2, line 32, leave out “vertebrate” and insert “mammal”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment limits the application of the Bill to mammals.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, there are four amendments in this group in my name, Amendments 48, 52, 53 and 57. I will come in a moment to say exactly what they would do, but I shall make some preliminary remarks that arise from something my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering said and which has not been sufficiently discussed. This is the famous metaphysical bit that the Minister has been worried about, although I hope to get through this while skirting Descartes—or anybody difficult or foreign, for that matter.

The difficulty we have is that we are asked to assess to what extent, in a meaningful way, we think that animals can feel pain. That requires us to think a little about what pain and feeling are. My noble friend Lady McIntosh brought up insects as an example of this, but it relates to other creatures as well. Pain itself, of course, is not just an interior experience; it is, to some extent, a social concept. Pain is an abnormality, but we learn from others that it is an abnormality that is expressive of something that requires a response. So, we learn as children, “Don’t put your hands on the coal. If you do put your hands on the coal, that is what we call pain; learn not to do it again.” There is a social element to it, and it is not by any means clear that that can be translated to animal experience. This is the problem of operating on a non-behavioural scientific basis.

We humans also have coping strategies for dealing with pain. When I know I am going to have an injection in my arm, I always make sure that I look the other way; that is a very small example of a coping strategy. That illustrates another thing about the human experience of pain, which is that very often it is worse in anticipation than in the experience itself. All of this is tied up with what we understand by pain: for humans, it is not simply a neurological experience that can be tracked by chemicals and electrons, although it has all those aspects to it.

It is very difficult to know how one can map that across the bulk of animals. It is easiest to do so, of course, in the case of mammals, because there we have a closer link with ourselves in terms of DNA composition and so forth. To map it to fish and birds is extremely difficult. Indeed, it is scientifically quite challenging to understand how the very limited neural capacity, or brain capacity, of fish and birds could accommodate that range of complex experiences of pain characteristic of humans and, perhaps, of primates and other higher mammals.

There is also a similar question about what it is to feel something. In ordinary English, “feel” has two aspects: I can feel a table—that is a physical sensation—but I can also feel love, disdain and other emotions. Nobody doubts at all that the vertebrates we are discussing can feel in the former sense but, simply as a matter of their neural and brain capacity, the notion that they even have the ability to feel love, affection, fear and complex emotions such as those is a very challenging one.

We really need to understand that sort of background before we do what the Bill does, which is to cast an extremely wide net. It includes all vertebrates, but it goes beyond that: it gives the Secretary of State the power, which I think is completely unprecedented, to decide that any invertebrate, including the insects referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, are in fact sentient. That is the power given to him which, as I say, is almost incredible.

I turn to the detail of what my amendments seek to do. They would cut the thing in different ways. First, Amendment 48 suggests we “leave out ‘vertebrate’” and limit the scope of the Bill to mammals. This would make it much easier for the public, and for many members of this Committee and your Lordships’ House, to accept the Bill. It could be regarded as a first stage; there would be nothing to prevent the Government coming back subsequently and saying, “Having won over opinion on the question of mammals, we could now extend it to the broader class of vertebrates.” Amendment 52 explicitly invites the removal of fish—it is playing the same tune—and Amendment 53 proposes the removal of birds. These are all different ways of coming at the same thing.

Amendment 57 is slightly different, because I still cannot get over my outrage that Parliament is proposing to give the Secretary of State the power to designate any invertebrate as sentient. Here, simply for the sake of modesty and respectability, this amendment would limit that power to “cephalopods and decapod crustaceans”, simply because one knows from conversation and debate that that is the category of animals most likely to come within scope of this unprecedented power. It should none the less, in my view, be limited.

That is the purpose of these amendments and it is important that we explore them, because I do not accept that it is easy to map notions of feeling and pain on to these classes. Perhaps I may briefly refer to—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, there is a Division in the Chamber. The Committee stands adjourned for five minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, we shall resume. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, may complete his speech and move his amendment.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I had just finished commenting on my own amendments when we were interrupted, so it was a convenient break, but before I conclude I shall comment on a few other amendments in this group.

Amendment 50, in the name of my noble friend Lord Robathan, would exclude the actions of wild animals upon other animals from the scope of the committee’s activities, and I think that must be sensible.

Amendment 56, from my noble friend Lord Trenchard, to leave out the power to designate invertebrates is in keeping with my amendment, and I support it.

