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Standing Committee F
Thursday 23 January 2003
(Afternoon)
[Mrs. Marion Roe in the Chair]
Clause 9
The registrar
Amendment moved [this day]: No. 304, in
2.30 pm
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment No. 305, in
clause 9, page 3, line 33, at end insert—
'(1A) ''Appropriately qualified'' means that the individual—
(a) has a good knowledge of hunting with dogs in the United Kingdom or Ireland, and
(b) is entirely impartial as to hunting, and ''impartial'' means that he has had no association with hunting or any organization which directly or indirectly supports, opposes, or has supported or opposed, hunting, and
(c) he neither has nor has had any membership or affiliations at any time with a party represented in the House of Commons.'.
Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire): The Committee will recall that before lunch we had started to discuss the tribunal in schedule 2, and the qualifications of the registrar and the sort of person that he should be. I made the point that we have finished discussing the red meat of the Bill. We did not like clause 8 and the way in which the Committee accepted it. None the less, it has been accepted and is now part of the Bill. What is important now is that the debate becomes more like an ordinary Committee stage in which we all, jointly and severally, seek a way to ensure that the tribunal and the registrar work properly.
It is especially important that the tribunal and the registrar are seen to be working properly, which is a point that the Minister often made as far back as at the hearings at Portcullis house. He went to some length to say that he is trying to find an answer to the long-running problem relating to hunting with dogs that is acceptable to all and that stands the test of time, as he keeps saying. The Bill must be well drafted and first class in every way. It therefore behoves all of us, including Opposition Members, who dislike the Bill and what clause 8 will do, to try to find ways of making the tribunal and registrar work as satisfactorily as possible under manifestly unsatisfactory conditions.
That is why we are moving away from the red meat of the debate about hunting into a drier but equally important debate about what will happen once the Bill becomes law. All the parties seem to agree that that should be the case, and I hope that the Committee's approach will become more consensual. Our aim is not only to ensure that the tribunal works properly but, crucially, to ensure that it is seen to be working
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properly by both parts of the argument or, if we include the Middle Way Group, all three parts. The method for deciding whether a particular activity should be registered must be sensible and agreeable.
We are therefore concerned that the registrar is being asked to make a series of what we believe to be subjective decisions. The registrar is not a judge, a vet or someone who must make subjective decisions, but the person whose job it is to keep a register of permitted hunts and what those hunts are allowed to do. That is an extremely important distinction. After all, it is extremely likely that every application under the Bill will go to appeal and be heard by the tribunal. An applicant may appeal because the registrar has found against him, or the opponents of hunting may appeal because they do not like the fact that registration has occurred.
It is the members of a tribunal who will have to make the judgments, weigh up the arguments and bring a degree of subjectivity to determine whether a hunt should be allowed. That should not be the job of a registrar, but of the tribunal. A judge in a court of law applies the law, but also applies his own wisdom, intelligence and common sense to decide a case. The same applies to the tribunal, which must seek to apply the law to the letter, but may also have to make judgments to reach a far and reasonable conclusion.
Under the Bill, the registrar will be asked to make all sorts of extraordinarily subjective judgments that he should be making objectively. The main reason for that is that we as a Committee have failed to nail down precisely what is right, wrong and indifferent in terms of utility tests and cruelty tests. We have left that wide open to interpretation in a variety of different ways.
That is particularly true with regard to what is cruel. Which is most cruel: shooting at night with a shotgun, snaring or hunting with dogs? I have asked that question of the Committee several times and no one has yet answered it. It is a subjective judgment, and members of the Committee have very different opinions. We do not know whether snaring is more or less cruel than hunting with dogs. If any Government Member has a view on that, I challenge them to tell me now.
Under the hierarchy of suffering, as I described it, which we discussed a couple of weeks ago, I sought to persuade the Government that it was important to include in the Bill, or in guidance issued by the Secretary of State, an opinion on which practices are believed to be more or less cruel. I sought to get the Committee to agree to that, but the Committee declined to do so by rejecting my amendment.
Once the Bill is enacted, we will be saying to the registrar, ''We are sorry, but we are unable to judge which of those practices is more cruel.'' Therefore, he will have no guidance to rely on when approached, for example, by someone from the Beaufort country, in my own constituency, who argues that hunting with dogs is less cruel, while at the same time the Chippenham branch of the League Against Cruel Sports argues that hunting with dogs is not the best way because shooting with shotguns by night is less cruel, and the Royal Society for the Prevention of
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Cruelty to Animals argues that trapping in boxes is less cruel. Who knows what the outcome of that would be?
