I am grateful for the opportunity to speak, Mr Turner, and I am sorry that I was a few minutes late.
I was keen for the Select Committee to look at this issue, because there has been a sharp increase in the number of problems associated with so-called status dogs. The number of people hospitalised as a result of dog attacks has doubled—it went from around 3,000 as recently as 1997 to well in excess of 6,000 in 2010. That is a real problem, and I welcome many of the measures that the Government have brought forward to date, all of which have been referred to already.
The decision to have compulsory microchipping and the strengthening of that proposal have been important, and I welcome the decision to make an attack on an
assistance dog an aggravated offence—I agree that that is an important step forward. It is also right to make it an offence for there to be a dog attack on someone, whether on private or public property.
My only concern is the possible final unintended consequences of such legislation, which we need to think about. I hope that the courts will have wide discretion to take into account individual cases. For example, a couple of border collies could be working dogs on a remote farm, running loose most of the day, but they might nip someone who is not trespassing and who might even be delivering a political leaflet. The implication of that becoming a dreadful offence might be that dogs would have to be locked up all day because someone canvassing for a political party might come round once every couple of years. We must be careful and give some discretion to the courts.
I want to focus most of my comments on dog breeders. My one concern about community protection notices is that there is too much emphasis on irresponsible behaviour by dog owners and the dog is treated as though it were an accessory to antisocial behaviour and crime in the same way as a knife or baseball bat might be.
As the hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) said and as I have stressed, the issue is not as simple as that. So much about how a dog behaves and whether it is unpredictable and likely to bite someone depends on whether it was socialised in the first few months when it was a puppy and whether it was cared for properly. If it was brutalised in those first few months, it will never be right, however responsible the current owner might be.
The evidence from dog charities, such as Battersea Dogs Home, was very clear. Many of the dogs they receive were bought as puppies from a disreputable breeder who did not raise them properly. It might be a mastiff, and a year down the line the buyer finds that they have a huge dog that they cannot control. They do not know what to do with it so they abandon it and leave it on the streets.
Many dogs that go to charities have been abandoned by people who have bought puppies from disreputable breeders and then did not know what to do with them, so abandoned them. That is a real problem; so many of those dogs end up being destroyed because their experience as puppies means that they are completely unsuitable to be rehomed with families.
As hon. Members have said, we recommended that one way of dealing with the problem was to change legislation so that the maximum number of litters that a hobby breeder could breed before having to be licensed with a local authority was reduced from five litters a year to two. The Government rejected that, and I want to press the Minister on the current position. Our understanding was that a hobby breeder could breed up to five litters a year. That is a lot of dogs; an irresponsible hobby breeder could send 50 dogs into the outside world and cause problems.
In their response, the Government thanked the Committee
“for the opportunity to clarify the legislation on dog breeding”
and said:
“The Government would like to stress that anyone in the business of selling dogs, which is anyone that a local authority justly believes to be trading must be licensed”
and that is the case whether it is five litters or even one litter. I am interested in what the phrase
“in the business of selling dogs”
means. Does it mean anyone who sells a dog? Does it mean that if someone breeds one litter of puppies and gives five away to friends but sells three, they would have to register because they had sold a dog? Does it mean someone who earns their full-time income in that way, or a part-time income, and is there an income threshold? Does it mean that someone receiving more than £500 from puppy sales must be licensed, but not if they receive less than that? The figure is vague and I would like to know what the phrase means. If there was clarity and someone breeding fewer than two litters would be a hobby breeder and exempt, but those breeding more than two litters would automatically be caught, that would remove the vagueness. That is important, and I would welcome the Minister’s comments.
After the publication of the report, I met some dog wardens who raised various issues with me. They said that the most important one was that doing what I suggested and reducing the threshold from five to two litters would be for the birds because they did not have the resources or powers to carry out the necessary surveillance to pick up such breeders. When I pressed them on how much such work they do, the answer was, “Not a great deal.” We must not delude ourselves into thinking that this simple tweak in the legislation would solve the problem.
Those wardens said that one obstacle to their looking into such problems is the difficulty, bureaucracy and complexity of obtaining the relevant authorisation from the right authorities to carry out surveillance on people they suspect of running illegal puppy farms. They said that what usually happens is that the police or a local authority decide to conduct surveillance on a household for some other reason—suspected cannabis growing, selling of drugs or dealing illegally in something else—and only incidentally do they find out that dogs are being illegally bred and sold, and that there is a business in dogs that is not properly licensed.
An interesting area that we did not look at in our last inquiry, and which I hope the Government will take on board, is whether more should be done to ensure that local authorities have the necessary powers to hand to obtain such authorisation, so that they can carry out surveillance and catch people engaged in back-street puppy farms that are causing so many problems, as other hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Bolton West, made so clear.
2.35 pm