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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman has remembered what I said in my previous ruling.
Mr. Hancock: I had a slight lapse there, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and apologise to you and to the House for it. I feel that those points should occasionally be made, but I shall vigilantly remember your ruling.
I should hope that the House will today give the Bill a fair wind and wish it well. I hope that there will not be a vote, and that the Bill will move uncontroversially to its next stage. In Committee, I hope that hon. Members who are concerned about the Bill will vent their concerns. I am sure that, in his reply, the Minister will give a very steady steer in telling us how the Government might respond to some of the points. I am sure also that the Government
will take on board all the very interesting and well-made arguments on the issue. Nevertheless, I believe that the Bill very precisely identifies, clarifies and answers many of the concerns.
Jane Griffiths (Reading, East):
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle) on her success today in introducing the Bill. Like many other hon. Members on both sides of the House, I find it incredible that, this year--the final year of a century in which we have seen unparalled acceleration in development of science, technology, civil rights and animal welfare, which are all vital ingredients of a civilised society--the House should have to draw its attention to a practice that is more congruent with an uncivilised society lacking development in those spheres.
Nevertheless, the House is no stranger to debating the merits of practices--or traditions, as their apologists weakly claim them to be--that belong to the dustbin of history. One has only to look at the fine Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster) in the previous Session. Like that Bill, today's Bill commands the support of the majority of our fellow citizens: the people whom we are here to represent and in whose name we legislate.
The Bills are similar, in that they recognise that our attitudes towards animal welfare reflect on the integrity of our society, but I hope that is where the similarity ends, because, in the previous Session, the Wild Mammals (Hunting with Dogs) Bill fell, at the hands of a small number of hon. Members who employed some of the more outdated procedures of the House in their hell bent pursuit of thwarting the wishes of the majority.
Now is not the time to discuss the merits of some of our parliamentary procedures, but perhaps it is the time, as we stand on the eve of a new millennium, to suggest to last year's culprits a new millennium experience: the experience of accepting the overwhelming arguments against fur farming and recognising the overwhelming support that those arguments enjoy. Perhaps I may be called democratically naive for accepting the will of the people.
Mr. Swayne:
The hon. Lady does not help her cause by drawing a parallel between the Bill and the Wild Mammals (Hunting with Dogs) Bill, for they are entirely different.
Jane Griffiths:
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his remarks.
The millennium has generated many problems in computing and information technology--problems that may touch all our lives--but I believe that it also presents us with another set of challenges, some symbolic and some more tangible. The Government are making great progress in meeting the tangible challenge of modernising
Britain, transforming it into a country equipped for the 21st century, with improvements in the economy, the health service, education and other aspects of our national life. The symbolic challenge is for Britain to enter the 21st century as a country with moral integrity, and that integrity is at least partly based on the humane treatment of animals.
The Bill would take us one step closer to achieving that integrity. At present, thousands of mink are kept in unacceptable conditions for the sake of a luxury product. Those conditions severely limit the extent to which the animals can behave naturally, and that is cruelty.
The Bill is supported by the RSPCA, the country's defenders of animal welfare, yet the British Fur Council is foolish enough to have published in the national press disingenuous photographs purporting to show the hands of an RSPCA inspector holding a healthy mink from a fur farm. People will not be conned by that. Even if the pictures told a true story, it is worth noting that the RSPCA has no powers of entry to fur farms; inspectors can visit them only with permission and view only what they are shown.
Mr. Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham):
I congratulate the hon. Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle) on promoting the Bill and I pay tribute to the animal welfare organisations, and the RSPCA in particular, that have given freely of their services to back it. I am delighted to be one of its sponsors. It has wide cross-party support, as it should.
I am not naturally one to advocate banning things, be it as an emotional kneejerk reaction to furry animals or as a pandering to populist opinion polls. I am certainly not in favour of banning foods or supplements that individuals choose to consume, or of the nanny-state attitude that is so much a hallmark of the Government, trying to tell us how to run every aspect of our lives every hour of the day--
Mr. Loughton:
--but--I am pre-empted--in the case of fur farming in the United Kingdom, we have the last vestiges of an industry that has virtually banned itself. There are 13 farms run by only 11 licensed farmers, producing 100,000 pelts a year from 130,000 mink, accounting for less than 1 per cent. of world production. As the hon. Member for Garston said, the number is down from 600 farms early in the century, and 68 in 1982, to almost nothing.
Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough):
My hon. Friend and I are fellow Conservatives and share many values. Does he agree that one of the finest attributes of Conservative thinking is that we always protect minorities
Mr. Loughton:
That is a perfectly legitimate point, but there is a minority of child killers, and we do not necessarily support them. There must be a cut-off point for common sense to come into the argument.
Mr. Leigh:
Child killers break the criminal law, the civilised common law that has been established for centuries to protect other human beings. Fur farmers do not kill or oppress human beings and, as Conservatives, we should surely protect their minority interest.
Mr. Loughton:
There must be a cut-off point. There is a wide choice of perfectly legitimate pursuits for people to follow. The majority of people engaged in the industry favour the Bill, because they want to get out of the business, and the Bill is rather a good way of affording them an opportunity to do so. My hon. Friend is advocating protecting a minority who do not want protection.
We often hear that the Labour party is the party of the many, not the few. I agree with my hon. Friend that it has been up to Conservative Members to stand up for the minorities whom the Government are unduly attacking, but this is a different matter.
I am not pandering to a populist issue, but neither am I taking a primarily moral stance, although there may be a valid moral case. I believe that the current practice is just plain unacceptable, and that making it remotely acceptable in the United Kingdom would prove wholly unviable economically, for practical and sensible reasons.
I am hard pressed to see how rearing mink or other animals in cages can possibly conform to the terms of the European convention on protection of animals, although I concur with my hon. Friend the Member for Teignbridge (Mr. Nicholls), in that is not the sanctuary that I would normally seek in matters European.
The convention says:
Mr. Forth:
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is up to a combination of the European Commission and the national Government concerned to ensure that something conforms to a European convention? How does he make the leap from non-compliance with a convention or directive to an outright ban?
Mr. Loughton:
I am not recognising a European recommendation or directive as an overriding source, but merely using it as an example of how the practice does not fit with what is considered appropriate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Teignbridge said, animal welfare standards, like pollution, do not respect national boundaries. If we can set precedents, as we did on the use of veal crates, we should do so, to encourage better animal husbandry on the continent. We can take a stance and press for better practices among our European neighbours.
The semi-aquatic mink, which is accustomed to roaming and defending areas of river bank up to 2.5 miles long, is not encouraged to exhibit its natural behaviour on
a fur farm, where it is not in its natural habitat. On farms, mink are typically kept in long rows of barren cages in open-sided sheds and fed with dollops of paste. A typical cage is 70 cm by 45 cm by 40 cm--I use the metric unit purely because I did not have time to convert into proper imperial measures. It is not surprising that there are so many reports of disturbed behaviour among farmed animals.
The Government's scientific advisers have said that fur farming does not meet all the basic needs of those animals. They say that it is impossible to recreate a mink's natural free-roaming environment in fur farms, where those wild animals have no opportunity to express natural behaviour such as swimming, diving and climbing, and that results in serious welfare problems. The Farm Animal Welfare Council was set up by the Conservative Government in 1979 to advise on welfare of farm animals--another successful animal welfare measure for which, most unfairly, the Conservative Government gained little credit. The council reported on fur farming on several occasions and stated:
"Freedom to display most normal patterns of behaviour"
is a requirement in animal welfare.
"The Council believes that the systems employed in the farming of mink do not satisfy some of the most basic criteria which it has identified for protecting the welfare of farm animals."
As the hon. Member for Garston said, the German state of Hessen prohibited the use of cages in 1996 and required climbing facilities, access to water and other measures. Now, there are no fur farms in Hessen, because it is not economically viable to breed the animals for fur in acceptable conditions--the farmer cannot make a living from it. If it were economically viable, farms in this country would have adjusted years ago--they certainly cannot deny having seen the writing on wall. For many years, it has been clear that animal welfare measures should be taken, but the industry has done nothing. Now--especially given the current slump in auction prices for fur--most fur farmers favour the Bill because it would allow them to get out of the business altogether.
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