My noble friend Lord Mancroft’s Amendment 59, which would require a scientific report that a being is sentient before it is redesignated as such by the Secretary of State under this very broad power, is an absolute minimum requirement and one that is very much in keeping with my comments on the previous group.

Finally, Amendment 49, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, concerns cephalopods and decapods. As the same words are used in a different order it might easily be confused with my amendment, but on careful examination it has a very different effect. My proposal at least puts some decency on this unprecedented power so that it is confined to the most likely class of animals. I understand—and I am sure I can be corrected—that Amendment 49 effectively takes the decision for the Secretary of State and includes cephalopod and decapod crustaceans as sentient beings on the face of the Bill. That is quite different from what I am proposing, if I have understood the amendment correctly, and I do not think that without proper and rigorous scientific reports, as indicated by my noble friend Lord Mancroft, this august Committee is quite the place in which to make such a radical transformation in our understanding of the natural world. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

After “except homo sapiens”.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

Okay. As I was saying, they are probing amendments that are basically asking for animals to come in that are already covered, as they are vertebrates. I am just a bit confused about that. If we look back to the European Council directive in 1998 which preceded the Lisbon treaty, fish and birds are included all the way back to then. I will be interested in what the Minister has to say and why the probing amendments are felt to be necessary.

Looking at Clause 5(2), we have had some debate about the fact that the definition could be widened in future to include invertebrates if evidence of sentience among invertebrates comes forward. We have put forward this amendment because we believe that evidence of sentience among two groups of invertebrates, cephalopods —for example, octopuses—and decapod crustaceans, is already established and has been for a number of years.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, spoke about the importance of scientific evidence in the debate on an earlier group, so I am sure he will be interested in the fact that back in December 2005, the Panel on Animal Health and Welfare of the European Food Safety Authority published a report that examined the scientific evidence about the sentience and capacity of certain invertebrate species to experience pain and distress. It concluded that decapod crustaceans and cephalopods can experience pain and distress, and that the largest decapod crustaceans are complex in behaviour and have a pain system and considerable learning ability.

As regards cephalopods, the scientific panel concluded that they have a nervous system and a relatively complex brain similar to many vertebrates and sufficient in structure and function for them to experience pain. Notably, they can experience and learn to avoid pain and distress, such as avoiding electric shocks. In addition, they have significant cognitive ability, including good learning ability and memory retention, elaborate communication systems and individual temperaments. More recently, a number of scientific papers strongly point to the conclusion that both cephalopods and decapod crustaceans are capable of experiencing pain and suffering.

Even more recently—the noble Lord, Lord Trees, referred to this—evidence was given to the Select Committee in July, this month, by Dr Jonathan Birch from the LSE, who is, of course, the author of the report that Defra is producing. He provided written evidence, along with Professor Nicola Clayton and Dr Alexandra Schnell from the University of Cambridge, and Dr Heather Browning and Dr Andrew Crump from the LSE. These are serious academics, who are the kind of people we should listen to when we consider scientific evidence in making decisions. If noble Lords will bear with me, I just want to pull up a couple of their points on this Bill. They say:

“In our opinion, the evidence vindicates the 2012 extension of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 to cover all cephalopod molluscs. We now have a very strange situation in the UK: all cephalopod molluscs are protected in science but they are not protected by robust animal welfare laws outside scientific settings.”


Coming to Amendment 57 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan—and perhaps to answer his considerations about this—they also say that:

“Regarding decapod crustaceans: although it would be possible for animal welfare law to protect some infraorders while excluding others, this has the potential to generate significant confusion. A better approach would be to protect all decapod crustaceans in very general legislation such as the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill”.


Having made that point, I would like to look at the work of the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission. In February this year, it issued a definition of sentience to cover both groups we have been discussing in light of the accumulating evidence, and that preceded the evidence I have just read out to noble Lords. Our amendment acknowledges this growing amount of evidence and seeks to embed it within the Bill by extending the definition of “animal” to cover cephalopods and decapod crustaceans. We know that they are already protected in some other countries—Australia, Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand—and in some states in the United States and Australia. The recognition of cephalopod and decapod crustacean sentience has already been acknowledged within the scientific community, so in our mind there is no good reason to delay acknowledgement of it within the Bill.