2.36 pm
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
2.51 pm
On resuming—
Mr. Gray: Never has an oration in this place been so interrupted—first by lunch and then by a vote. I will now seek to continue so that Labour Members can understand the crystal logic of what I am saying. [Interruption.] If the Minister would stop chatting he might be able to follow this. He is not very good at logic, but if he listens carefully he might improve.
The system will work only if it is seen to be fair and above reproach. That is what we all should aim for. The registrar's job must be to register the applications; he can either register the hunt or turn it down. It should be up to the tribunal—the people who make the value judgments—to decide whether the registrar's decision is correct. For that system to work in all its beautiful simplicity—many Opposition Members doubt whether it will work in any shape or form—the tests and the job of the registrar must be as objective as possible. We are concerned that the Bill will make objectivity extremely difficult. The amendments would therefore require the registrar to be impartial. We have laid down three ways in which he should be qualified. First, he should have knowledge of hunting and the area in question. Secondly, he should be impartial and be proved to be impartial. Thirdly, he should not be party political.
All three qualifications seem eminently sensible. We have already dealt with local knowledge. The NFU briefing, which I quoted this morning, said that the registrar should have local knowledge if he is to have any chance of achieving an impartial judgment. The party political point seems reasonably self-explanatory. If someone has an allegiance to either the Conservative or the Labour party it would be difficult to trust his judgment. In any case, as a civil servant the registrar would be precluded from involvement in party political activity. Both those categories are reasonably straightforward. The more difficult category, which perhaps needs to be explained in slightly more detail, is the question of the impartiality of his judgment.
The difficulty lies in the subjective nature of some of the things that he is asked to do. We have expanded on some of those objective tests already. The utility test, for example, requires the applicant to show that the mammal to be hunted causes ''serious damage'' to the matters listed. As we discussed the other day, he would have to show that the proposed hunting would make a significant contribution to the prevention or reduction of such damage. We sought to extract from the Minister a clear definition of the words ''serious damage'' and ''significant''. We did not get them. It will be left to the registrar to decide what is ''serious damage'' and what is ''significant''. Those are, by
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definition, subjective judgments. Most people would come to a reasonable conclusion as to what is serious damage and what is a significant contribution to avoiding it. Most courts of law could come to a reasonable judgment about that. I expect it will end up in a court of law.
A very much more difficult issue is what constitutes cruelty. That seems to be the most central, subjective judgment, which we, in this Committee, have entirely failed to address. Had we done what I asked, which was for the Bill to put in clear terms—or for the Secretary of State to do so in subsequent guidance—that ''this'' is crueller than ''that'', the registrar would have had a relatively easy task to fulfil. Had people from the Beaufort country come along and said, ''We believe that using dogs is less cruel than trapping,'' and had LACS then said, ''No, we believe that using dogs is more cruel,'' the registrar could have referred to the guidance from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which would have made it plain which of those arguments was correct. He could then either have said, ''Fine, Messrs. Beaufort, you have got your licence,'' or ''Bad lack, Messrs. Beaufort, I am afraid you don't.'' It would have been a straightforward registration matter, entirely suitable for a civil servant to carry out. Civil servants are not qualified and should not be required to make large value judgments in the way in which the registrar would.
As we have demonstrated, the question of which method of dealing with foxes in particular, and other vermin in general, is least cruel is not a matter of simple proof. The Burns inquiry came to that conclusion. As is customary in Committee, I shall illustrate my point by using a quote. Lord Burns highlighted areas where he felt that further research was necessary. Referring in particular to foxhunting, he said:
''really very little science has been done, either in terms of welfare effects of hunting or indeed of other methods of control''.
How much research has been done, we do not know. As Lord Burns said, we do not know which is more cruel or which is less cruel. If Lord Burns does not know, how can we expect Mr. Smith, the registrar, a decent grade 7 civil servant, to know? The examination in Portcullis house could not come to any conclusion. It said that no conclusion had been arrived at as to whether there should be any form of ban on any form of hunting. The hearing in Portcullis house was unable to come to that conclusion but we are going to say to a grade 7 civil servant, ''Lord Burns cannot reach a conclusion, Portcullis house cannot reach a conclusion, the scientists have not reached a conclusion, there is no scientific evidence, we do not know which is more cruel or less cruel, but you, Mr. Smith, must make up your mind.''
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