Farmed Animals: Cages

Patricia Gibson Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

I extend my thanks to the hon. Member for Stockton South (Matt Vickers) for the tone and content of how he opened the debate.

The decision as to whether we permit farm animals to be kept in cages is not a party political issue, and nor should it be. I am sure that the almost 110,000 signatories to the petition come from a whole cross-section of the population, with a whole range of different political affiliations and none, as is the case today in this Chamber. That should surprise none of us, since animal welfare clearly matters a great deal to the vast majority of the population and certainly to the vast majority of my constituents in North Ayrshire and Arran. Some 78% of people across the UK oppose factory-farming practices, such as breeding chickens to grow unnaturally fast and keeping large numbers of animals inside crowded facilities as a means of producing affordable food.

We should all instinctively recoil from putting a sentient being into a cage. To put animals in cages deprives them of expressing their natural behaviours and can only cause them suffering. Yet across the UK, as we have heard, millions of farmed animals are kept in cages, so it really is time to end the cage age once and for all.

If we look to our European neighbours, we see that banning the caging of farm animals is set to come into force, potentially by 2027, and they are also seeking to ban the import of food from caged systems, which is a critical point, as we have heard this afternoon. As the Brexit debate raged on, I recall that Minister after Minister came to the main Chamber and indeed to TV studios to proclaim confidently that leaving the EU would mean that the UK could forge ahead with improved animal welfare. Yet now, unless we get cracking, the UK is set to lag behind the EU, with the EU banning the import of food from caged systems, which will have further implications for our farming exports. Therefore, instead of falling behind, across the UK we should be working to secure a ban on farrowing crates for sows and individual calf pens.

In their programme for Government for 2021-22, the Scottish Government committed to starting consultation this year on proposals to

“phase out cages for gamebirds and laying hens, and farrowing crates for pigs.”

In its 2021 manifesto for the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish National party committed

“to shifting to entirely free range, woodland or barn chicken and egg production”,

as well as promising to

“modernise and update the Animal Welfare Act from 2006”

and to implementing new livestock legislation. I urge the UK Government to mirror those actions. We know that the action we want to see cannot happen overnight; we have already heard that. However, we need to get on with the transition that we all want to happen.

Scotland’s agriculture sector has some of the highest standards in the world and it is really important that those standards are not sacrificed for trade deals with countries with lower standards. This matters not only for animal welfare, important though it is, but for the quality of our food supply. For example, a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrates that hen welfare is compromised in cages. That is why all the UK’s main supermarkets have either stopped selling eggs from caged hens or have committed to doing so by 2025. In addition, companies such as Burger King and Tim Hortons have announced that they, with all their worldwide locations, will stop sourcing eggs and egg products from caged hens by 2025 in 92% of their markets, and by 2030 for the remaining 8%.

Businesses that survive and thrive do so because they give their customers what they want. What consumers want is more ethical and more humane treatment of animals, which means no caging and as little suffering as possible. If businesses can respond to consumer demand, then Government can do so too—indeed, they should do so.

However, vitally, even if we set the very highest standards for our own agriculture sector, we cannot allow, as many Members have already said, those standards to be undercut by imports from countries that have lower standards, including caging animals, which would cause a race to the bottom. For example, we know that barren battery cages, which were banned in the UK in 2012, are legal in Australia, as are sow stalls, which were banned in the UK in 1999. There is clearly no point banning a practice in the UK because it is cruel and inhumane yet allowing that cruelty to be outsourced, so that the product of this poor regard for animal welfare is still allowed to land on our supermarket shelves, whether it is eggs, meat or any other food produce.

The EU has taken a lead on banning cage systems; the UK Government must follow that lead. The SNP Scottish Government will work and seek to work collaboratively with the UK Government to ensure that animal welfare legislation within the remit of the UK system is of the highest possible standards. We in the SNP will continue to press the UK Government hard not to undercut domestic farmers in trade deals with distant lands that treat animals in a way that we know the people of the UK strongly disapprove of.

As the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) and others have pointed out, this is a very important matter, and it requires the UK Government to ask some hard, searching questions about trade deals. That is a critical point that the Minister will be keen to address. I know that she is listening, and I really hope she heeds these calls, for the sake of animal welfare, the quality of our food and our agricultural sector as a whole.