The independent review has been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Trees, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes. There is huge expectation that this report will be published soon, and it has a significant role to play in informing the Bill we have been debating in this Committee. It would be extremely useful if the Minister could give us an update on its progress because to have it before us before Report is very important.

Before I finish, I want to speak very briefly to a couple of the other amendments. First, on Amendment 50 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, I just feel a bit disappointed that it has been tabled to remove wild animals from the scope of the Bill. I do not think there is a case for their removal. I heard the noble Lords’ concerns around responsibility, and I would be very keen to hear some clarity from the Minister on this area. I really think that if we accept that animals are sentient by virtue of their biology, sentience applies whatever the condition an animal is in, whether it is wild, farmed or kept as a companion. Human activity—what we do—impinges on wild, farm and companion animals alike. So, consideration of how our activity impacts on the welfare of sentience should cover all animals that would come under the scope of the Bill at the moment.

Amendment 48, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and other noble Lords, would limit the Bill’s coverage to mammals, as we heard in the introduction. I would just like to make this point: when we consider whether an animal is sentient, we should not be affected by how like it is to us. That is not the point of sentience. As noble Lords, we need to consider this fact very carefully, and that is borne out again by the scientific evidence. On that basis, being an invertebrate should not automatically preclude sentience, so the limitations proposed by the amendment would then become an entirely arbitrary limitation given the overwhelming evidence I have just expressed concerning the fact that sentience exists across vertebrates.

I am aware that there has been quite a bit of press interest in our amendment. I know we are not allowed to use props, but I have a newspaper here, the Times, whose editorial on 8 July said, “Considering the Lobster” —it is almost getting a bit Lewis Carroll, is it not? The subheading was:

“Ministers are right to ban the practice of boiling shellfish alive.”


In light of this, I urge the Minister to take action and accept our amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am not an expert, and that is why I want an animal sentience committee that will advise me and my successors on the rights and wrongs of dispatching species of all kinds. I cannot answer my noble friend. I understand the point that he makes. He is a seasoned political debater. This is an issue which requires people who will make decisions about such matters, and that should not be lay men like me.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister and to other noble Lords who have spoken on this group of amendments, particularly my noble friends Lord Caithness, Lord Robathan and Lord Mancroft. I was pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Trees, felt able to express support for Amendment 57 in my name.

I also want on this occasion to thank the Minister for handling us so well. These have been two afternoons of extremely informative and at the same time very good-natured debate, and he has taken everything that we have thrown at him and come back with a dazzling display of intellect and sympathy, though it is mildly regrettable that the only philosophers he cites are all French—maybe he should have a closer look at that for the future.

I apologise for expressing myself badly if I conveyed to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, that I did not think that dogs could feel pleasure. That is not what I intended to say. In fact, one of my amendments specifically preserved mammals as part of the scope of the Bill. I was trying to say that, while we can certainly understand pleasure and indeed pain in a dog or in the higher mammals, it is very difficult to understand what that means in any meaningful sense when one is talking about fish, for example. It was simply that point that I was trying to make; I am sorry if I did not express myself well.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, that Amendments 52 and 53 would add fish and birds to a clause that excepts—it is an exception clause—so that it would except homo sapiens “and fish” and so on. It takes them out of the scope of the Bill. Clearly, the noble Baroness does not want them taken out. However, she was never going to express support so, in a way, it does not matter.

As a final point, I want to pick up on what the noble Baroness said about cephalopods and decapod crustaceans, and it is a bit of commentary on much of the Bill. I think that we are all agreed that the Bill has to say something, and we have a Bill here which is so empty of content that it would almost be a scandal if it passed in its current circumstances. Today and on previous occasions, we have discussed how it ought to say something about composition and about term limits—which we discussed last time. Perhaps there is a feeling that it ought to say something too about cephalopods and decapod crustaceans. Where we might differ around the Committee, because we have not sufficiently coalesced, is on what exactly it should say on those issues, but I think that many of us sitting here, from all political parties and groups, can probably agree with me if I say to the Minister that as the Bill stands, it is not good enough, and that when it comes back on Report we expect many things that we have said to be heard and the Bill to be improved in a number of respects.

