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?

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[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.

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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.