Male Chick Culling

Debate between Nusrat Ghani and Angela Eagle

Thursday 11th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I agree that when a supply chain, however difficult, is established and we try to move away from it, there can be unintended consequences. We have to look at the whole series of issues along that chain, so that we do not end up in a situation that has lower welfare outcomes than the one we started with. I assure my hon. Friend that the Department is well aware of that, and we will not move in any way if we would end up in a worse welfare situation than the one we started with, but he makes a perfectly good point.

As I was about to say, another issue flagged in the Animal Welfare Committee’s report is the fact that male chicks provide a whole food source for exotic animals, and we would have to replace that.

In recent years, there has been phenomenal global progress in the development of technologies that could help to end routine culling of male chicks by identifying or determining embryo sex before hatching, and it appears that this is going on in the dairy industry as well. There is clearly a lot of scientific work going on to see what we can do to get away from the current situation in our livestock supply chains. Several new methods and systems have appeared, and many refinements in existing systems have continued, since the publication of the Animal Welfare Committee’s report on this subject.

We welcome the UK egg industry’s interest in the development of day-zero sexing technology, which enables eggs to be sexed prior to the start of their incubation. Such a commercial system offers many benefits, including economic and sustainability savings by directly freeing up hatchery space, in addition to providing an ethical solution to the culling of chicks.

In Germany, one alternative is the rearing of male layer chicks for meat production, also known as brother hens. Due to their slower growth rate, rearing brother hens requires a greater input of feed and a longer rearing phase to produce a smaller bird with less desirable body composition, making it more challenging to rear them commercially at scale in the UK. There is a lack of published research on the welfare of brother hens, but animal welfare concerns have been linked to this practice. In particular, managing aggression and high mortality within all-male flocks can be problematic, often accentuated by housing inappropriate to the birds’ behavioural needs.

Aside from in-ovo sexing technology and rearing of brother hens, I was pleased to hear about an initiative to assess the viability of dual-purpose poultry breeds in the UK—that is, breeds that can be used for laying and meat. Clearly, they are not as specialist as the different breeds currently used for the laying of eggs and for meat, but since they are dual purpose, they do not result in the mass culling of males in the laying industry. The initiative was awarded funding earlier this year as part of DEFRA’s farming innovation programme.

Using birds that can serve both as egg layers and meat producers could offer an alternative to chick culling, but it is different meat—they grow and turn out differently than UK consumers are perhaps used to. It is also thought that dual breeds bring other animal welfare benefits, as hens of dual-purpose breeds have lower incidences of keel bone fractures, and some breeds show less injurious pecking behaviour than found in commercial laying hen breeds. The males of dual breeds have better walking ability, lower levels of pododermatitis and better feather cover than fast-growing meat chicken breeds.

In addition to the animal health and welfare benefits, the project is also looking at the sustainability benefits of dual breeds. Dual breeds have lower protein requirements, and a German trial found that locally grown beans were a suitable alternative to very high- protein soya. If this approach to chicken breeding can be made viable, become popular and be accepted by UK consumers—those three things all have to work—it may deliver sustainability benefits. Bringing value to male layer chicks is of key importance, and I look forward to hearing the outcome of this research and whether dual-purpose breeds might offer a more ethical and sustainable approach than our current one.

This Government were elected on a mandate to introduce the most ambitious plans in a generation to improve animal welfare, and that is exactly what we are going to do. Our farm animal welfare policy is backed by a robust evidence base, and is supported and shaped by input from our many excellent stakeholder and expert advice groups. I look forward to speaking to hon. Members about this in more detail soon. Although, as I said earlier, this is principally an ethical rather than animal welfare issue, that does not mean that we should not be trying, very robustly, to address it. I look forward to seeing progress in this area over the next period.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

That was incredibly educational.

Question put and agreed to.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Nusrat Ghani and Angela Eagle

Report stage
Monday 12th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

We have no more speakers, so we will go straight to the Minister. Forgive me, I thought we had another person bobbing, but they no longer seem to be in the Chamber. Minister Eagle, you get the lucky extra few minutes for the winding-up.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise after what has been a very full debate, with people having to fit in quite complex points in short amounts of time. I congratulate everybody on the points they made. I will try, as much as possible, to deal with some of them in the time I have left.