I wish the Minister well in his endeavours to make the Bill better so that we are all as happy with it as we have been with him. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 48 withdrawn.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - part one
Monday 6th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, although I do not entirely agree with her uncritical support of the Bill. I want particularly to support Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Trees, to which I have lent my name, but also generally to support the other amendments in this group. The characteristic they have in common is that they deal with the retrospective powers of the committee—its powers to look back at existing policy and past practice—which clearly cause a degree of concern. My comments are intended to be largely helpful to the Government.

I have heard it said that the Government cannot support this amendment or the general thrust of these amendments because farming practice and husbandry practice go back decades—indeed, hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Therefore, they would say that it is impossible to look at the current situation or a change in the current situation without looking back at what it is changing or at the past. I would have a great deal of sympathy, as I think many people in the House would, with the Government if they advanced that argument. My suggestion, which I hope the Government will be able to take account of, is that an amendment could be crafted, perhaps by the Government, in response to this debate which ensured that the new animal sentience committee could look at existing and past policy only where the Government were coming forward with a specific proposal to change it—that unless there was a proposal to change it, the committee would not be able to look at current and existing policy.

I realise that is not quite the same as the amendment I have put my name to in support of the noble Lord, Lord Trees, but I do not think any of us here are trying to pin the Government down to a particular outcome—indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, said that she was generally supportive of this. We are coming together around a sort of principle, which is that the ability of this committee to roam into existing policy at will should be limited, and it should be limited in ways that keep it focused on the present and the future, rather than going into the past. If my noble friend could find a way of agreeing something along those lines, I think the force of many of the amendments in this group would fall away.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow my noble friend. I thank my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb for boosting my right-wing credentials. I think one thing the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, and I have in common is that we find ourselves a little out of kilter with our respective parties in relation to the Bill before us this evening.

I have amendments in the third group, so I would just like to put two general queries to my noble friend the Minister. I would hazard a guess that, had we had this Bill in front of us when we were both serving as shadow Ministers in the Defra team some years ago, we would have been minded not to accept what is in the Bill before us today.

I would like to associate myself with the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Trees, in moving his Amendment 1. I am proud to be an associate fellow of the British Veterinary Association, and I commend him for his work in flying the flag for vets—I think he is the sole flyer of that flag in this House. He adequately addressed not just the process but the retrospectivity aspect of this amendment. Could my noble friend the Minister give us a reassurance this evening that it is not intended that the work of the committee will have any retrospective effect—that is, going back over old laws in its work—should the Bill be carried in its present form?

I would also like to associate myself with the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, and ask for what particular reason—for some reason the manifesto did not reach me this time, possibly because we are not allowed to be candidates—

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

I did—my noble friend teases me, but I did. I did not always agree with every single item in every single manifesto, but my understanding was that we made a manifesto pledge to roll into national law what was effectively, as has been rehearsed here this evening, set out in Article 13 of the EU treaty—which I do not think I have read either. My understanding is that that was our commitment. So I would like my noble friend the Minister, in summing up this debate, to set out for what reason it was not acceptable simple to rehearse in UK law what we had already committed to in EU law, because I believe that that would have been acceptable.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I add for the benefit of my noble friend that the Conservative Party manifesto for the last election contained—I have looked it up—simply a pledge that

“We will bring in new laws on animal sentience.”


Nothing more was said in any detail.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - part two
Monday 6th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 27, to which I have put my name. I have the great privilege of following the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, in doing so. This amendment goes to the heart of what I see, perhaps eccentrically, as the problem with the Bill. The Bill seems to be about animals and their welfare, and it seems to be based on science, but really it is a Bill about humans and our moral standing. It is not about our moral obligations—all animal welfare legislation for the last 200 years either articulates or creates moral and legal obligations on us; that is what law does—but rather it is about our moral standing. It is the ambition of the people who are promoting the concept of animal sentience that it should be a common moral measure, putting humans and animals on the same moral plane, differenced only by the degree of sentience that they evince.

I find this a really false anthropology. So it is absolutely right that the Bill, which actually makes no reference to humans, should say something about them, if only to try to achieve a better balance in the moral architecture that the Bill seeks to create. Amendment 27 does that. It says that there are some things about human beings that should not be trampled on by this Bill, by the principle behind it, or by the animal sentience committee it creates. Those are quite basic things: they are to do with religion and religious practice, culture and your local region or locality—the place where you belong. All Amendment 27 does is ask that those things should be carved out and specially protected—not in an innovative way, because in fact they are already protected in the European Union treaty, in the language that we adopted before. It is simply about incorporating that language back, not in a copy-and-paste way but because we genuinely believe that those things about human life are important and should be protected. That is why I support Amendment 27.

