Animal Welfare

My hon. Friend leads me on to my next point. I recognise another point that was made clearly in the RSPCA briefing: in the programmes put forward in Scotland and Wales there are variations in emphasis. I stress that I believe that they are variations in emphasis and, in some cases, variations in decision. That is what I would seek to explain. One should not be surprised—certainly not in this Chamber—that the outcome of devolution is that each part of the United Kingdom determines its own priorities and takes account of the evidence of need, farming practices and environmental circumstances that is specific to them. Our countries are different and our rural development programmes will be different. Exactly how we use the new programmes to support animal health and welfare objectives is, of course, one of the areas where there may be a divergence, not because we have a different view of the importance of the objective, but because we may have different ways of reaching it. As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud in the House last week, we recognise the importance of good animal health and welfare standards in the farming industry, but we are confident that farmersin England achieve animal welfare standards thatmeet and sometimes exceed the minimum legal requirements. We therefore want to target the resources that we have not towards existing good practice, but on new ways of making agriculture more competitive and sustainable, through a focus on skills and innovation. In line with that approach, we proposed that we could use funding—