Agriculture Bill Debate
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Lord Russell of Liverpool
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Agriculture Bill
Lord Russell of Liverpool ExcerptsThursday 17th September 2020
(3 years, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Agriculture Act 2020 View all Agriculture Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 130-III(Corrected) Third marshalled list for Report - (17 Sep 2020)
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 68. I remind noble Lords that Members other than the mover and the Minister may speak only once, and that short questions of elucidation are discouraged. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division should make that clear in the debate.
Clause 32: Identification and traceability of animals
Amendment 68
The Duke of Montrose (Con) [V]
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. I declare my interest as a livestock producer from Scotland.
Amendment 68A in my name emphasises much the same point for much the same reason. I have considerable admiration for my noble friend the Minister, who, along with his officials, has laboured hard and finally found a formula through which it has been possible to get a legislative consent Motion from the Scottish Parliament, as well as other Administrations, for this part of the Bill.
My amendment reflects the fact that given the present political views of the devolved Administrations, the Government have realised that they must get devolved agreement. Can my noble friend the Minister give the House some idea of which functions the body that is being proposed under this power will be expected to carry out? When we found that we were going to have the chance to resume control of our own laws, many in the agricultural and rural industries hoped that there would be frameworks to ensure seamless regulation across our own UK market. The Government then found that these functions under the devolution Acts had not been reserved to Westminster, so it was possible to argue that anything which could be considered to be part of agriculture and the environment was a devolved competence. It now appears that what we have in front of us is as far as we can get by way of a framework, but any final outcome will be hard won.
The noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, has given a considerable description of the attitude with which these powers were received in the devolved Administrations. Rather like the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, I see this as an issue about the identification and traceability of animals being an area where the need for a joined-up policy is truly vital. It is an area where new technology is making an enormous difference to the capabilities of the information which can be included. Inevitably, it is triggering updates to the systems in the different parts of the country.
The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, has just explained the situation in Wales in some detail, and I must admit that I am not familiar with how this works in Ireland. However, in England, the AHDB is now moving on to using electronic identification for all livestock. It is in the middle of setting up the livestock information service using a database supplied by a company called Shearwell Data which will hold all the English data. Quite separately, the Government in Scotland are introducing electronic identification for cattle; the system is to be called ScotEID. They already have a well-tried one for sheep which has been running for some years.
Noble Lords will be familiar with the tremendous trade in livestock within the UK, both north to south and west to east. A large quantity of cattle and sheep which have a Scottish electronic identity will land up in England and vice versa, and it will be the same for the other Administrations. The normal expectation is that their identity would remain on the database of their registration. The person buying the animals would have to know their origin and then have to input or source any relevant information from that database, perhaps at a different end of the country, as will the authorities if there is an issue with health or disease. Other areas of possible similar divergencies are in carcass classification and food standards. I shall be interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who has such wide experience in these fields, has to say.
Apart from all these complications, at what point do the Government hope to be able to have a comprehensive view of what is going on? Is this the final framework in this area, and what about other similar areas?
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. The noble Baroness is not here, so I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, and my noble friend the Duke of Montrose, for introducing their respective amendments. These two amendments refer back to comments that I made earlier about the status of the common framework agreements. It is very clear at this time that this is a fuzzy area and it is not quite clear what the status of the common framework agreements is—and yet, in the very specific circumstances that both noble Lords speaking to Amendments 68 and 68A referred to, time is pressing on and we need to know how the different Administrations across the United Kingdom will administer this part of the Bill.
My question to the Minister is: what is the status of the common frameworks at this time? I understand that they have been reduced to 21, but obviously the process is ongoing. It would be helpful to know whether this level of detail has been reached in the current negotiations and how circumstances referred to in Amendments 68 and 68A can be avoided if at all possible.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 69. I remind noble Lords that Members other than the mover and the Minister may speak only once and that short questions of elucidation are discouraged. Anyone wishing to press this, or anything else in this group, to a Division should make that clear in debate.
Clause 34: Agricultural tenancies
Amendment 69
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
I understand that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans is not on the call, so I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Rock.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
The noble Lord, Lord Rooker has withdrawn, so I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Palmer of Childs Hill.
Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD) [V]
My Lords, I wish to speak against Amendment 71. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, for the thrust of her argument, with which I agree. I agree also with the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes—but not that she is an old boiler.
This is one of a series of amendments dealing with the export of live animals for slaughter. At the heart of Judaism is animal welfare and the very strict prohibition from causing harm to animals. The UK Jewish community has often raised the issue of animal transport, as it has serious concerns over both the length of time animals spend in transport and the conditions they are kept in during the journey. I stress that I know of no such exports from the UK for the kosher food trade, so I have no problem with Amendment 72.
In principle, I support a blanket ban on the export of live animals for slaughter. However, Amendment 71 singles out religious communities, such as Jews and Muslims, for no logical welfare reason. It suggests that only animals destined for religious slaughter should be forbidden from being exported, as if the method of slaughter makes the slightest difference to the animal’s horrendous journey. Furthermore, the standard of welfare at slaughter, with only very slight variants, is uniform across Europe as governed by EU directive 1099, which I understand will be retained in UK law post Brexit. No welfare benefits would accrue by preventing animals being transported for religious slaughter alone, travelling to France or other European countries, as regulations on religious slaughter there are identical to those here.
