Question to the Leader of the House:

To ask the Leader of the House, whether the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill will (a) return to Parliament before the end of the 2022-23 Session or (b) be carried over into Session 2023-24.

We have some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world and we continue to strengthen these even further. Since 2010 we have:

• Introduced new regulations for minimum standards for meat chickens;
• Banned the use of conventional battery cages for laying hens;
• Made CCTV mandatory in slaughterhouses in England;
• Made microchipping mandatory for dogs in 2015;
• Modernised our licensing system for a range of activities such as dog breeding and pet sales;
• Protected service animals via ‘Finn’s Law’;
• Banned the commercial third-party sales of puppies and kittens (‘Lucy’s Law’);
• Passed the Wild Animals in Circuses Act;
• Led work to implement humane trapping standards;
• Passed the Animal Sentience Act;
• Passed the Ivory Act;
• Increased maximum sentences for animal cruelty from six months to five years’ imprisonment;
• Delivering one of the toughest bans in the world on the import of hunting trophies;
• Supporting a Bill to ban the import and export of detached shark fins and shark fin products;
• Supporting a Bill to prohibit the advertising and offering for sale, here, of unacceptably low welfare activities involving wild animals;

We recognise the strong support for getting provisions in the Kept Animals Bill onto the statute book and we are fully committed to delivering our manifesto commitments on animal welfare. All future business will be announced in the usual way.