My Lords, there are two amendments in this group with my name on them. The first is Amendment 8, which is also supported by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, and which goes to the question of the composition of the committee. I have some sympathy with what my noble friend Lord Forsyth just said, but I would like to develop a slightly different point on the basis of this. One can say that there is almost universal agreement across the Committee that this topic should be addressed in the Bill. The question would be what it should say, if there were questions of difference. However, I do not think there is support on the Committee for the idea that the Government should simply have a clear run and be able to make it all up when it suited them.
The proposal here is that at least 50% of the members of the committee should have recent commercial experience of animal husbandry, livestock farming, the management of abattoirs and the management of game and fishing stocks. It may be thought that this is a sort of ignoble attempt to stack the committee in one direction rather than another, but it is not at all. I want to make a rather different point.
We will have an opportunity in the penultimate grouping, whenever we get to it, to discuss the science and indeed the metaphysics of sentience. However, I want to make this point now, anticipating that. One can
approach sentience as a neurological phenomenon: that is, the central nervous system of the animal, the brain and the other features work together to create something which can be tracked by way of the movements of electrical signals, changing chemical compositions and things like that. All that can be tracked to some extent by science. However, it is also the case that sentience as we talk about it is a lived experience; it is the experience of pain and the undergoing of suffering. We as humans, ourselves undergoing pain and knowing that suffering, can sympathise with it when we see it in animals, vertebrates and mammals—different classes of animal.
For us to understand and for a committee to benefit from a real understanding of sentience, it is terribly important that people who have a direct experience of working with the animals that are in the scope of the Bill should be fully represented on the committee. Otherwise, we risk the possibility that it simply ends up as a sort of neurological exercise, and the direct and lived experience of sentience is ignored by the committee as it is packed with all these scientists. That was the point I wanted to make about that. It is not a question of stacking the committee but of trying to understand what sentience is and how we translate it into policy.
While the Minister wants to move away from this topic, and I understand that, he must realise by now that, given the almost total absence of any definition of what the committee is doing or any constraint on its activities, the question of who is sitting on it is about 90% of the meat of the Bill. Therefore, it is not possible for him to carry on brushing this away.
My second amendment, Amendment 9, concerns the term limit. Again, there seems to be almost universal acceptance that the Bill should impose some term limits on the membership of the committee, and there seems to be a sort of consensus that three years is a good idea for a term. If there is a matter of difference, it is simply on the question of whether it should be non-renewable, which is what my amendment says, or whether it should be perhaps renewable for one single further term, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said. I am sure that some consensus on that point can be achieved by the Committee, even if the Government themselves do not want to do so. That was simply the second point; it is a sensible amendment, and I hope that the Government respond to the widespread views on this topic in the Committee.