Clause 9 - The registrar
Hunting Bill
2:30 pm
Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire, Conservative)
The Committee will recall that before lunch we had started to discuss the tribunal in schedule 2, and the qualifications of the registrar and the sort of person that he should be. I made the point that we have finished discussing the red meat of the Bill. We did not like clause 8 and the way in which the Committee accepted it. None the less, it has been accepted and is now part of the Bill. What is important now is that the debate becomes more like an ordinary Committee stage in which we all, jointly and severally, seek a way to ensure that the tribunal and the registrar work properly.
It is especially important that the tribunal and the registrar are seen to be working properly, which is a point that the Minister often made as far back as at the hearings at Portcullis house. He went to some length to say that he is trying to find an answer to the long-running problem relating to hunting with dogs that is acceptable to all and that stands the test of time, as he keeps saying. The Bill must be well drafted and first class in every way. It therefore behoves all of us, including Opposition Members, who dislike the Bill and what clause 8 will do, to try to find ways of making the tribunal and registrar work as satisfactorily as possible under manifestly unsatisfactory conditions.
That is why we are moving away from the red meat of the debate about hunting into a drier but equally important debate about what will happen once the Bill becomes law. All the parties seem to agree that that should be the case, and I hope that the Committee's approach will become more consensual. Our aim is not only to ensure that the tribunal works properly but, crucially, to ensure that it is seen to be working
properly by both parts of the argument or, if we include the Middle Way Group, all three parts. The method for deciding whether a particular activity should be registered must be sensible and agreeable.
We are therefore concerned that the registrar is being asked to make a series of what we believe to be subjective decisions. The registrar is not a judge, a vet or someone who must make subjective decisions, but the person whose job it is to keep a register of permitted hunts and what those hunts are allowed to do. That is an extremely important distinction. After all, it is extremely likely that every application under the Bill will go to appeal and be heard by the tribunal. An applicant may appeal because the registrar has found against him, or the opponents of hunting may appeal because they do not like the fact that registration has occurred.
It is the members of a tribunal who will have to make the judgments, weigh up the arguments and bring a degree of subjectivity to determine whether a hunt should be allowed. That should not be the job of a registrar, but of the tribunal. A judge in a court of law applies the law, but also applies his own wisdom, intelligence and common sense to decide a case. The same applies to the tribunal, which must seek to apply the law to the letter, but may also have to make judgments to reach a far and reasonable conclusion.
Under the Bill, the registrar will be asked to make all sorts of extraordinarily subjective judgments that he should be making objectively. The main reason for that is that we as a Committee have failed to nail down precisely what is right, wrong and indifferent in terms of utility tests and cruelty tests. We have left that wide open to interpretation in a variety of different ways.
That is particularly true with regard to what is cruel. Which is most cruel: shooting at night with a shotgun, snaring or hunting with dogs? I have asked that question of the Committee several times and no one has yet answered it. It is a subjective judgment, and members of the Committee have very different opinions. We do not know whether snaring is more or less cruel than hunting with dogs. If any Government Member has a view on that, I challenge them to tell me now.
Under the hierarchy of suffering, as I described it, which we discussed a couple of weeks ago, I sought to persuade the Government that it was important to include in the Bill, or in guidance issued by the Secretary of State, an opinion on which practices are believed to be more or less cruel. I sought to get the Committee to agree to that, but the Committee declined to do so by rejecting my amendment.
Once the Bill is enacted, we will be saying to the registrar, ''We are sorry, but we are unable to judge which of those practices is more cruel.'' Therefore, he will have no guidance to rely on when approached, for example, by someone from the Beaufort country, in my own constituency, who argues that hunting with dogs is less cruel, while at the same time the Chippenham branch of the League Against Cruel Sports argues that hunting with dogs is not the best way because shooting with shotguns by night is less cruel, and the Royal Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals argues that trapping in boxes is less cruel. Who knows what the outcome of that would be?
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
On resuming—