While I am on my feet, I am going to make a comment on Amendment 48, in the same group. It is a slightly more procedural comment—it is really a question to my noble friend. We have been told since Committee, through the issuance of the terms of reference of the new committee—which are not statutory as I understand it, but of course I am always happy to be corrected—that it is to be set inside and corralled by, so to speak, a new Defra centre of excellence on animal welfare. Other committees that already exist will also be brought within that nest, but the other birds in this nest are not statutory committees—they are creatures or creations of Defra, whereas this new committee is a statutory committee. I simply do not understand—this may be because I am relatively new—how it is that, through some non-statutory terms of reference, a committee that we are today being asked to give statutory independence to, can be reliably told that it will be part of this centre. What if it decided not to be? It is going to have an independent board; what if the board decided that the centre trammelled it or interfered with its work? My question to my noble friend is this: if this committee is going to be on the basis he says, corralled inside the new centre for excellence, should that not be in the Bill?

[Baroness Fookes (Con)]

My Lords, I understand the worries of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, about including or not including matters that relate to medical science and the slaughter of animals by ritual, religious methods. But unless I am much mistaken—the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—the Act that deals with the slaughter of animals specifically exempts ritual slaughter from what would otherwise be illegal. By the same token, we have legislation that deals with medical experiments which already tightly controls what may or may not be done. I cannot see, therefore, that the amendment being advocated can have any real substance to it, given those restrictions, and also bearing in mind that the committee that is being set up, although it is being set up by statute, does not have legal powers of any kind whatever. It will be entirely up to the relevant Ministers whether or not they accept any recommendations from that committee. In order to change the rules about medical science or the slaughter of animals, I believe there would have to be primary legislation. I hope my noble friend can confirm this.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - part three
Monday 6th December 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

23: Clause 2, page 1, line 16, at end insert “, but such recommendations may only be made after the report referred to in subsection (1) has been published in an academic journal following peer review.”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures the academic robustness of the Committee’s work.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 23 and 35 give the House the opportunity to discuss the robustness of the science on which the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill is allegedly resting. I detect a lack of enthusiasm for the wide-ranging debate on this topic that might have otherwise ensued at a more timely part of the day, so I shall keep my remarks as brief as can.

I was once on the Zambezi and had the opportunity to observe the crocodiles. These are largely placid animals that sit basking in the sun but, when hungry, they can move with terrifying rapidity and can kill very rapidly indeed. The person I was with, who knew about crocodiles, said—and I will stand corrected by the noble Lord, Lord Trees, if I have got any of this wrong, of course—that the brain of a crocodile is a very small thing. The size of a pea was suggested to me, and that there was no capacity within the brain at all, neurologically, for a function that allowed for any memory. The consoling thought that was offered to me was that, since a crocodile cannot remember anything, if it did eat me, it was not personal.

We are about to enact a Bill—we are close to passing it through our House—without limitation that, as I understand it, declares a crocodile to be a sentient creature; that is, a creature that can experience pleasure and pain, and science is prayed in aid to support this. I take the crocodile simply as an example, there are other creatures with brains almost as small as a crocodile and probably even smaller that are being covered and in scope of this Bill. The difficulty of this is, they have very limited functions, partly because the size of the brain simply limits the functions that they can actually have.

No one doubts, as a matter of science, that a crocodile, as I say taken as an example, will respond in a certain way if a sufficiently strong stimulus is applied to it. That is a neurological reaction explicable by the movement of chemicals and electrons through the nervous system and in what passes for the crocodile’s brain. What we are being asked to do here goes way beyond that. How can this be extended scientifically—not by analogy, not by empathy, but scientifically—to include the concept of pain in a crocodile as we understand pain.

Pain is more than a simple neurological reaction. Pain, as we understand it, exists in anticipation. One worries about it coming in one’s direction. It exists in reflection; one thinks about it in the past. One has coping strategies for dealing with it, and so on. Most importantly, it exists as a time of abnormality. Pain is abnormal; we want the pain to go away, so that we can go back to normal. How can a creature with no memory have any conception of what normality is, let alone what abnormality is? How can it understand pain, beyond that neurological reaction, in any sense that we understand it? Yet there are scientists, or people who hold themselves forth as scientists, who say that scientifically that link can be made when it is actually almost incomprehensible for most of us. Who are the scientists in whom the Government are placing such faith for the scientific basis of animal sentience that they claim to exist? Where do they gather? Which respectable journals do that publish in? Who is this cadre of leading animal sentience scientists?

