Clause 24 - Standard duration of registration
Hunting Bill
10:45 am
Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire, Conservative)
The purpose of amendment No. 271 is to allow applicants to continue to be registered until either the registrar is satisfied that the terms of registration have been breached or the point at which the applicant specifies that they no longer require registration, which is a perfectly sensible provision. If an applicant applies under the legislation and persuades the registrar that what they propose to do meets the utility and least-suffering tests, the registrar will register them. It is perfectly sensible, and a good thing in administrative terms, to allow an applicant to continue an activity until either they no longer wish to do it or the prescribed animal welfare bodies, which will be monitoring events, make representations to the registrar that the activity should be stopped. That would have the benefits of allowing people to make reasonable plans for an activity that they are going to carry out and reducing the administrative burden on the registrar.
If the registrar has to reconsider each application on a three-monthly basis, which one amendment in the group proposes, the registrar would be buried under applications. There are likely to be tens of thousands of applications on the day on which the Bill becomes law. If that figure were multiplied by four, as the amendment would do, the registrar would be buried under a gigantic mountain of administration. All the registrar would do is reconsider matters that had been considered to be perfectly satisfactory only three months previously.
There is no presumption that the circumstances in which an applicant hunts would change within three months. If there were such a change, it would be open to animal welfare organisations to make representations to the registrar that the applicant had breached the terms of the Bill by not performing in the way in which the registrar expected.
In other words, it is entirely unnecessary to require the applicant to come back every three months or every six months. The amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber) proposes allowing the registrar to decide how long the application should last, which is also unnecessary. Even if one starts from the presumption that hunting should be restricted or banned, there are perfectly
good provisions in the Bill that would allow animal welfare organisations to stop hunts at short notice by going back to the registrar. Merely putting in place a bureaucratic solution such as that proposed by Government Members would make it extremely difficult for the registrar to carry out their proper functions. The registrar would be buried under paper and applications, most of which would be identical to ones submitted three or six months previously.
The same point applies to all kinds of applications; driving licences spring to mind. When one applies for a driving licence, one keeps it until such time as a court discovers that one has breached its terms, in which case it is withdrawn for a period or for life. That parallel is sensible and I can see no advantage, even from the point of view of those who speak for anti-hunting organisations, in seeking to restrict the length of the registration to three months or six months. Our amendment, which proposes that a registration should remain in place until such time as the animal welfare organisations are able to demonstrate that there has been a material breach of the registration, is much more logical.