Ben Bradshaw (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Local Environment, Marine and Animal Welfare), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Exeter, Labour)

The hon. Gentleman may overestimate my powers of persuasion with the Whips and parliamentary managers if he thinks that I could persuade them to find time to rush the codes through using the procedure that he recommends. That takes us back to a point that was made a little earlier. It may be helpful to the Committee if I say a few words about how we plan to prepare and introduce codes of conduct; that may put into context the debates that we are to have in a moment.

For each of the codes that we intend to produce, we shall first convene a working group of experts to scope the work and ensure collaboration in producing a first draft. As is our usual practice, we shall in all cases try to convene a working group representing a wide range of interests. That happened with the draft cat code, which I have already made available to the Committee. Once the Department is happy with the draft, we shall put it out to consultation, and in most cases we would expect that to be a full public consultation.

All Departments conducting consultations are required to follow the Government’s code of practice on consultation. Criterion 4 of the code requires Departments to give

“feedback regarding the responses received and how the consultation process influenced the policy.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as hon. Members will know, makes all responses to consultations publicly available on request, unless the respondent has asked that a response be kept confidential. Information provided by the public in response to consultations must be dealt with in accordance with the access to information regimes. Those are primarily the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Environmental Information Regulations 2004. Where respondents request that information given in response to consultation should be kept confidential, that is possible only if it is consistent with the freedom of information obligations. On the other hand, there may be rare occasions where it is appropriate for responses not to be made public in part or in total.

Amendment No. 81 would require my Department to undertake a full public consultation before a first draft of a code of practice was produced. That would be an unnecessarily burdensome requirement, likely to slow down the production of codes—of which we have to produce quite a lot, as hon. Members have urged us to do. We do not think that such a slowing down in the process would be in the interests of animal owners or keepers. As I have explained, the access to information regime and the codes of practice on consultations already prescribe, in detail, the rights of consultees and members of the public in respect of evidence submitted to public consultations. We believe that it would be inappropriate to try to reproduce the complex provisions and safeguards of that regime with a summary requirement of the type suggested here.

The use of the word “authority” in amendment No. 63 could include the National Assembly for Wales. I am not sure whether that is the intent of the hon. Gentleman, but I doubt it given his earlier views on giving the Assembly powers under the Bill.

On amendments Nos. 64 and 65, clause 13 specifies the procedure that will be followed to make or revise a code of practice to apply in England. That is obviously connected to clause 12, on codes on practice, and clause 15, on the revocation of codes, while clause 14 specifies the procedure to be followed in Wales. When the Secretary of State proposes to issue or revise a code of practice, he or she will issue a draft and, as I   mentioned earlier, there will then be a consultation. The draft would be laid before Parliament under the negative resolution procedure. Unless Parliament resolves not to approve the draft, the Secretary of State will then bring the code into force by order.

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