Animals (Penalty Notices) Bill

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 29th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) on bringing forward the Bill. His passion for animal welfare is well known and admired across the House. I also associate myself with all the comments about Sir David Amess. It is absolutely right that he would have been here contributing today. We are so sorry not to have him here with us.

This is very clearly a Government Bill—it was referenced in the Government’s action plan for animal welfare—so I will treat it as such. Some of my comments will be directed as much at the Minister and the Department as at the hon. Member for Romford.

To some extent, this is a puzzling Bill. It is really about penalty notices as much as it is about animals. To see that, one just has to read the long title of the Bill, which is to

“Make provision for and in connection with the giving of penalty notices for certain offences relating to animals and animal products.”

That says to me—I am not a lawyer, but it says it to my legal friends with whom I am consulting—that this is as much about the legal system as it is about animals. I disagree with some of the comments by Government Members. I do not think it is particularly well-drafted. When I first read the Bill my worry was that there was a danger that some of the offences in Labour’s groundbreaking Animal Welfare Act 2006—Labour Members are very, very proud of the 2006 Act—were at risk of being downgraded to the level of a parking ticket.

I listened very closely to the hon. Member for Romford’s speech and I am reassured. I see what he is trying to do. I have also spoken to the Minister and she has reassured me that that is not the aim of the exercise. I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) to her place. As I said to her colleague the other day, the shadow Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs team is flattered that the Government have felt the need to bring in reinforcements. I wish her well in her role, which is a fantastic job to be doing. I believe her reassurance, which is why we will not be opposing the Bill. I know how Fridays work. It has happened to me before. We know how to do it, but we are not going to.

To be fair, this is not just about the hon. Member’s reassurances or the Minister’s reassurances. In their briefings, both the RSPCA and Battersea Dogs and Cats Home expressed support for the use of fixed-penalty notices to tackle low-level breaches of animal welfare law. That is the crunch of the question that I asked myself about the Bill: how we are sure that it is about low-level breaches.

I am not sure the Government entirely helped themselves in the way the explanatory notes set out the context for the Bill. Anyone coming to them afresh would read through them and not be entirely sure, without the benefit of the hon. Member for Romford’s speech, that they had understood it. I would have thought the starting point would have been the action plan for animal welfare, which sets out the context. In fact, the explanatory notes immediately attack CAP cross-compliance. I just say to Conservative Members: get over it. Labour Members have gotten over it. We are looking ahead. We do not have to keep looking back and replaying the arguments of the past.

If Conservative Members are congratulating themselves on how animal friendly they are, I suggest they visit their local pig farms, if they have them in their part of the country. I went a few weeks ago, and what I saw was very sad. They are overstocked, and the tail biting and aggressive behaviour, and so on, is awful for the animals—it is also pretty awful for the people working with them. I ask hon. Members to reflect, as that is perhaps one of the unforeseen consequences of recent changes. We have to find a solution, because there is nothing animal friendly about 6,000 pigs being culled on farms, with possibly more to come.

There is an attempt to link the Bill with CAP cross-compliance, which we all know has had problems—no one is saying it was a particularly successful system, although these things are not as easy as they might look. We might reflect on that. The way the Bill is framed, those cross-compliance issues have to be related to animals. Having read the explanatory notes, that is not entirely clear.

These are the kinds of things we will be exploring in Committee, because there is a concern about the lack of clarity. The positive spin is that this Bill is an extra tool in the toolbox to aid compliance, which is absolutely fine. If the Bill were to replace the penalties for quite serious offences with the equivalent of a parking ticket, that is not fine. Leaving the choice on where that line is drawn to officials and Ministers through obscure secondary legislation is also not fine.

Although animal welfare organisations support the Bill, their concerns can be discerned in some of the briefings. Battersea says the “beyond all reasonable doubt” criterion that an enforcement authority has to satisfy before issuing a fixed penalty notice could have unforeseen consequences for offences that currently require lower levels of proof. It rightly says that the guidance will be critical to ensuring that there is some uniformity of practice. I welcome the reporting proposals, but the reporting needs to be uniform so it is clear to enforcers when fixed penalty notices are the appropriate tool to use.

Similarly, the RSPCA says

“more discussion will be needed when secondary legislation is laid on which areas will be prioritised and what offences will be covered.”

In my view that is too late. There needs to be more clarity in the Bill, and the Minister has indicated that she appreciates that and that it will be considered in Committee. Indeed, she might wish to consider whether the entire system needs some oversight and whether there is a role for an animal welfare commissioner, as Labour has suggested.

It is perhaps worth asking some basic questions about why the current system does not work, or about the extent to which it does or does not work. Where is the empirical evidence? Has the research been done? If so, can we see it? How many prosecutions have been brought under the various legislation? How many were successful, and what was the effect? How much recidivism has there been?

A cynic might wonder whether this Bill should actually be called the “complete failure of the Tory criminal justice system, (attempt to clear the backlog)” Bill. Although some might see that as unfair, it is the Opposition’s job to ask questions, and we will. If we do not get the answers, we will draw our own conclusions.

We all want the legislation we pass in this place to work, and Sir David and I had exactly this discussion in the Chamber some months ago on his attempt to address the long-standing, vexed issue of tethered horses. He made the good point that if Acts of Parliament are not properly enforced, we find ourselves having the same debate 17 or 20 years later. It is crucial that we get it right.

I am happy to give the Minister the benefit of the doubt. I am not entirely convinced but, provided proper safeguards are introduced in Committee—I am sure I have her word on that—we can go forward together.