New Clause 15 - Welfare of gamebird laying stock
Animal Welfare Bill
3:30 pm
James Paice (Shadow Minister (Agriculture & Rural Affairs), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; South East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
I should emphasise, as some hon. Members know, that I am not only a long-standing member of the BASC but a member of the Game Conservancy Trust council. Both positions are non-pecuniary, but I wanted to make that clear in the interests of transparency.
As the hon. Member for Sherwood said, there has been a lot of discussion about these issues for the past year or two, stemming from a video taken by Animal Aid of one or two game farms in the UK. It is important to emphasise that those cages were in conflict with the game farmers’ own code of practice, which has been published. If the Government were later to adopt the Game Farmers Association’s voluntary code as the statutory code, the farmers in the video who were using those cages would be open to prosecution under clause 8.