Of course, there are animal welfare scientists and veterinarians, and people like that, but this is very specialised, a very narrow and a relatively new field—only over the last 20 years. It has no leading lights at the moment; it is, I would suggest to your Lordships’ House, predominantly ideologically driven, and it is based in large measure on funding being supplied by what might be thought of as groups and foundations with a prior view.

So my question really to my noble friend, even as he trembles on the brink of his success—he is very close to getting his way and seeing this Bill through with practically no amendments—and before he commits the nation to this Bill and this version of animal sentience, is whether he should not think twice about the claims that he makes and the confidence that he rests in what is a very ropey branch of science. Should that not lead him to pull back and consider this amendment, which requires peer review of scientific reports from the committee? In fact, it requires peer review of all reports, and I realise now that that is a bit silly, because some of them will just be procedural—but we can work on the wording. On the scientific reports of the committee, could not he and I work together to get an appropriate amendment at Third Reading that would try to make sure that we rest at last on robust science and not on something ropey and partisan? If it is ropey and partisan, we will come deeply to regret it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My Lords, it has been a fascinating debate. I do not want to detain the House, but I was very entertained by my noble friend Lord Moylan’s trips down the gradations of sentience that might exist across the animal kingdom. I was trying to work out whether he was a follower of Aristotle—who believed that animals lacked rational souls and therefore were outside the sphere of justice—or whether he was Descartian or Rousseauan in his view. I do not want to go into a philosophical—

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

It may help my noble friend—seeing as he was so kind as to ask the question, I am sure he will be interested in the answer—to know that I stand on every occasion with Aristotle on this, as on so many other matters. I just want that to be clear.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

That is good to know. I am very grateful. However, I differ from him entirely if he thinks—which I do not think he really does—that the Government, of whom I am proud to be part, would engage with any form of ropey bunch of scientists. In fact we will come on to talk about, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said, the degree of scientific breadth that went into the 300 different pieces of work studied by the London School of Economics in its reports on decapods and cephalopods. It is an indication of the expertise that exists out there.

I think my noble friend Lord Hannan has the advantage on me in that he believes that legislators do not need experts. I may have misunderstood him, but as I gaze around this Chamber I see precious few scientists, with one notable exception. There may be more—of course, there is the noble Lord, Lord Trees.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I will make sure that every single person who applies for the committee has the necessary expertise, whatever background they come from. We will be looking for a range of people, from those with agricultural experience, those with experience of animals at the end of life in the slaughter process, and veterinarians. I made a list earlier; I will not repeat it because there were some long words which I cannot remember, but they will undoubtedly be a factor in deciding who will be members of the committee.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great disappointment that my noble friend has not conceded the very sensible proposal I made. It was unsurprising, however. What did surprise me were the remarks from the Opposition Dispatch Box. A more thorough-going endorsement of government policy better presented it is rare to imagine coming across. The idea that the Government never take scientific advice that needs to be checked or disputed and that they would never take dodgy scientific advice, now endorsed by the Labour Front Bench, is one I will cherish and store up for reference, no doubt, on some future occasion. However, for the moment, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 23 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am grateful to your Lordships for your forbearance, and for your views and insights on this important piece of legislation. I will also speak to the consequential Amendment 43.

As I have said during previous debates on the Bill, the Government’s approach to recognising the sentience of animals will be guided by the scientific evidence. My department commissioned an independent review from the London School of Economics and Political Science of the evidence surrounding the sentience of cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans for that very purpose. As promised, I made the findings of that review available to your Lordships for consideration ahead of today’s debate.

Sentience is broadly understood to be the capacity to feel pain. Our Animal Welfare Committee advised in 2018:

“Sentience is the capacity to experience pain, distress and harm.”


The review considered the findings of around 300 scientific studies, using a set of criteria based on brain structure, nervous system complexity and testing for adaptive behaviour to assess whether these classes of invertebrate are sentient. The report itself was subject to peer review.

The Government have given careful consideration to the contents of the final report. We accept that there is strong evidence of the sentience of these invertebrates. It is only right, therefore, that they are included in the provisions of the Bill. That means that the animal sentience committee, once established, may produce reports under Section 2 of the Bill in relation to the welfare of cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans.

