Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-12-06
Topic: Agriculture
Jonathan Peter Marland (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments tabled in the name of my noble friend Lord Mancroft, who, sadly, has fallen to the Covid virus, and we of course wish him well. It falls to me to take on the challenge of trying to persuade the Government, who so far have been pretty unpersuadable, to take this Bill more seriously and put it into better shape. For the record, I do not consider myself, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, suggested, a right-wing Tory, even though some of my colleagues do. This has nothing to do with right or left. I think that the general feeling in the House was that this is a badly constructed Bill. I know that some of the government amendments have the support of the Liberal Democrats and Labour, which means that it is not a well-supported Bill For those who have just joined this debate, I say the following: I do not farm, and I rarely fish. I am not an industrial fisherman or commercial farmer; occasionally I shoot—but what I really enjoy is our green and pleasant land, and living in the countryside. As far as I am concerned, it has been under responsible stewardship for a very long time, or it would not still be a green and pleasant land. If I am a Tory, which I am, I believe the well-known Conservative Party tenet that people do better when the Government do least. Here we have a Bill that seeks to interfere with people and how they run their lives. It is not just this Bill on its own, in isolation; we should look at the general onslaught of change that is happening to farmers in the countryside How do we arrive at this place? It is extraordinary. I may be totally wrong, but I can count four animal welfare-related Bills, three of which come under a new umbrella of animal welfare created by Defra. Ministers say that they want experts to advise them on sentience, but they are getting loads of advice. They could just come to the noble Lord, Lord Trees, and get terrific advice from him, or the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and get fantastic advice from her, because they are well-known experts. It is why they have been appointed to this House—among many other reasons, I hastily add. It just demonstrates another way of Defra interfering with farming, the countryside and fishing. It is setting down standards and definitions of standards that many other countries do not support. Not even the European Union has gone this far in setting out standards, insisting that our farmers and fishermen adhere to a certain group of standards Yet on the other hand, the Government are signing trade deals with these countries and allowing imports of various goods from countries that will not adhere to the same welfare sentiments that we do. We will still get lobsters from Canada—we will be able to get lobsters from Scotland, by the way, as this relates to the United Kingdom. We will still be able to get octopus from Spain not killed in the same way as we think it should be. We will get langoustines from Scotland and France killed totally differently than the ones that we have—and prawns, as we know, come from Thailand and other countries like that There is no civilised way of killing animals, or anybody, for that matter—whether it is slitting their throat, catching them in nets and leaving them out of air on fishing boats, hooking them and shooting them, stunning them or boiling them. They are all terrible ways to die. We should bear in mind that that is the case. Yet Defra is going to appoint a committee that sits as judge and jury on how these animals and sentient beings should be killed—in the animals’ case, but also it will give the description of sentient beings. This will destroy the livelihoods of our fishing industry, which will not be able to compete on the same level field, and it will make farming very difficult.