Hunting Bill [back to previous text]

Mr. Luff: I also welcome you to the Chair, Mrs. Roe. It will be a great pleasure to serve under you. The hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) and I had the same feeling—that we had wandered on to the stage set of ''Casablanca'' at the moment when the usual suspects were being rounded up. For me it is a novel experience to serve on a Standing Committee such as this. I expect that there will be a long debate on clause 8, to which a number of amendments have already been tabled. The same may also be true of clause 1. I hope that Government Members will not think that time is being wasted when that long debate takes place. It being half an hour after the commencement of proceedings on the motion, The Chairman put the Question, pursuant to Sessional Order C (9) relating to Programming (28 June 2001). Question put and agreed to. The Chairman: I remind the Committee that there is a financial resolution in connection with the Bill. Copies are available in the Room. I also remind hon. Members that adequate notice should be given of amendments. As a general rule my co-Chairman and I do not intend to call starred amendments, including any that may be reached during an afternoon sitting of the Committee. Mr. Nick Ainger (West Carmarthen and South Pembrokeshire): I beg to move, That further consideration be now adjourned. Alun Michael: In the traditions of the House, I am grateful for the opportunity almost to contradict the motion that has just been moved by introducing a wide-ranging debate on a motion for the adjournment, although I believe that it is technically known as a dilatory motion in a Committee. In the spirit of earlier exchanges, may I add to the welcomes? The hon. Member for St. Ives should be welcomed to the new experience, as he described it, of being a member of the Committee considering a hunting Bill. I hope that he will enjoy that. It may also be the first occasion on which he has represented his party on the Front Bench in a Committee. If it is, I welcome him also to his Front-Bench responsibilities. I am not sure that the hon. Member for North Wiltshire has participated in many Committees, but I believe that it is his first occasion on the Front Bench in this role. I am also pleased to welcome the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) to a role that seems not to have existed for a while—that of the speaking Whip. During my time as a Labour Whip in opposition, which is now quite a few years ago, I was given licence to speak on many occasions by the Front-Bench team and, as a result, thoroughly enjoyed the Committee sittings. I simply extend a note of sympathy to the Government Whip, because I am not sure that we shall be that over-generous. However, one never knows. Column Number: 012 The subject of hunting with dogs has been controversial for many decades. That controversy and the strength of feeling on both sides of the argument have been reflected time and again in the House. There has been a lack of meeting of minds. More often than not, people have hurled slogans across the Committee Room or the Floor of the House. The strength of feeling behind those slogans does not diminish the fact that they were slogans, nor does it enhance the quality of debate. People on both sides of the argument have a great deal to contribute if we can move beyond that and consider the principles that have been debated in the run-up to the Bill. We want people not to give up their beliefs or surrender their views about principles, but to engage with the ways in which principles can be applied in practice when we are developing good legislation. People have tended simply to defend traditional sporting activity on the one side or to seek to end the outrage of cruelty to animals on the other. It is also true that no Government have taken the initiative to introduce legislation. Time and again, individual Members have used the private Member's Bill to introduce draft legislation to test the views of Parliament. Neither side should accuse the other of setting too high a priority on the issue. The record of voting and debates in the House shows that right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the debate have turned up in droves to seek legislation or to object to it. We may say, as many people do, that this is not the most important issue that Parliament must address or the most important issue in the countryside, but it is important. It is a moral and practical issue that must be resolved. Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough): The right hon. Gentleman rightly asks all members of the Committee to be flexible in their approach to the Bill. I have studied the list of hon. Members on both sides of the argument. How does he suggest that those who have stated on numerous occasions in Committee and in the House their beliefs that hunting is cruel and should be banned outright should bend their minds to the problem? I believe that the he will find it extremely difficult to persuade hon. Members who almost give the impression that they came to the House only to ban hunting to change their minds or alter their opinions. Alun Michael: I have the same challenge with all members of the Committee. Some Opposition Members gave the impression, particularly by their behaviour during the Second Reading debate, that they had come to the House simply to defend hunting. Let us not cast stones in one direction or the other. As I said, the issue has been dealt with through private Member's Bills for many years. It is inevitable that people will have nailed their colours to the mast and expressed their opinions during debates on previous Bills. The challenge for members of the Committee—I indicated this in saying that everyone is here on a free-vote basis—is to take responsibility for judging how to vote on amendments and on the Bill as a whole, with the objective of considering how good legislation and the things that they believe in can be delivered. In view Column Number: 013 of the hon. Gentleman's comment, I suggest that both sides must consider that more widely. The hon. Member for North Wiltshire referred to his relationship with the Countryside Alliance, which he said was putting out his press releases, and he gave a list of the organisations to which he listens. I may be