However, I want to be clear that this amendment does not alter existing legislation or policy. I have heard, for example, the concerns put to me by representatives of the fishing sector, and I can assure this House that nothing in this amendment, or indeed in the Bill, changes the rules governing the activities of individuals or businesses.

Naturally, in due course, the Government may wish to consider whether it would be appropriate to amend the scope of other animal welfare legislation to include cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans. While that is not the question we are discussing today, I take the opportunity to assure your Lordships that any changes to existing laws would be subject to appropriate parliamentary scrutiny, and we would consider carefully how we would engage industry in their development.

Today, we propose simply to recognise the sentience of these invertebrates in line with the scientific evidence. I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman of Ullock, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and my noble friends Lady Fookes and Lord Randall of Uxbridge, for their previous amendments on this subject. I hope that they, and the rest of the House, will support this amendment. I beg to move.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is with some regret that I note that my noble friend at the Dispatch Box did not thank me for my previous amendment on this subject. I accepted as far back as Committee that it was likely that cephalopods and decapod crustaceans would be added to the list of sentient beings covered by the Bill, although I did not expect it to be done in the Bill but through the secondary legislation which it contemplates.

I introduced an amendment in Committee that said, beyond vertebrates, the Government can only add, to the list of sentient beings, cephalopods and decapod crustaceans and no more. This was countered, so to speak, by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, who put down an amendment that actually added those two classes of creature to the face of the Bill. Neither amendment, of course, proceeded at Committee stage. I find it rather sad and curious that, of those two amendments, my noble friend at the Dispatch Box selected that promoted by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, and has rather ignored mine.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for those remarks. I think it might be helpful to the House if I say how this came about, as it answers the points about how we got to the stage of including decapods and cephalopods in the Bill. It is a matter of serendipity. For many years people have been pushing for work to be done, and it was done by the LSE. It just so happened that that report came into the Government’s hands over the summer while we were in the process of going through the Committee stage, and it seemed an obvious moment to take this forward when the findings of that report were so clear.

To cheer up my noble friend Lord Hamilton a bit at this late hour, I cannot think of any other species that are likely to go through this process. If there are any, I suggest that it will probably be at least a decade before someone is standing here recommending that we take that forward. It may be less; this is a fast-moving area of science, but it has taken many years—I do not know how many precisely—for decapods and cephalopods to be recognised in this way. I hope that is reassuring.

The noble Baroness asked a question about the food industry and making sure that, if the committee were to make recommendations about how one treats these organisms as part of food processing or cooking and the law is then changed because Ministers accepted that advice, there would have to be a huge amount of work with the food industry to make sure that it was prepared for it. However, this amendment does not change anything. It does not change the law; it just allows it to be within the remit of the committee to give advice to Ministers who will then take other factors into account, regarding, for example, the marine environment, fish, the economic benefits of the fishing industry to coastal communities or the importance that the Government put on fish being part of the nation’s balanced diet. These are the sort of wider factors that Governments will take into consideration.

I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Moylan feels put upon. I thought that I was the victim here, but clearly that is not the case. I will try to be kind to him when I come to his amendment.

I turn to Amendment 41, and here my remarks relate to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Trees. The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill recognises that live animals with a backbone—vertebrates—are sentient. A government amendment has been tabled to also recognise decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs as sentient, as I have said. It is our intention and expectation that the committee will concern itself with consideration of the welfare of live animals. In practice, it would be difficult for the committee and government departments to identify the way in which a policy under consideration affects the welfare needs of a foetus or an embryo, as opposed to those of the mother animal. It is unlikely, therefore, that the committee would find itself considering a policy beyond its remit. The central recommendation in the report is that these cephalopods and decapods will be regarded as sentient animals, but we carefully considered the recommendations in the review. The evidence of sentient decapods and cephalopods is clear: we are committed to being led by science when it comes to sentience, and that is why we amended the Bill.

