My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity given by my noble friend Lord Caithness in moving his Amendment 35A to probe my noble friend the Minister and the Government a little bit more on the cross-departmental responsibilities of the animal sentience committee. I also want to explore what the relationship will be within Defra and the relationship between existing legislation and soon-to-be legislation in the form of the Agriculture Act and the Environment Bill, the latter of which my noble friend Lord Caithness referred to. We spent some time in the
first day of Committee on the amendments looking at pests—particularly deer, badgers, bats, grey squirrels and insects—and sentience. It begs the question: are insects to be treated as sentient beings within the remit of this Bill?
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I mention this because, recently, when my brother innocently picked up a weed from a flagstone at the farm where he occasionally stays so that he can ride out his horses, he was told by a neighbour not to do that because the weed was a living creature with feelings and obviously must not be destroyed. In our approach here, we are perhaps unleashing different feelings and priorities to those shown by Governments in the past. In the context of Amendment 35A, can my noble friend say what the relationship of the provisions will be? In particular, in making recommendations under Clause 2(3), what will be the position of the animal sentience committee’s remit in respect of the pre-existing responsibilities under the Agriculture Act and the responsibilities that we will be giving to the Government under the Environment Bill, once that is finally enshrined in law?
We also had a little debate about the animal sentience committee’s responsibilities in respect of its cross-departmental nature. I confess that I am still vague as to what the responsibility across departments will be. It would be helpful to probe my noble friend the Minister on this. I can clearly see that the Department of Health will be responsible for zoonotic diseases, which may have crossover and on which the Bill may have an impact. Personally, I do not like bats—I am fearful of them. They carry rabies and are believed to lie at the heart of the Covid pandemic; that has not been disproved at this stage. We are potentially on a collision course between the preservation of bats and the need sometimes to control their numbers. Obviously, there is the work of BEIS and other departments as well. This amendment is useful in that regard.
With those two points, I leave on the table the question for my noble friend the Minister as to what the exact crossover is with the other departments, to which he briefly referred last week, and to what extent this Bill relates to the provisions of the Agriculture Act and the Environment Bill. With those few words, I support my noble friend’s Amendment 35A.