A new parliamentary session opens on Tuesday when the Government will announce its legislative agenda for the year. Twelve months ago the Queen's Speech was packed with legislation which affected the countryside, including a series of animal welfare measures which had been signposted in the Government's Animal Welfare Plan.
Some of that legislation has been passed, some of it has been amended and some of it has disappeared without a trace. The Alliance has been at the centre of many debates during what was been another extraordinary year in politics and our work has had a direct effect both on the legislation passed in the last year, and the Government's future agenda.
The headline animal welfare proposal in the last session was the Animal Sentience Bill a spectacularly pointless piece of legislation which nearly no one understood, but which many decided was a 'good thing' simply because it seemed to be about being nice to animals. However, those parliamentarians who looked under the bonnet of the Bill found it severely lacking and throughout its progress in the Lords and then the Commons, Ministers had to mount a painful rear-guard defence as they were harried, mostly by their own side. Eventually, the criticism piled up to an extent that the Government accepted an amendment which ensured that the Animal Sentience Committee created by the Bill will be required to recognise local customs, cultural traditions and regional heritage when it is considering whether government policy has given due consideration to the welfare of sentient animals. The Bill subsequently became law, but at least that amendment has given some protection from future misuse.
Meanwhile, the Kept Animals Bill introduced some welcome proposals to tackle livestock worrying and puppy smuggling amongst other issues but was delayed by MPs who sought to amend the legislation to attack shooting and hunting. This laid bare the hypocrisy of politicians who claim to be interested in animal welfare, but who are willing to risk the passing of good laws to pursue petty vendettas against rural people. The Bill did not pass in the last session but has been 'carried over' into this one and we will continue to work to ensure that it is passed without amendments attacking the rural way of life.
When the Government published its Animal Welfare Plan the Alliance was very critical that measures to tackle hare poaching which we had been promoting with broad support were not included. Working with colleagues and with the support of a large number of rural MPs, we coordinated amendments to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill which give the police more powers to tackle poachers. After three years of prevarication by the Home Office and Defra, the weight of support on the Government benches forced the Government to accept the amendments and the Bill became law last week.
The lesson of the last 12 months is that animal welfare legislation needs to be specific and targeted, and that grandstanding legislation designed to create headlines rather than tackle problems is often more trouble than it is worth. We will see whether a lesson has been learned by the Government when we hear the Queen's Speech on Tuesday. Currently, the mood of Westminster and the apparent relegation of legislation like the Animals Abroad Bill, which includes everything from restrictions on importing hunting trophies to banning advertising of elephant rides, suggests a welcome change of focus towards the priorities of rural communities, rather than those of online campaigners. That would be both good politics and good for the countryside as the Alliance will continue to point out.