Hunting Bill [back to previous text]

Lembit Öpik: I did not want to keep intervening on the Minister, but I hope that he bears with me during my brief contribution. I have listened to the Minister and I find that there is an up side to his reassurances, which are now on the record, regarding his expectation that the tribunal should act fairly and in the interests of applicants, and that it would call expert witnesses if that could increase the likelihood of a fair outcome. I am encouraged by his saying that—it is helpful—but there seems to be a contradiction between his remarks and retaining clause 11(3). The Minister might also have said that if the prescribed animal welfare body needed support to make its case, the Secretary of State could have the discretion to make such a decision. I hope I am not putting words in the mouth of the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West, but that appears to be a broadly similar concern to one that he raised. This is nothing to do with the question of foxhunting; it is simply a matter of implementing the clause. I think I see the hon. Gentleman nodding. If it is possible to look after the interests of the applicant under the clause, the Minister should Column Number: 549 consider seriously why it is not possible to look after the interests of the prescribed animal welfare body in the same way. He reassured the Committee that the grants would be paid only to ensure successful performance of the statutory role. He added that the grant is intended to ensure that the prescribed animal welfare body does the job for which it is responsible and that it does not spend the money on campaigning in areas that are not relevant to the specific application that is under review. Alun Michael indicated assent. Lembit Öpik: I see the Minister nodding, so that is understood. Once again, I suggest that if one considers the issue in the context of clause 18—I know we are not discussing that, but it is relevant—it is clear that there is an assumption that the prescribed animal welfare body would be likely to appeal to the tribunal when an application was granted. It is assumed that the body will take only one side in the debate. We have already covered that point. Alun Michael: Let me try again, as I clearly have not convinced the hon. Gentleman. The animal welfare organisation would be asked to consider and fulfil its four roles only from an animal welfare perspective. The applicant would appeal for a grant, so it is likely that only an animal welfare organisation would appeal against a grant. That does not mean that the animal welfare organisation would lurch towards the ''anti'' side of the case, although it must consider things from an animal welfare perspective. Lembit Öpik: The irony stems from this morning's debate. I distinctly heard the Minister say to the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) that he hoped that the hon. Gentleman would not seek to exclude the Countryside Alliance as a potential prescribed animal welfare body. Leaving aside—[Interruption.] It makes me smile too, because the Minister made the point and that seems relevant now. I will leave aside whether he had intended to use the Countryside Alliance. In pursuing the logic of the Minister's argument, it would seem likely that if the Countryside Alliance was, by some chance, appointed the prescribed animal welfare body, it could take up an applicant's case if that applicant failed to convince the tribunal or registrar of the benefits of granting a licence. Although saying such a thing might seem unusual, I can foresee a time when the prescribed animal welfare body might do the opposite of what the Minister may assume and stick up for the interests of, let us say, animal welfare by saying, ''This way of killing a fox would cause the least suffering.'' That is relevant to the amendment, because in such a circumstance the prescribed animal welfare body could be sticking up for the applicant. Assuming that the Countryside Alliance does not end up in such a position, however, it is hard to see how the applicant would receive the support that the prescribed animal welfare body would get, unless that body was sticking up for it. I think that we have covered the point, and I do not need to pursue it any more. Column Number: 550 To summarise, in the hope that the Minister at least thinks about the issues between now and consideration on Report, under clause 18 it looks as though the prescribed animal welfare body will be more likely to appeal against an application than in favour of it. Under clause 11, only the prescribed animal welfare body has the opportunity to receive payments, and a reciprocal arrangement does not exist for the applicant. I have used a slightly stretched example to make the point. However, for the sake of fairness, I ask the Minister to consider what would be lost by including a new subsection (4) that made similar provision for the applicant. Again, the point is discretionary: it would still be up to the Secretary of State to decide whether there was a legitimate case for providing the applicant with that support. It is fair to say that the tribunals could become quite adversarial, and that would probably happen as the first precedents were set. There is, therefore, a chance that there would be a break in natural justice due to the differences in resources. There is no point in my saying much more about the matter at the moment, but I simply ask the Minister to speak with his staff to see whether there is a beneficial point. There is no trick in my proposal, and it has nothing to do with the main body of the foxhunting debate. However, I think that the provisions could safely be modified without offending a single person in the Room. Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire): This short debate, like this morning's debate on the first group of amendments to the clause, has been useful and illuminating in a number of ways. I join the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire in welcoming the small concession that the Minister made in making it plain that the state would pay to call expert witnesses on behalf of the applicant at the tribunal and at the registry. That is not in the Bill, and we would have had no way of knowing it otherwise. However, under Pepper v. Hart and what the Minister said, the state would pay grants towards expert witnesses. I think he is shaking his head. How disappointing. I fear that I had understood him to mean that the state would pay the costs of expert witnesses to come before the registrar and the tribunal, in the same way that the costs of the animal welfare groups would be paid. He is about to clarify. Alun Michael: I am not going clarify; I am going to repeat what I said, because the hon. Gentleman might understand the second time. If expert advice is needed to assess properly the applicant's case, the tribunal may obtain that by calling expert witnesses, whom it has the power to pay. The Bill provides for that, so Pepper v. Hart is not needed for the interpretation. Mr. Gray: Perhaps not Pepper v. Hart, but I none the less welcome the Minister's commitment that the there will be occasions on which the tribunal decides to call expert witnesses in support of the applicant. I can imagine many circumstances in which precisely that will happen, and I suspect that most applications will need the assistance of expert witnesses. The Minister's making it plain that that is perfectly legitimate and within the powers of the tribunal and the registrar is a small but useful thing. However, his Column Number: 551 hesitation worries me slightly, because I had understood what he said to be a gesture towards the applicant. The fact that he is jumping to his feet and vigorously shaking his head indicates that he was not being as generous as we presumed. Alun Michael: I am happy to continue to explore the matter, so that there is no doubt about it. The hon. Gentleman seems to want to extrapolate beyond the words I used to suggest that any applicant can have witnesses paid for and summoned before the tribunal, almost on a whim. If he did not intend to extrapolate that far, I apologise, but I had the impression that he was moving in that direction. I was clarifying a point that the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire raised in an intervention. He expressed a concern, which I accept the hon. Gentleman shares, that people should not be disadvantaged because of any incapacity. I explained that the power in question would be available to the tribunal, should it be concerned that an expert witness was needed for a fair hearing. However, I do not want to second-guess the circumstances in which a tribunal might use the power in the Bill. Mr. Gray: Apparently, the Minister is being less generous than I thought. Even in his last sentence, he confused the issue a little further. He specified applicants who might not have the personal resources to put together a worthwhile case. That is exactly the example given by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire—a poor person who wants to make a case. My earlier understanding of what the Minister said was that it would be possible for the tribunal to pay for expert witnesses to assist such a person in presenting a case. He now seems to be backing off from that slightly, and to be suggesting that the issue may be more to do with expert witnesses and the discretion of the tribunal. None the less, we welcome the provision as far as it goes. Rob Marris: Will the hon. Gentleman give way? Mr. Gray: The point is not terribly important. Perhaps it would be more useful to progress to the main topic. More interesting than what we have just been discussing is the insight that we have gained in the two debates into how the Minister envisages the tribunal and the registrar working, in the relevant context. His brave attempt, in his speech just now, to assuage our concerns on the matter has not worked at all, I fear—it certainly has not worked for me. Clauses 18 and 19 make it plain that there is a presumption that prescribed animal welfare groups will speak against the applicant. There may be occasions on which they would have the opportunity to speak in favour of the applicant, but those are likely to be the exception rather than the rule. Of course, the animal welfare groups have a hurdle to jump before they can carry out that function, as they must be recognised by the Secretary of State. We must have an answer to the question whether the Secretary of State would recognise an animal welfare group that was likely to speak on behalf of the applicant. The Column Number: 552 presumption, going by how the Bill is drafted, is no. For example, he would be unlikely to register the Countryside Alliance. For the sake of clarity, I must say my point from this morning was that I do not believe that the Countryside Alliance should be registered as an animal welfare group. It is not one. It is a campaigning group. If it were to be registered as an animal welfare group, I would be extremely unhappy. I am also extremely