I thank the Minister for his answer and thank everyone who contributed to what has been a very rich, full and very informed debate. I am going to deal first with the structural questions just raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman of Ullock and Lady Jones of Whitchurch.
We again have this problem that we have to wait for the regulations and trust the Government. I appreciate that the Minister was doing his best to persuade us,
and I felt that he really wanted the opportunity to have a PowerPoint presentation here to show us a slide of his flowchart. But this is all about taking it on trust. Almost certainly, in the timeframe the Minister referred to, we are talking of not the same Government implementing this—I am not casting any aspersions on who the next Government might be—and the noble Lord not being in a position to guarantee what will happen in the future. We are left with this uncertainty and it not being clear. We know that tomorrow will test your Lordships’ House on just how much it is prepared to stand up against regulations. We shall see what happens then.
The Minister responded to me on the standards of what I call factory farming. He said that there is already legislation on this, but I say that that legislation is grossly inadequate and that we have huge disease problems because of that. Tightening up animal welfare regulations and regulations for housing animals in this country would greatly reduce the need to deal with problems of disease.
It is interesting that the Minister also said, perhaps a couple of times, that including animals is about making the UK the best place to conduct research. I come back to the point I made on an earlier group about whether this Bill is for animal welfare, food security for farmers, or for our biotechnology industry. It appears that we are hearing that it is for the biotechnology industry.
I am not going to run through all the contributions, because the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Hayman, have already provided us with a good summary, but I will draw together the responses from the Minister and a number of others, including the noble Lords, Lord Trees and Lord Cameron of Dillington. There have been suggestions about tackling disease, but we are talking about ecological niches here. Let us say you produce pigs that are entirely resistant to a particular disease; you are producing resistance to one species or one threat. You are very unlikely to produce widespread resistance, so you are opening up an ecological niche for another disease to come in, if you keep animals in conditions that allow that to happen.
We can take a practical example from what is happening in human society at this moment. Over many centuries, human societies have had conditions that have allowed the spread of a wide range of respiratory diseases.