Turning to Amendment 42 in the name of my noble friend Lord Moylan, as I mentioned, the Government are led by the science when it comes to sentience. We have considered the review’s findings carefully before amending the Bill to recognise these invertebrates as sentient. I can confirm that, at the present time, there is no intention to treat any other invertebrates, beyond decapods and cephalopods, as sentient animals. The scientific evidence that led to the Government commissioning the LSE review has been many years in the making. I can assure the House that this will continue to be the case for future extension, using the delegated powers in Clause 5.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I note what my noble friend says about there being no plans—and I fully accept that that is so, as he has assured the House—but if there are no plans, why do the Government wish to take the powers to continue to pursue them? Would it not be better if the Minister would just accept that primary legislation will be required as and when the science demands it?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I hope I can reassure my noble friend by saying that if the Secretary of State were to use his or her powers to recommend another species or group of species to be included, that would be the subject of parliamentary oversight. It would be an affirmative resolution requiring debate in both Houses and would be subject to other areas of parliamentary scrutiny, such as Select Committees and other means by which noble Lords and people in the other place would seek to hold that decision to account. I hope that we would not wish to risk this Bill becoming out of date by removing the ability to update its scope should the scientific evidence develop.

While we are not aware of any instances on the horizon, we cannot discount the possibility that new evidence will emerge in the future that demonstrates the sentience of some additional category of invertebrate. Decapods and cephalopods were the invertebrates most likely to qualify for being regarded as sentient animals. The likelihood that another category of invertebrate might one day be shown to be sentient is small, but it is not zero. That is why we wish to leave an option to update the definition if needed. Such a power must be subject to appropriate checks and balances, of course, and I will address this point shortly.

In the meantime, I take this opportunity to clarify that the Bill is all about government policy decision-making and how well particular decisions take account of the welfare needs of animals. The Bill and our amendments do not change existing law or impose new restrictions on individuals or businesses. I hope that your Lordships will agree that the time has come to include decapod crustaceans and cephalopods in the Bill and will therefore support the government amendment. I also hope that the points I have set out reassure noble Lords and that they will be content not to press their amendments. I beg to move.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Thursday 7th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I had thought that the Government had completely forgotten this Bill, because it has been so long threading its way through both Houses. Anyway, I am glad that it is happening. It is not the Bill that I would like to have seen passed, but I guess that we have to accept it, since it is better than nothing—although that is not exactly glowing praise. I hope that we can see some effectiveness coming from the Bill and real action, so I say well done for bringing it back and getting us to this point.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I want first to thank my noble friend the Minister, who has put an inordinate amount of effort into discussing concerns about this Bill with those of us who have them. I congratulate him not only on becoming a grandfather but on landing this Bill, as he does today.

However, it remains a very bad Bill and I think it is worth repeating why. It is not because it entails a huge administrative reorganisation; in this House, we take huge administrative reorganisations in our stride. We have been reorganising the National Health Service over the past few weeks, which is possibly the largest organisation in the world, certainly in Europe. The Government’s defence of the measure is essentially that it is administratively very minor: it just sets up a committee; it is an advisory committee, and Ministers will make final decisions—“There is nothing to see here; move on”. But the important part of the Bill is not its administrative effects but the fact that it is a declaratory Bill. It declares something in the law of the United Kingdom for the first time to be true—that is, that animals, vertebrates and certain non-vertebrates, are sentient. I know that this appeared previously in a treaty that we were party to, but it moves it on a considerable step to incorporate it into domestic law in this way.

It is worth asking why that declaration matters. It matters because it is very much part of the agenda of the animal rights movement to achieve agreement on three things. The first is that animals are sentient; the second is that sentience is the sole basis for judging moral conduct; and the third, as a consequence of that, is that humans and animals are to be treated on the same basis in moral terms. That is a complete upturning of our established view of moral conduct; it is a completely new anthropology. This Bill is therefore profoundly anti-human. It opens the door to a moral calculus in which people can ask the question: how much chimpanzee suffering is equivalent to a human baby suffering? That is why it remains a very bad Bill. It is a Bill that we will come to regret.

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests as declared in the register. I thank my noble friend the Minister for indicating that the Government wish to agree with these sensible amendments, which merely import principles which previously existed in relation to sentience provisions in the Lisbon treaty and will create a better balance in the Bill and in the operation of the sentience committee.

I fear that I rather agree with my noble friend Lord Moylan that this remains a bad Bill and it stores up trouble for the future, but we have made all those points before. Even if the Government came to this late, they are wise to have accepted the view of the Commons that some balance needed to be injected into the measures, so we are doing the right thing by agreeing with them. I thank my noble friend for everything that he has done to get us to this place.