forgiven if I missed in that fairly short list of organisations any suggestion that he is interested in the views of animal welfare organisations. Mr. Luff: My hon. Friend did mention them. Alun Michael: I shall examine the Committee record with care, because I thought that the hon. Member for North Wiltshire did not indicate an interest in the views of animal welfare organisations. I am glad to enable him to clarify that. Mr. Gray: I certainly did; if not, I certainly intended to do so. The Minister might consider what the Game Conservancy Trust, the National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association are saying. A host of animal welfare organisations—I include the Countryside Alliance among them, as anyone who is interested in hunting is interested in animals—dislike what the Minister seeks to do in the Bill. Alun Michael: The hon. Gentleman has dug himself deeper into the hole that he started digging with his earlier remarks. He referred to organisations such as the NFU, the Countryside Alliance and the Nature Conservancy—a range of organisations have taken an interest—and I have given them an opportunity to provide evidence and have been prepared to listen. In his intervention, he did not refer to animal welfare organisations, such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which have played an important part in the debate for many years. In taking the evidence, I have listened to all those organisations, as have some people who take a different view, including the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire, who seeks to enhance his role as the speaking Whip. Mr. Luff: One reason why I was so grateful to the Minister for the three days of hearings in Portcullis house in September 2002 was because they gave the Middle Way Group its first opportunity to engage with the RSPCA, the League Against Cruel Sports, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and other groups, which have consistently refused to discuss and to explore certain issues. The organisations to which the right hon. Gentleman just referred are often intransigent, and I am therefore very grateful for the three days of hearings in September. Alun Michael: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for perhaps balancing up the way in which those on the Conservative Front Bench have approached the issue, which we should approach in the open spirit of listening to everybody because, as someone once said, we should never be afraid of the truth. If the truth comes from people with whom we disagree, we should nevertheless be willing to listen to their arguments. I am about to demonstrate how generous I am in that regard. Column Number: 014 Mr. Gummer: I wonder whether the Minister will help us by reflecting on this: if those of us who believe that the Bill is unnecessary were to find a way—it might not be the middle way—in which some sort of regulation were allowed, would he be able to bring on board those Government Members who believe that hunting should be banned? The difficulty with his argument is that if he came to us with a range of Government Members who felt that they could take an in-between position, it would be much easier for us to do the same. I do not hunt but, as someone who is adamantly opposed to the whole proposition on the grounds of freedom and liberty, I would be prepared to go quite a long way towards to him if he were to say from the beginning that those Government Members who adamantly take an opposite position in Committee had assured him that they would move towards us. If he cannot say that, much of what he says is otiose and empty. Alun Michael: The last thing that I would do to the pleasant and innocent shadow Minister is to ask him to speak on behalf of the right hon. Gentleman. I will not speak on behalf of Government Members, who are in Committee with a free vote. On the profile of members of the Committee, the narrowness of the representation on the Conservative Benches is dramatic. I look to Conservative Members to approach the Bill in the same objective and reasonable way in which I ask all members of the Committee to approach it. I shall return to the other part of the right hon. Gentleman's question in a moment. I stated earlier that the controversy has gone on for a long time. The issue is both moral and practical and it needs to be dealt with not because the Government have said so but because individual Members have brought private Member's Bills before the House to tackle the issue of hunting with hounds. As I said, people on both sides of the debate have appeared in large numbers every time there has been a vote. The House of Commons has made the issue one that needs to be resolved. The Government have reacted by promising to enable Parliament to reach a conclusion. 5.15 pm The Government have made two previous attempts to make progress on hunting. One was the options Bill, which gave Members the opportunity to vote for, in effect, three Bills, drafted under the guidance of the three organisations that have most propounded ways forward on hunting. That Bill failed in the House of Lords before the last general election. The Government also established the Burns inquiry. Although some people have criticised it for not providing a solution—it did not produce a magic wand at the end of its deliberations—it is fair to say that both sides have recognised its value. The Countryside Alliance and the Campaign for the Protection of Hunted Animals asked me, when I took on these responsibilities, neither to reopen nor cast aside the Burns report, but to use it as a starting point for considering legislation. I am happy to confirm that I have done so, and I recommend the reading of the Burns report to any Committee members not already familiar with it. I say that Column Number: 015 because selective quotation by organisations of particular parts of it are no substitute for examining the whole report and taking its recommendations in the round. I undertook not to rerun or abandon the Burns report and I believe that both sides were right in asking for that. That was the first element of consensus that I discovered. The two principles that emerge from reading the Burns report are utility and cruelty. The definition of cruelty in English law is clear: to cause unnecessary or avoidable suffering. I ask