I thank all those on the Labour Benches who made contributions: my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Riverside (Kim Johnson), my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan), my hon. Friends the Members for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy), for Sheffield Hallam (Olivia Blake), for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh (Chris Murray), for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), for Bassetlaw (Jo White), for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome), for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) and for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt).

Liberal Democrat Members concentrated on safe and legal routes, and the ability to work. I was worried that the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) had had such a difficult time in Committee. I thought we were having quite a reasonable time, but he was extremely downbeat about it. I must try more on another occasion.

I welcome the maiden speech from the hon. Member for Runcorn and Helsby (Sarah Pochin), which we all listened to in traditional silence. I congratulate her on it, welcome her to the House and wonder if Reform is practising the principle of one in, one out—or perhaps one out, one in. It is a pleasure to welcome her to the House.

The shadow Home Secretary produced a flurry of amendments and new clauses demanding that we do a whole range of things that not only did he not do when he had the chance as a Home Office Minister, but his party did not do when they had the chance over 14 years. I have to keep saying this, but we inherited a system in the most incredibly difficult mess, with huge backlogs. He says we have made it worse, but by beginning to process claims, that by definition creates a backlog of those who have been refused. By trying to get the system working again, we get a backlog of appeals, because people who are refused asylum generally appeal, and the backlog—as he knows from his time in the Home Office—therefore reappears in the appeals system. That is why we have the new clauses to attempt to get a timeline for dealing with those cases.

I will concentrate on some of the things that I know there will be votes on tonight. First, I will deal with safe and legal routes and new clause 3. Our approach is to resettle refugees identified by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees who would benefit most from resettlement to the UK. Alongside that, we have bespoke routes to sanctuary for those from Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong. It is important that safe and legal routes are sustainable, well managed and in line with the UK’s capacity to welcome, accommodate and integrate refugees. Part of the difficulty we have at the moment is the legacy we received from the Conservatives of a huge quadrupling of net migration and the issues with having to assimilate all those people in the huge, unplanned way in which they delivered that.

New clause 37 was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy). We recognise her campaigning on this issue over the past five years. We also recognise that there has been an unfair burden for some families with rights to citizenship under the system as it is. I can confirm that the work referenced on page 76 of the White Paper—it is right at the end—will look at tackling the financial barriers that she highlighted in her speech. I urge her to work with us on how we move forward and to not press her new clause.

The Opposition tabled new clause 14. Let me be clear that this Government are fully committed to the protection of human rights at home and abroad. As the Prime Minister has made clear, the United Kingdom is unequivocally committed to the European convention on human rights, and it is worth noting that many of the legal obligations provided for in the European convention are also found in other international agreements to which the UK is a party.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

This Bill restores order to an asylum system that was left in chaos by the Conservatives. It puts an end to the failed gimmicks and unworkable mess that they bequeathed us. It repeals in full the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, and it repeals most of the unworkable Illegal Migration Act 2023, which trapped asylum seekers in limbo as asylum backlogs soared and the taxpayer picked up a spiralling bill.

This Government are clearing up the mess that the Conservative party left us, and the Bill before the House will help us to succeed. It will assist in securing our borders by dealing with the soaring backlogs. It gives counter-terror style powers to law enforcement agencies, equipping them to go after the people-smuggling gangs that are making millions of pounds out of exploiting people’s misery. The Bill introduces new powers to seize electronic devices and disrupt the activities of people smugglers; new offences against gangs selling or handling small boat parts for use in the channel; new powers on serious crime prevention orders to target individuals involved in organised immigration crime; a new law to protect lives at sea by making it an offence to endanger another life during small boat crossings; a new statutory footing for the Border Security Commander; and new and improved data sharing between Government agencies, such as HMRC and DVLA, and law enforcement to detect organised immigration crime.

The Bill introduces a statutory timeline for appeals decisions and a major modernisation of the powers of the Immigration Services Commissioner. It ensures that those who commit certain sexual offences will be denied protection under the refugee convention, and contains a long-overdue extension of the right-to-work checks for casual and temporary workers in the gig economy, so why on earth is the Conservative party going to vote against it tonight?

People smuggling is a complex and multifaceted problem, and there are no quick or easy solutions to prevent it. Anyone who claims that there are easy answers is a snake oil salesman, but it is possible to identify, disrupt and dismantle the criminal gangs and strengthen the security of our borders through international diplomacy and operational co-operation. This Bill will help us do just that, and I commend it to the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the shadow Home Secretary, who has a minute or two.