Amendment 71 seeks to claim that industrialised slaughter is somehow more humane than religious slaughter, and there is simply no conclusive evidence to support that. Just visit any abattoir—they are pretty horrendous. Stunning is an all-encompassing animal welfare panacea, which some hope will be unquestioningly accepted as such. We have had this argument often in this House, but in reality mechanical stunning methods, which may include asphyxiation by gas, electrocution by tongs or water or shooting with a captive bolt gun, cause pain to the animal. They also frequently go wrong, leaving the animal in even greater, prolonged distress. We have had this argument before on labelling an, came to the conclusion that we should label everything to say how it was killed. I have no problem with that.
Shechita—kosher killing—incorporates an integral and irreversible stun by severing the anterior structures of the neck with a rapid transverse incision using an instrument of surgical sharpness. I could go on at greater length about the methods but it is rather bloodthirsty, for the reasons needed to kill an animal.
Amendment 71 only seeks to stigmatise religious communities by belittling their legal method of slaughter for no logical welfare benefits. Yes, ban animals from travelling long distances. We should be against—as Amendment 72 is, quite correctly—sending animals on long horrendous journeys to be slaughtered by any method. So please look in the long term at the fact that we need to stop animals having horrendous journeys, so that what happens at the end of them is irrelevant because they are not being exported.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has withdrawn from this group, so I call the next speaker, the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose.
The Duke of Montrose (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am very glad to be able to talk on this subject, and I declare my interest as a livestock rearer in Scotland.
This group is much focused on animals involved in exports, and I was thinking that many other speakers in the House today would want to comment on this. My remarks today are directed at Amendment 73—in the name of my noble friend Lady Fookes—in this group, which is, in the first instance, to do with the transport of animals within the UK. However, some comments inevitably will have a bit of a read-over to exports.
My noble friend Lady Fookes has a reputation as one of the foremost advocates of animal welfare in the UK, and this amendment brings forward a lot of proposals that would make life easier for animals and—if they had a chance of a practical outcome—might even make life easier for farmers. However, I will point out what seem to me like some practical difficulties. At the same time, it is proposing a very different world to the one that most of us see around us, and it would require a great deal of government intervention to bring it about. My noble friend Lady Hodgson is pressing the Government to do something in regard to the verbal intention they have given, but I feel it is a fairly big ask at this point.
My noble friend’s concept of requiring producers to take their animals to the nearest abattoir within 10 kilometres, unless prevented by a list of circumstances, has got problems, not least that in the last 10 years we have lost over 200 small abattoirs across this country. There has been some reduction in certain kinds of stock, but a major trigger was the regulations that were brought in from Brussels about the equipment and standards in abattoirs, and we are committed to maintaining those standards.
The end product of any of these units is a very perishable commodity, and I have no doubt that everyone is aware of that. The prices vary widely every year, both by season and availability in world markets. To limit farmers to only one buyer in a small abattoir is a recipe for commercial rip-offs. As a farmer in a mountainous area of Scotland that relies on sheep production, I say that we are only economically able to produce lambs in a limited season, and the net effect is that, at certain times of year, there is a huge flood of lambs looking for buyers, while at other times there is practically nothing that would keep the processing chain viable.
However, if my noble friend can achieve a solution to these drawbacks, there is another difficulty that is contained in her proposal. Due to a lack of small local abattoirs, farmers take their stock to livestock auction markets or collection centres, where the numbers can be combined to make the cost of haulage economic to an abattoir that has capacity for those numbers.
There is a difficulty in that all these markets and sites are regarded as agricultural holdings, and most of the stock will have come from more than 10 kilometres away, while all of it would be required to be held at these units for 24 days before undertaking a journey of up to 10 hours. This happens to be almost exactly the driving time from the two main markets of Aberdeen and Stirling to what is currently one of the main recipients of their throughput. It strikes me that the amendment as currently worded applies particularly to journeys starting in England; perhaps it is more than a coincidence that it has not described journeys starting in Scotland.
Unless there is a ready way of overcoming these major drawbacks, would we not make better use of this time to apply our minds to what would make livestock transport more bearable for the animals themselves? I would like to draw your Lordships’ attention to one of the most distant parts of the United Kingdom. On the Islands of Orkney, animals have to be driven to a ferry, but they have developed pods for the animals on the ferry, such that the journey to Aberdeen is regarded as an animal’s rest period before starting an ongoing journey. This does not read over immediately to other forms of transport, but it shows that, with a little thought, there could be other solutions. But I am afraid that, with its present wording, I would not be able to back Amendment 73.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
My Lords, I have had no requests to speak after the Minister, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson.
Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who contributed to this very important debate. I thank the Minister for his reply and also for the time and courtesy that he has given in talking to us before today. We really do welcome his sincere input.
I am glad to hear that this is work in progress, although I am concerned that it does not get kicked into the long grass and that it is always not now. I very much hope that the consultation will come forward quickly. We are leaving those animals to a terrible fate while we still allow them to be exported for slaughter—with or without stunning. We should be aware that, in doing this, we really are not ensuring the highest standards of animal welfare, as we have heard.
That brings to mind the saying popularised by General Morrison of the Australian army:
“The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”
This is a standard that I would feel very uncomfortable accepting, so I hope we will move forward quickly with all this work.
I beg leave to withdraw the amendment in good faith that the Minister will do all he can to ensure that animals do not go on having to be exported for slaughter and fattening. I hope this comes into place as soon as possible and we live up to our election manifesto.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 74. I remind noble Lords that Members other than the mover and the Minister may only speak once and that short questions of elucidation are discouraged. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division should make that clear in debate.
Amendment 74