Clause 7 - Fighting etc
Animal Welfare Bill
10:00 am
Norman Baker (Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Lewes, Liberal Democrat)
We have had an interesting exchange. It was one of those occasions when the longer the Minister was talking, the less I was convinced by his arguments. I began with the concern that the generality of subsection (1)(b), which we rely on to cover all the various offences that were in the draft Bill, may not cover recording. I believe that it does not, but I expected the Minister to stand up and say, “Hon. Members are wrong. It does cover recording for the following reasons.” He said nothing of the sort.
The Minister actually said that the subsection does not cover recording and that we cannot deal with that because parliamentary draftsmen would find it too difficult to draft something that covered such an offence, so the Government do not want to pursue the matter. He said that although they do not agree with animal cruelty or with people distributing such disgusting images—he accepted the word I used—somehow the parliamentary draftsmen, who are paid very well, cannot come up with a form of words to deal with the issue, so he is letting it go.
That does not seem a satisfactory way forward and it is resiling from the intention of the draft Bill, which perfectly properly identified the issue as important. Rather than find a form of words with which we are happy, the matter has been dropped altogether. The Minister is saying that people can go out, record such events and distribute them with the blessing of the Government because there is no offence—