Fireworks: Public Sales

Unfortunately, due to the Prime Minister’s statement I could not be here at the beginning of the debate, so somebody may already have raised the plight of horses, but as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for the horse I will say for the record that already this year there have been 42 firework-related incidents that have affected horses, resulting in two being killed and 20 injured. I particularly wanted to speak in this debate because what is missing in that statistic is, for example, what happened in my constituency over the period of bonfire night, where two mares aborted their foals. Sadly, they will not appear in the statistics because they are unborn. I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman that we need to look at tightening the regulations to try to make the animals safe.