Leaving the EU: Live Farm Animal Exports

Debate between Roger Gale and Alistair Carmichael

Monday 26th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to welcome you to the Chair, Mr Hollobone. May I place on the record my gratitude to the Petitions Committee for bringing this debate to the Chamber?

Despite our differences, there has been a large measure of agreement among Members. People have spoken about the need for abattoirs close to the source of production, and I have no problem agreeing with that. The abattoir in Orkney recently failed yet again, so that subject is near to my heart and, Orkney being an agricultural community, to those of my constituents. It also illustrates, though, how insisting on having a facility for slaughter near the point of production leaves people in island communities or even remote rural communities on the mainland open to unintended consequences.

Whatever position we have taken in the debate, I think we are all motivated by a desire to see the highest possible animal welfare standards. No one wants animals to suffer unnecessarily. The hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) said a few things with which I do not necessarily agree. He said that animals are not moody like people. I can only assume that he has never kept a cat. He also said that this is not an easy debate for those of us who represent agricultural communities, suggesting that we are not in a position to put animal welfare standards at the top of the agenda. I passionately disagree. I speak as a farmer’s son who represents an agricultural community. In fact, I should declare an interest given what he said about veterinary fees: my wife is a partner in a local veterinary practice in Orkney and regularly does pre-export checks for animals that go from Orkney to the continent. That does not happen often—the economics are such that live export for purposes other than slaughter, such as breeding, is not straightforward —but it does happen, and the cost of that is met by the exporter, not the taxpayer.

The assertion that farmers care less than other people about animal welfare has to be challenged. It simply is not the case. I invite the hon. Gentleman to cast his mind back to the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001, when he will have seen on his television set pictures of farmers who had had their entire herds slaughtered. Those were not people who did not care about the fate of the animals they had just seen destroyed; many of them suffer a measure of trauma to this day, and they are by no means untypical of farmers. In fact, although there are exceptions to every rule, they are typical. Farmers care about animal welfare. They invest a lot, not just financially but emotionally, in rearing beasts that they then send off for slaughter. That is a commercial activity, but it is by no means cold-hearted.

The hon. Member for Gordon (Colin Clark) explained the shipping of livestock from Orkney and Shetland to Aberdeen and spoke about the cassette system that is used to transport animals. I was first elected shortly before that system was put in place, and I recall that the construction and design of those cassettes was led by the farmers’ unions and farmers themselves, as well as by the State Veterinary Service and the animal welfare authorities. As he said, the system is the gold standard in animal transportation. If anyone feels, as the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) suggested, that transportation cannot be done humanely and with due regard for animal welfare, I invite them to come and inspect it. It is subject to the most rigorous standards and regulation, not just in its construction but in its operation.

As has been said, animal welfare export standards are currently subject to EC regulation 1/2005, which governs loading, unloading, journey length, vehicle standards, temperature, and available food and water. Of course, those rules, like any, get broken from time to time—that is self-evident. That is why we have proper enforcement. If hon. Members are keen on seeing better enforcement, I look forward to their support when I next make a call for better resourcing and governance within the state veterinary service, because that has been allowed to wither on the vine for many years. If we are serious about animal welfare, that is somewhere we should put our money.

[Sir Roger Gale]

If I accept the idea of cruise liner facilities being offered for cattle shipped from the islands to the Scottish mainland—for the purpose of this argument, I do—will the right hon. Gentleman explain why it is then necessary to permit those animals to be transported to mainland Europe in conditions over which we have no control at all, for hundreds of miles and dozens of hours?

[Mr Carmichael]

The hon. Gentleman’s question prompts another question: what control is there to be within our domestic boundaries? It is still possible to transport animals for a very long time within the UK. He is right: there is a need for better enforcement across the whole European Union. Part of my unease about some of the arguments that he and others advance is that their attitude is almost, “Well, we’ll be fine—we’ll take the moral high ground and have the best possible standards of animal welfare.” That will not see the end of veal farming in France. That production will go on, but we somehow seem to think we can draw a line on the map and say, “We’re not going to be part of that.”

That also goes to the point I made earlier to the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), to which we have not yet had an answer. A ban that does not ban movement across the Irish border is not a ban at all; it is a ban with a most obvious loophole. No matter what terms we may wish to write in about onward transmission, once the livestock has been moved from the north of Ireland to the south of Ireland we have lost control of it. As was said earlier—it might have been by the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin)—when market conditions dictate that a significantly better price is to be had for a product in France, that is where it will go. If there is even only one route to that market, that is the one route that will be taken.