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Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2019

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing these regulations today. As he explained, they form a continuum with the more comprehensive Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018, which we debated and agreed last year.

At the time, we made the case for including the ban on the third-party sale of puppies and kittens in those regulations; it was never clear to us why the Government found it necessary to postpone that decision. Like many other pieces of animal welfare legislation, promised but not yet delivered, the Government seem determined to proceed at a snail’s pace despite the obvious cross-party support for many of these provisions. The Minister well knows our views on this; I am sure he will be pleased to hear that I shall not labour the point again today.

Nevertheless, we welcome these belated, catch-up regulations, which put one further nail in the coffin of exploitative and often illegal puppy farmers and unscrupulous third-party traders, who show no compassion or concern for the puppies they are marketing. That has resulted in puppies being taken from their mothers before they are weaned, not learning proper socialising skills and suffering a wide range of health and disease-related issues that can blight their health and limit their well-being.

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The only way to address these concerns is for the purchaser to see the puppy with its mother and the breeder so that they can be assured that the puppy has been bred in a quality environment. We hope that will mean the end of puppies being advertised and bought online or in pet shops, where poor breeding conditions can be disguised.

As a number of noble Lords have said, we do not think this will be the end of the matter. Selling puppies is a lucrative business for many third-party traders and overseas gangs; as the noble Lord, Lord Trees, said, it represents a wholesale criminal smuggling industry. They will try to find their way around this legislation and we will need to be alert and vigilant about how they may seek to undermine the controls we are trying to enforce. This is why, as many noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Clark, have said, this is just one step in what needs to be an ongoing and holistic approach to tackling the issue.

That is why the licensing and inspection of breeders’ premises is vital, and why local authority inspectors have to be properly trained and resourced to carry out their enforcement duties effectively. The noble Countess, Lady Mar, made an important point about the availability of trained inspectors. Will the Minister clarify whether he thinks there are enough inspectors in post across England to operate the licensing regime and to root out illegal third-party traders who might be masquerading

as legitimate breeders? How many licences have been issued to legitimate breeders under the 2018 regulations? Is he confident that there are stringent enough fines and custodial sentencing powers to dissuade illegal backstreet breeders from continuing their trade?

One of the potential loopholes suggested by the RSPCA is that rogue rescue organisations and sanctuaries might be set up as a front for illegal selling by third-party traders. As my noble friend Lord Clark says, we recognise that the vast majority of rehoming centres provide a high-quality service, but can the Minister reassure the House that inspectors will be trained to spot these fake animal rescue centres and close them down? Is he confident that we have the legal powers to distinguish between commercial rehoming centres, which might include puppies and kittens in their offer, and their more established charitable counterparts? Could he also update us on the progress being made by police and border staff to apprehend illegal dog importers from European puppy farms, where the greatest level of abuse occurs? What are the Government’s plans to tackle abuse of the PETS passport travel scheme, through which puppies and kittens are still being smuggled into the UK?

I was pleased to hear the Minister describe the very welcome public awareness campaign that the Government are commissioning to make sure that potential puppy buyers realise that the law has changed and they need to buy direct from the breeders in future. As the Minister says, these proposals had huge public support in the Government’s consultation so should be widely welcomed, but we need to spread the message wider and reach out specifically to those people beginning the process of finding a new puppy to live with them as a family pet. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said, that is particularly urgent as Christmas approaches.

We still have a long way to go, otherwise people would no longer be buying dogs online or with unproven parentage despite the evidence surely being there for them all to see that they cannot be sure of the health implications of buying puppies and kittens in that way. I hope the Minister can reassure us that this will be a genuine mass-education initiative that reaches out and persuades buyers that the only way to guarantee the future welfare of their puppy or kitten is to check the circumstances of its birth and early nurturing, otherwise they will have additional costs and health problems from that puppy that they will not have anticipated.

Having said that, we of course welcome these regulations and the Minister’s commitment to remain ever vigilant on these issues for the future. As noble Lords have all said, this issue will not be fully solved by the regulations; they are just one step in the process.