unhappy about the notion that the League Against Cruel Sports, the International Fund for Animal Welfare or the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which, equally, are campaigning groups, should be registered. Our point is that neither one side nor the other should be registered. That returns me to the central point. There will be confrontation. The process will amount to one side against the other—the applicant against the animal welfare group. The Government—the taxpayer—will pay the costs of the animal welfare group, subsidising the efforts of the RSPCA or the League Against Cruel Sports to prevent an applicant from succeeding with his application. The Minister says, ''Don't worry about that. The groups will be narrowly restricted to their statutory duties. It will be plain that they can be subsidised by the state only in fulfilment of their statutory duties under the Bill.'' That is all well and good, and I am glad to hear it. As one Labour Member is always reminding us, transparency is important in this matter. I welcome the Minister's acceptance of the suggestion that he should perhaps report back to the House once a year on how the money is being spent. Nevertheless, does he accept that a question of substitution or additionality arises? If, by chance, in pursuit of its intention to support animal welfare groups, the state paid large sums to, for example, the RSPCA, would not the RSPCA be relieved of the necessity to raise funds for its other functions? I have some questions, which I hope the Minister can answer on Report. We need to know, and he has signally refused to tell us throughout today's debate, which bodies he believes the animal welfare groups might be. He will not even tell us the general categories. Will they be groups of academics, campaigners or zoologists? We do not know. We have pressed him extraordinarily hard on the issue. I even went to the length of writing to the Prime Minister on the subject yesterday lunchtime, giving him 24 hours' notice of the fact that we intend to press the issue. We can only assume that the No. 10 office forwarded my letter to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I imagine that it did. If it did not, that says much about the machinery of government. I assume that the Minister was warned 24 hours ago that we would press him on the issue. None the less, he has refused point blank to give us the names of the organisations. Had the Minister stood up this morning to tell us not to worry and that none of the campaign groups—LACS, IFAW, RSPCA or Countryside Alliance—would get a single penny of Government money, he would have shot my fox. I would have thought, ''Fair Column Number: 553 enough, we have won the point,'' but I would have looked silly. 3 pm However, the Minister has refused to do so. Based on his refusal and the way that the Bill is drafted, particularly clauses 18 and 19, we can conclude only that the Minister foresees a situation in which organisations such as LACS would speak against an application at the registrar or tribunal stage and would be subsidised in doing so by the taxpayer. The Chancellor of the Exchequer may be required to pay for LACS to speak against a particular hunting application. In my view, that is a disgrace. In that context, the Minister might like to answer some other questions. Who are these people? How many of them are there? The Bill says ''one or more''. We want to know whether there is just one or a long list of 20 or 30 organisations that will receive taxpayers' money. To take a ludicrous example, it may be that the only organisation that will receive money is LACS. That would be even more disgraceful. We want to know how often such organisations will be subsidised. Let us imagine that there are 10,000 applications. I would not be at all surprised if there were that many. Let us imagine that the RSPCA decided that it wished to take an interest in each of them. It is possible to imagine the RSPCA saying that it needs a department of 30 or 40 people and a large infrastructure to deal with the task that it has been given under the Bill and, therefore, seeking substantial amounts of taxpayers' money. Again, the Minister has given no guide at all on that front. The Minister must address a particular point before we move to later stages of the Bill. It will be necessary by the time of next year's DEFRA accounts for him to have determined the amount of money that will be required under clause 11(3). If there are many applications, he might have to spend many millions of pounds of taxpayers' money—it could be an enormous amount of money. Let us imagine 10,000 or 20,000 applications and a professional animal welfare group involved in each of them. My presumption of many millions of pounds may be wrong—the Minister must tell us what the budget will be. By this time next year, the DEFRA accounts will have been published and he will have had to lay down how much he expects to pay out to animal welfare groups. If he wishes to allay our concerns, it might be sensible for him to come forward with a figure before the end of the Committee stage. He may tell us that he has put aside a total budget of £10,000. For the sake of argument, let us say £10,000 or £20,000—who knows? He must tell us the amount. Otherwise, there will be a clear presumption that he may spend several million pounds, which will be paid out to precisely the organisations that only five or six years ago donated of £1 million to the Labour party.

©Parliamentary copyright 2003	Prepared 28 January 2003