With permission, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will provide the House with an update on the Government’s progress on animal welfare. Before I start, would you indulge me in allowing me to pay tribute to Peter Jinman, who was chairman of the Farm Animal Welfare Committee and also heavily involved with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, who I understand passed away last night? He was a great man and a friend of mine, and did an enormous amount of work in the area of animal welfare.
We are a nation of animal lovers, and animal welfare has been a priority of the Government since 2010. Since then, on farms, we have introduced new regulations for minimum standards for meat chickens, banned the use of conventional battery cages for laying hens, and made CCTV mandatory in slaughterhouses in England. For pets, we have introduced microchipping, which became mandatory for dogs in 2015; we have modernised our licensing system for activities such as dog breeding and pet sales; we have protected service animals via Finn’s law; and we have banned commercial third-party sales of puppies and kittens. In 2019, our Wild Animals in Circuses Act became law, and we have also led work to implement humane trapping standards by banning glue traps. We have done more than any other party on animal welfare, delivering on a manifesto that was drafted with the public’s priorities in mind.
Further to the steps I have outlined, in 2021, we published an ambitious and comprehensive action plan for animal welfare that set out an array of future reforms for this Parliament and beyond. That action plan’s wide-ranging measures relate to farmed animals, wild animals, pets and sporting animals. They include legislative and non-legislative reforms, and extend beyond domestic actions to cover international engagement and advocacy. And we have delivered—since the publication of that action plan, we have delivered on four key manifesto commitments. First, we passed the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, which recognises in law that all vertebrate animals and invertebrates such as crabs, lobsters and octopuses are sentient beings. That Act will form the bedrock of the animal welfare policy of the future. We passed the Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Act 2021, which introduced tougher sentences for animal cruelty, increasing maximum sentences from six months up to five years. Last month, we made cat microchipping compulsory, which will help reunite lost pets with their owners. Just this week, we announced that, having brought the Ivory Act 2018 into force in 2022, we will be extending it to cover five endangered species: hippopotamus, narwhal, killer whale, sperm whale and walrus.
In addition to legislating, we have launched the pioneering animal health and welfare pathway. It charts the route forward for improved farm animal welfare for years to come. This Government and industry partnership are already transforming welfare on the ground. The pathway does that through annual health and welfare reviews with a vet of choice, supported by financial grants.
I can tell that Opposition Members are feeling weary listening to the expansive list of delivery, but I can assure them that I am not done yet, because today we are taking two further steps in delivering our action
plan. First, we are announcing the launch of the new Animal Sentience Committee, which will advise Government on how policy decisions should take account of animal welfare. The committee’s membership provides expertise from veterinary and social science and covers farm, companion and wild animals. We expect the committee to begin its work next month.
Secondly, we are announcing a consultation on new financial penalties of up to £5,000 for those who commit offences against animals. That will mean there is a new enforcement tool to use against the small minority of people who fail to protect the health and welfare of animals. This could apply, for example, if an animal is kept in poor living conditions due to a lack of appropriate bedding or shelter.
On top of those measures, we continue to support the private Member’s Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith), which will implement our manifesto commitment to ban the import of hunting trophies. Also making strong progress are private Members’ Bills that ban the import and export of detached shark fins and that ban the advertising and offering for sale here of low-welfare animal activities abroad. I thank the hon. Member for Neath (Christina Rees) and my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Angela Richardson) respectively.
The Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill started nearly two years ago. It was designed to implement several of our ambitions, including banning the live exports of animals, seeking to prevent pet theft and new measures to tackle livestock worrying. Unfortunately, its multi-issue nature means there has been considerable scope-creep. The Bill risks being extended far beyond the original commitments in the manifesto and the action plan. In particular, Labour is clearly determined to play political games by widening the Bill’s scope.
The Bills and regulations that we have already passed demonstrate the enormous progress that can be made with single-issue legislation, so we will be taking forward measures from the kept animals Bill individually during the remainder of this Parliament. We remain fully committed to delivering our manifesto commitments, and this approach is the surest and quickest way of doing so, rather than letting that Bill be mired in political game-playing. Having left the EU, we are able to and will ban live exports for fattening and slaughter. There have been no live exports from Great Britain since 2020, but our legislation will ensure that that becomes permanent and we remain committed to delivering it.
We are committed to clamping down on puppy smuggling. We will ban the import of young, heavily pregnant or mutilated dogs, and we will be able to do that more quickly with a single-issue Bill than with the secondary legislation required under the kept animals Bill. We are committed to banning the keeping of primates as pets, and we will do that by consulting before the summer recess on primate-keeping standards. They will be applied by secondary legislation to be brought forward this year. We also look forward to progressing delivery of the new offence of pet abduction and new measures to tackle livestock worrying.
I am conscious that there are many other campaigns on aspects of animal welfare. I want to assure the House that, in making this change to how we will implement
the measures outlined, we are open to future consideration, but we will focus on delivering these key elements. Delivering these measures, as well as everything we have already delivered as part of and beyond the animal welfare elements of our manifesto, shows a Government who care about animals and do not just talk about the issue or play games with it. We are committed to maintaining our strong track record on animal welfare and to delivering continued improvements in this Parliament and beyond. I commend this statement to the House.
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