Eleventh Standing Committee
on Delegated Legislation
Thursday 8 July 2004
[Mr. Alan Hurst in the Chair]
Horse Passports (England)
Regulations 2004
2.30 pm
Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con): I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the Horse Passports (England) Regulations 2004 (S.I. 2004, No. 1397).
Every time I beg to move a statutory instrument that I have prayed against, I wonder why on earth I should beg to move, but I know that that is the form. I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Hurst. You may well think that something as obscure and apparently benign as horse passports would be an easy task for the afternoon. I hope that the matter will be relatively easy to deal with, but the deep passions that are raised on both sides of an argument about horses are amazing. None the less, we will seek to make your task as congenial as possible.
Before I continue, I should declare an unpaid interest. I am the president of the Association of British Riding Schools, which takes a keen interest in the matter. The position is entirely honorary. None the less, I speak from that position and, to a degree, on behalf of the association. All that I shall say has its endorsement.
I shall try not to do what I was accused of doing in this very Room last Thursday; that is, gabbling for 20 minutes to produce what sounded like one word strung together and speaking in a manner that was entirely incomprehensible. I believe that word was used. The reference appeared in some lowly rag known as The Independent. All that I can say is that most of what is in The Independent is completely incomprehensible, but I shall seek not to repeat my error.
Today's debate is another chapter in the long and sorry saga of the Government's attempt to introduce what amounts to compulsory identity cards for every horse, mule, donkey and pony in the land. It has been going on for some years, and this is the second if not the third time that we have met in this Committee Room to discuss the matter. Even if we approve the statutory instrument this afternoon, there will still not be a legal requirement until, I believe, next February. Several years will have passed since the measure was first proposed.
The Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality (Alun Michael): May I correct the hon. Gentleman straight away? The requirement for a horse passport applied from 30 June—it is now a requirement. We agreed that enforcement would take place from February next year, partly because that is the date when regulations brought in by the National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Parliament will apply. Without relaxing in any way the sense of
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urgency for all equines to have a passport, we felt that it was sensible for enforcement to begin on the same date. I would not like the situation to be misunderstood. I intervene now rather than risking someone's reading the hon. Gentleman's remarks and gaining a misapprehension from them.
Mr. Gray: The Minister is right, and I am grateful for his intervention. In fact, the regulations became law some time ago. They were made in September 2003, so his intervention was not quite correct. The requirement applies from 30 June, but it will not be in force between the end of June and the end of February. One will not go to prison if his or her horse does not have a passport. However, after the end of February, they will be liable to a fine of up to £5,000 and, if they cannot pay it, to go to prison.
I believe that the Minister said in a private conversation in the all-party group that deals with the horse that, even then, he hoped that the enforcement regime would be relatively light. Its application will not necessarily be excessively aggressive. However, we shall come back to that in a moment. We are getting too much into the meat too early in the discussion.
The reality is that this legislation will require that every horse, mule and donkey—every old mule kept by a vicar in his back garden and brought out once a year for Palm Sunday, every multicoloured horse that pulls a gypsy caravan, every donkey on Blackpool beach—have a document identifying what it is. It will have to be signed off by a vet, who will produce the so-called silhouette, and every use of veterinary medicine of a particular category will have to be marked on the document.
That sounds like quite a good idea, as none of us wants veterinary medicines to enter the human food chain. That is a perfectly sensible view, but most of the animals that we are talking about—the estimate is about a million such animals in the UK at present—will never go anywhere near the human food chain. We kill about 6,000 or thereabouts in the UK every year, and, for most of them, there is no possibility that they will enter the human food chain. None the less, every one of them will require an ID card at a cost, including vets' fees, of about £50 a head and perhaps as much as £75, depending on how much a vet charges for a visit.
Mr. Tony Banks (West Ham) (Lab): I take the hon. Gentleman's point. Many of us believe that the very idea of eating horses is anathema, but having said that, we do not know which 6,000 horses are involved. How can we get round that? If all are identified, clearly it does not matter, but how can we ensure that the 6,000 horses involved are clearly identified?