hon. Members to bear that definition in mind. There is sometimes a tendency in discussion to slip between the terms suffering and cruelty. They are not the same thing. If the language of our debate is to be clear and efficient, it is essential to understand that cruelty is defined as causing avoidable and unnecessary suffering, Utility is also important and I shall say a little about it in a few moments. It is clearly important that those who have to manage land and protect livestock or crops from the predations of vermin need a means of doing so. It is reasonable in a civilised society to seek a means that involves the minimum suffering—in other words, that avoids cruelty. That is an important underlying principle of the Bill. I stress the extent to which, in preparing the legislation, I have listened widely to what people have had to say. On 10 April, following my statement to the House on 21 March, I wrote to every organisation known to have an interest in the matter, especially those that had been involved in the Burns process. That included organisations on all sides, and those with a neutral view on hunting. Along with the detailed comments then received, some 7,000 contributions simply said, ''Leave hunting alone'', which matched roughly the same number that just said, ''Ban hunting''. However, many contributions looked under the surface of those two slogans to examine the practical issues: what cruelty issues are involved, what needs to be stopped and what principles should be applied. My second circular was again welcomed by both sides as posing the right questions. I was grateful for the trouble to which many on both sides went to respond to those questions and provide evidence. I also sought to listen to everybody and meet all who had a view to put forward. Some of those views were expressed reasonably and thoughtfully; some were expressed more through the mode of the loud hailer. That is the nature of an issue about which people feel passionately. Reference has already been made to the three days of hearings that took place in Portcullis house in September. That was important because the Countryside Alliance, the Campaign for the Protection of Hunted Animals and the Middle Way Group took part in the sessions and their design. All three signed up to the process, the topics to be debated, the list of experts to be invited and the way in which we would conduct ourselves. All three organisations took part in the sessions by asking questions of the experts. Because of the way that we Column Number: 016 conducted those sessions, several experts—sometimes with quite widely different views—took part in a single discussion with representatives of those three organisations. It is a tribute to parliamentary democracy and those organisations that they took part in such constructive sessions. It is also a credit to many hon. Members who turned up to listen. Some were associated with one group or another; others simply listened to the discussion. In a democratic society, if we cannot deal with matters that are as passionately fought over as hunting, there is a problem at the heart of that democracy. Of course, there must be a resolution at the end of the day, and someone has to have successful proposals. It is right that proposals should be based on the widest possible attempt to listen to everybody, and to listen to uncomfortable truths that may come from the other side of the debate. I pay tribute to the way in which the three organisations were willing to do so. Each of them made it clear that they were not resiling from their principles. They were not seeking a fudge or a compromise and nor was I. I wanted to examine and test the ideas that had been argued over like a set of old bones for many years, and to see whether, by exposing ourselves to that rational discussion, we could find a way to draft good legislation based on principles and recognising practicalities. I hope that I shall persuade the Committee that we have achieved that in the legislation. The discussion took place and the evidence was given in public. The questions and answers were heard in public. They are on the record and available on video, in transcript and on the website. They are available in this House and the other place. To those who have not yet had the opportunity of accessing them—whatever their views are or may end up being—I suggest that those discussions add to the knowledge and the quality of the debate, enabling people to deal with the issue. I have introduced the legislation on the basis of the discussions, the evidence and careful thought about the matters put forward. The Bill is based on clear and practical principles. It is wrong to describe the Bill as unclear, as some people have. It is based on two principles set out in clause 8. It is right to start with that clause to make that clear. The registrar and the tribunal will have to apply those principles in deciding whether an activity should be allowed to continue, where that activity comes under the registration system. The principles led to the conclusion that some activities could never satisfy the requirements, and that others generally did satisfy them. Let me consider those issues briefly. The hon. Member for North Wiltshire suggested that we should deal with the issues in general terms before we come to them specifically. Deer hunting is banned absolutely by the Bill. It may meet the utility test in that there may be a need to control numbers and to protect crops. Paragraph 5.75 of the Burns report states: ''It is generally accepted that red deer numbers in Devon and Somerset need to be controlled.'' Column Number: 017 However, Burns went on in effect to apply the cruelty test, saying in paragraph 6.39: ''Stalking, if carried out to a high standard and with the availability of a dog . . . is in principle the better method of culling deer from an animal welfare perspective. In particular, it obviates the need to chase the deer in the way which occurs in hunting.'' We shall of course return to the issue in detail, and a considerable body of evidence needs to be taken into account. I give that quotation simply as the headline of Burns's conclusions, which underpin my view that deer hunting can never satisfy the two principles that are set out in clause 8.

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