Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-12-06
Topic: Agriculture
Daniel Moylan (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 27, to which I have put my name. I have the great privilege of following the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, in doing so. This amendment goes to the heart of what I see, perhaps eccentrically, as the problem with the Bill. The Bill seems to be about animals and their welfare, and it seems to be based on science, but really it is a Bill about humans and our moral standing. It is not about our moral obligations—all animal welfare legislation for the last 200 years either articulates or creates moral and legal obligations on us; that is what law does—but rather it is about our moral standing. It is the ambition of the people who are promoting the concept of animal sentience that it should be a common moral measure, putting humans and animals on the same moral plane, differenced only by the degree of sentience that they evince I find this a really false anthropology. So it is absolutely right that the Bill, which actually makes no reference to humans, should say something about them, if only to try to achieve a better balance in the moral architecture that the Bill seeks to create. Amendment 27 does that. It says that there are some things about human beings that should not be trampled on by this Bill, by the principle behind it, or by the animal sentience committee it creates. Those are quite basic things: they are to do with religion and religious practice, culture and your local region or locality—the place where you belong. All Amendment 27 does is ask that those things should be carved out and specially protected—not in an innovative way, because in fact they are already protected in the European Union treaty, in the language that we adopted before. It is simply about incorporating that language back, not in a copy-and-paste way but because we genuinely believe that those things about human life are important and should be protected. That is why I support Amendment 27 While I am on my feet, I am going to make a comment on Amendment 48, in the same group. It is a slightly more procedural comment—it is really a question to my noble friend. We have been told since Committee, through the issuance of the terms of reference of the new committee—which are not statutory as I understand it, but of course I am always happy to be corrected—that it is to be set inside and corralled by, so to speak, a new Defra centre of excellence on animal welfare. Other committees that already exist will also be brought within that nest, but the other birds in this nest are not statutory committees—they are creatures or creations of Defra, whereas this new committee is a statutory committee. I simply do not understand—this may be because I am relatively new—how it is that, through some non-statutory terms of reference, a committee that we are today being asked to give statutory independence to, can be reliably told that it will be part of this centre. What if it decided not to be? It is going to have an independent board; what if the board decided that the centre trammelled it or interfered with its work? My question to my noble friend is this: if this committee is going to be on the basis he says, corralled inside the new centre for excellence, should that not be in the Bill?