Fireworks

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I would like to place on record my thanks to the hon. Member for Northampton South (David Mackintosh) for his thoughtful introduction to the debate.

Such debates are interesting, because we never know what we will learn. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) for informing us that fireworks were first used early in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. I am afraid that those of us who thought that the problem was caused by that continental European immigrant Guy Fawkes cannot use that one any more, which makes a nice change.

I think most of us rather like fireworks: the Roman candle, the Catherine wheel, the snowflake—or is it the snowstorm?—the sparkler, the traffic light and all the rest. As children, most of us enjoyed fireworks every year, but part of the problem is that fireworks now happen in a random way. That is fine for those enjoying the fireworks, but less fine for owners of animals living in the vicinity. I will quote what one of my constituents, who lives in one of the industrial villages a couple of miles outside Wrexham, had to say on the subject:

“I myself have 2 dogs that get extremely distressed every year and the onus is naturally upon myself to protect them. However having to stay indoors without being able to safely let them outside…keeping them inside with high volume music on in order to drown out the noise outside every night from mid-October to mid-January is ridiculous. Many anti-social people will set fireworks off at all hours in my area…and the police are powerless to do anything about it as it’s impossible to identify who is responsible, and more often than not they’re also setting them off before the curfew (regardless of the time of year), so the police won’t do anything about it anyway because these people are currently within their legal right to set off fireworks at these times.”

That, in a nutshell, is the problem, but how do we deal with it? Most of us do not want to stop firework displays, but we have to recognise that there is a real problem. In addition to some of the solutions that other Members have suggested, I propose one possibility, which is that at least some form of advance notification be given.

As a representative of a constituency that is very rural in part, I very much accept what the National Farmers Union and others, including the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), have said about the impact on livestock in certain communities, but there is an additional problem in densely populated areas: people just do not know where some of these fireworks will be going off. I suggest that we have a solution similar to that for street parties. Imagine if a group of friends decided spontaneously at 7 o’clock one evening, or perhaps a bit later, to have a party in the middle of their street with no licence and no permission. It would probably be a bit of a nuisance if one was trying to get one’s car out and could not do so without disturbing the street party. Could practical solutions such as advance notice be looked at? Through that, owners of animals and pets would at least have notification of fireworks dos.

There is an important issue of balance in all this. The problem does not merely affect those with pets. Many of us like fireworks—we really like fireworks—but I suspect that it is different for a family with young children trying to get the children to sleep to the accompanying cacophony of bangers and Catherine wheels and some of the other louder fireworks. It would be all right if it was just the quiet little sparklers, but usually it is not. How we sort this issue out in terms of balance is important. I am sure that the Minister will listen to the points that we have all made in our speeches, and I am sure that he will take on board the real concerns of animal owners across the country. We do not want to be killjoys, because many of us really like fireworks, but we recognise the practical problems and that we have to have some balance.