Animal Welfare (Primate Licences) (England) Regulations 2023

Lord Hope of Craighead Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I want to take this opportunity to put a couple of questions to the Minister, as she was kind enough to invite us to do. I declare my interest that I am an associate of the British Veterinary Association. It did not issue a briefing, but I have looked at its website and it supports the original thrust of the consultation, which was for a ban. As recently as December last year, when it posted its position on its website, it was in favour of a ban. Why have the Government and the department moved away from a ban to licensing, as in the regulations today?

Is the Minister in a position to say exactly how many primates are kept as pets? The noble Lord, Lord Trees, referred to a figure of 5,000, but I do not know whether that is an authoritative figure or a guesstimate.

The thrust of the regulations looks very much at licensing becoming the responsibility of local authorities. I entirely endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Trees, said about the difficulty of identifying which professional would be best placed to make sure that the conditions in which the primate was to be kept were appropriate. The Minister will be as aware as I am of the severe constraints under which local authorities are operating at this time, so I wondered what the thinking was behind putting in place a licensing scheme rather than a ban—and it would be helpful to know the total number of primates that we are talking about.

Lastly, when I chaired the EFRA Committee in the other place, we took a lot of evidence on the import of illegal dogs, dog smuggling and boiler-room breeding of dogs. I wondered why we have before us a very worthy statutory instrument on animal welfare and keeping primates as pets, but we do not seem to have tackled those other issues, which are a source of great concern and anxiety to the British public, of illegal dog smuggling and boiler-room breeding, often in inappropriate sheds, in people’s homes.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I want to follow the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Trees, about the possibility of exportation to Scotland when the licensing scheme is set up, as it will be, in England. It is quite a serious issue, as we have seen with XL bully dogs. I wonder whether the Minister’s department has been in touch with the authorities in Scotland to draw their attention to what is going on so that they are fully aware and can make their own assessment of the risk.

Some primates are kept as pets in Scotland, and I happen to have met two of them on separate occasions when they were being taken for walks. It is not as if it is an entirely English practice; there are certainly some instances north of the border, although I do not know how many there are. It is important that the two jurisdictions work together on this system without the disparity that is apparently coming because the regulations apply only to England.

[Lord de Clifford (CB)]

I declare my interest as working in the veterinary field, and obviously I am keen on animal welfare.

I too welcome the statutory instrument. It is a step forward for the improvement of primate welfare. If enforced, the new licence standards will discourage possible new owners from keeping these animals. A total ban on keeping primates as pets would be a far preferable outcome, but that is not what we are being offered today.

In my view, there are limitations on this, and I support the regret amendment. The time limit of two years is excessive. For an animal to be kept under those unacceptable conditions for that length of time is not particularly good, especially if an inspection has been done and someone has been given two years to implement that, as under Part 3, Regulation 15(2)(a) and (c).