Animal Welfare (Livestock Exports) Bill

Tim Farron Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I am happy to follow my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson), and to agree with many of the things that he said. My party and I are very supportive of the Bill. To ban the live export of animals, in particular cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses and other equine beasts, is a really positive step. We hope there will be no opposition to the Bill this evening, but should it come to a vote, we will support its Second Reading. If there is, we will join the Minister in the Aye Lobby.

We are disappointed—and we are not alone in this—by what is not in the Bill, because it was dropped in the last Session; by the fact that the measures previously promised by this Government are now either being dropped altogether or put through the very unreliable route of private Member’s Bills; and by the length of time it has taken to get here. But we cannot avoid the fact that the ban on live exports of animals is a positive move towards easing unnecessary suffering of animals. The journeys that those animals have been forced to make before being slaughtered are often needlessly stressful and distressing and a threat to animal welfare. It is a basic act of decency that today we begin the process of legislating accordingly.

However, as has been mentioned by more than one contributor to the debate so far, we signed trade deals not very long ago with at least one country that is not abiding by this kind of legislation. Australia still permits live export of animals over long distances, including overseas, for the time being, and in a country much larger and much hotter than the one in which we are legislating to regulate. If we are talking about the impact and influence that this country has on animal welfare, why did we not use that sovereignty and that power to ensure that we were not just exporting the animal welfare problems while importing produce to this country?

That deal threatens not just animal welfare globally, but the wellbeing, welfare and incomes of our own farmers, who abide by animal welfare standards often higher than those we legislate for in this country and legislated for previously through the EU, and are a beacon of strong animal welfare performance. For them to be undermined by that trade deal was an outrageous assault on our farming community and a threat to animal welfare. I hope the Government will learn the lessons from that in any future trade deals.

The Secretary of State, who is no longer in his place, was right when he said that the UK has the best animal welfare standards in the world. I think that is accurate. Not only does it feel correct, but I think it is accurate. I am concerned, though, that they are not just accidentally so. One of the reasons they are so is the nature of the farming we have in the United Kingdom: largely small family farms, maybe large in geographical scope but small in terms of the size of the businesses. They are the basis of our farming economy across the United Kingdom.

I would say that getting rid of the common agricultural policy and moving to the environmental land management scheme is one of those rarely sighted beasts, a Brexit benefit—a good thing, if the Government were handling the transition well, but they are not. We see that at least a sixth of the money that the Government promised to English farmers is not being spent and has not been spent in the last financial year, not because the Government have chosen to cut that money, but because they have just not managed to spend it. Farmers are losing vast amounts of their basic payments and are gaining very little in environmental payments to replace them. I talked to a farmer on Friday who reckoned that he would make up about 7% or 8% of what he had lost in basic payment via the new schemes.

What does that do to farming across the country? We lose farmers. If we lose farmers, we lose the ability to do good environmental work on our landscape, we lose our ability to feed ourselves as a country and we increase the chances of moving to ranch-style farming, which tends to have less close animal husbandry and therefore, culturally and necessarily, lower standards of animal welfare. As we pass this legislation, and I hope we are going to start that ball rolling tonight and that we will all agree to it, let us ensure that we are not, through our fiscal actions, undermining animal welfare throughout the country.

It is true that how we treat animals is a sign of what we are as a culture and whether we are decent or whether we are not. It is absolutely right that we are doing what we are doing; while the challenges out there still remain, if we can minimise journeys of animals from where they are reared to slaughter, as my neighbour the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border rightly pointed out, that is of great significance and importance to tackling animal welfare problems.

My fear is that the red tape and the collapse of the workforce in our abattoirs, not just the inability to bring in vets from overseas, but the lack of other members of the slaughterhouse workforce, mean that many small abattoirs are under enormous threat. Four million pounds will not even touch the sides when it comes to protecting small abattoirs in Cumbria, which are the best in the country—they are family firms, they aid animal welfare and they are massively important to our local economy.

This Bill does many good things, but it does nothing to address a series of other compassionate moves that could have been dealt with in one swoop, as the Government originally were planning to do. The RSPCA, which of course has campaigned for this particular ban for 50 years, found that the dropping of the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill last year and the omissions in the King’s Speech broke a grand total of 14 pledges on animal welfare. I will just list a handful of them.

The first pledge was on zoo licensing. The original plan was for animal welfare standards in zoos to be enforced more thoroughly, increasing the penalties for zoos that missed those animal welfare standards. That pledge was dropped and there was no sensible reason for that. The second was livestock worrying, which is a serious problem for our communities in Westmorland. It is unbelievably distressing to farmers, their families and everybody else to see the goring of livestock by uncontrolled animals. In the Government’s original plans, the police would have been given additional powers to protect sheep and livestock from dogs, something that was not only an animal welfare issue, but an economic one for the farmers. There was no obvious reason why that would be dropped.

The third pledge was a ban on primates being held as pets, and dropping that ban was a ridiculous nonsense. There was no reason why it should not have been in this Bill or why the original Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill should not have proceeded. That has been omitted. It is bizarre that that was not all in the same legislation. The fourth was puppy smuggling. We know that, as things stand, people can bring five animals per person in a vehicle over the border legally. We know that puppy farming is a problem, and the failure to tackle it through this Bill just seems peculiar. The lack of additional intervention and action to punish the theft and unlawful importation of such animals seems a massive missed opportunity.

By the way, the Government could have adopted my presentation Bill, the Pets (Theft and Importation) Bill, just a few months ago, if they had wanted to go down that route. The Bill was a reheating of their own promise from the 2019 Conservative manifesto. I just wonder why the Minister did not just seek to adopt my Bill and put it into practice. I would obviously have been very happy if they had stolen every single word of it.

To conclude my remarks, I also regret any sense that one party loves animals more than any other. I understand that, and I am sure that the Government Front Bench is filled with animal lovers as much as every other part of this House. Nevertheless, it is regrettable that that was not enough for, maybe not the Minister, but Government business managers to have acquired the backbone to take on their own Back Benchers when they threatened to be troublesome over a more comprehensive version of this Bill, the one that was promised in the Conservative manifesto and that has now not been delivered.

The omissions from this Bill are a source of shame and anger for many of my constituents in Westmorland, but what remains in the Bill is good, so it would be foolish to oppose it, and we will support its Second Reading.