Mr. Gray: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point and I entirely agree with him. It is important to identify which 6,000 horses will go into the food chain. The answer is: in precisely the same way as we identify any animal that goes into the food chain. If an animal is presented to an abattoir to be killed for food, it must have the correct documentation to prove that it does not have the wrong veterinary medicines inside it. The vicar's old donkey—I shall use it as an example this
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afternoon—need not have it unless the vicar chooses to take the old donkey to the abattoir to be killed for human food. The 6,000 horses which are presented to an abattoir to be killed to go into the food chain need documentation to prove that they have not had bute and other medicines that are unsuitable for human beings. That is the minimalist approach, and we will return to it in a moment because it was one of the three options offered to the Minister which he chose to turn down.
Mr. Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath) (Con): Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Gray: Of course, although I am still on my introductory comments to quite an extensive oration.
Mr. Hawkins: I do not want to detain my hon. Friend, but I want to intervene before he gets to the next stage of his argument. He referred to horses pulling gypsy caravans. My constituency, perhaps like that of my hon. Friend, has been disadvantaged by huge numbers of travellers, and my experience is that no one actually checks on travellers' activities. Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the sort of bureaucracy that the Government are talking about will be a burden on the law-abiding but that no one will every try to enforce it on travellers? Is that one of the reasons for my hon. Friend's concerns?
Mr. Gray: You would pull me up very short indeed, Mr. Hurst, if I started moving into the area of travellers and the associated difficulties. However, my hon. Friend is right in saying that some categories of horse owner will be more assiduous in applying for passports than others. We discovered that during the dog-licensing regime when the people in this Room probably went to the Post Office once a year to pay their 2s 6d for a dog licence and the bad guys did not. The same will apply to horse passports. The good guys will apply for horse passports and the bad guys will not. Anyone who has been to the Appleby horse fair, the horse fair in Gloucestershire or the Irish horse fairs, where many horses change hands and one animal might change hands 10 or 20 times during a day—that is done by the people trading spitting on their hands and shaking hands, which is something I tend to avoid doing. The notion that people who trade in that way will register each of those transactions on a horse passport is ludicrous.
Alun Michael: It seems to me to be important to distinguish between those who are law-abiding and seek to obey the law and those who are more reluctant. That is precisely where enforcement should bear more heavily. The identification of travellers' horses has been an issue in my constituency where, for example, the police and local authority have undertaken electronic tagging of those horses precisely to avoid some of the nuisance that has arisen in the past. Identification has been at the heart of trying to deal with the problem. It is not germane, as the hon. Gentleman implied, to the issue of horse passports, but shows the importance of identification.
Mr. Gray: It shows the importance of identification and the difficulty of enforcing it. Some people will pay no attention to the regulations.
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In a remote part of Wiltshire, a friend of mine has six horses in a field that is seven miles down a single-track road, and they have been there for the best part of 20 years. I would be extremely surprised if he gets round to registering those horses, although I hope that he does. They do not have shoes on and they have not been used or ridden. They have no purpose; they are just pets—animals living in the backyard. The notion that he might get a vet out at a cost of at least £50 and then pay a further £50 per animal to achieve a piece of paper that he demonstrably does not require is absurd, and I am sure that he will not. The Minister is right in saying that enforcement, as well as identification, is one of the big problems.
Before we move on to the means, I want to congratulate the Minister to a modest degree. We rehearsed many of the difficulties the last time we met, to discuss the 2003 version of the statutory instrument. The Minister has accepted quite a few of the points that we made then, and there are a several improvements in this version. I acknowledge that he has removed the drafting flaws that the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments pointed out, of which there were quite a few. He has redefined ''the horse'', taking note of my point that wild horses would not be included under the definition of a horse in the earlier version. The amended definition will include the 500 wild horses on Bodmin moor. I particularly welcome the change to regulation 9, where the previous irrevocable commitment either to slaughter or not to slaughter would have had welfare consequences. I am glad that the Minister has done that.
However, the Minister has not addressed the substantive and difficult objections to the horse passport regime itself made by all sensible horse and pony owners throughout the land. He has done nothing to reduce the cost of passports, but has increased the cost by insisting that, as of February this year, only vets or ''other qualified people'' can complete the silhouette. I have a letter from the Minister dated 20 November 2002 that says quite plainly:
''Some societies allow the owner of the animal to complete the silhouette themselves, therefore saving on the cost of a veterinary surgeon to complete it.''
The Minister has now over overruled his own letter and said that people cannot do their own silhouette but must get a vet out to do it. In my area, a vet's visit alone costs £50, before he does anything to the horses in question. The Minister has therefore increased rather than decreased the cost of the passports.
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