REGISTERED HUNTING: ABSOLUTE BANS: DEER, HARES, FOXES AND TERRIERWORK (Hansard, 30 June 2003)

§ The Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality (Alun Michael)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 6—Use of dogs below ground (No. 2)—

`(1) Registration under Part 2 may be effected in respect of hunting that involves the use of a dog below ground.

(2) The Secretary of State may make regulations for the recognition of any existing body as the proper authority for making a code in respect of the conduct of any activity in connection with the use of dogs below ground on wild mammals.'.

New clause 11—Foxes—
`Registration under Part 2 shall not be effected in respect of the hunting of foxes.'.
New clause 14—Registration in respect of hunting of mink—
`Registration under Part 2 shall not be effected in respect of the hunting of mink.'.
Government amendments Nos. 43, 44, 1, 85 and 100.

§ Alun Michael
I believe passionately that this Bill is a good, strong and effective piece of proposed legislation already, and that it will be further strengthened by the addition of new clause 13, which consolidates a number of amendments made in Committee and meets undertakings given to members of the Standing Committee, particularly my hon. Friends.
The Bill will ensure that all cruelty associated with hunting with dogs will be banned: no doubts, no compromise, no uncertainty, no delay; a ban on the cruelty and sport of hunting in the lifetime of this 56 Parliament. A great deal of comment about the Bill has been wrong in fact and wrong in terms of what the Bill will deliver. Let us be clear—the Bill will ban cruelty. How? It will ban the sport of fox hunting. It will ban cubbing, provided that new clause 13 is added. It will ban terrier work associated with hunts. It will ban deer hunting. It will ban hare hunting. It will ban mink hunting for sport. It will ban hare coursing events.

§ Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire)
Will the Minister give way?

§ Alun Michael
In one moment. In addition, the Bill will only allow the hunting of foxes and mink in exceptional circumstances, for pest control and only when alternative methods can be shown to cause significantly more suffering.

§ Mr. Gray
I want swiftly to pick up the Minister on a point that he mentioned. He said that the new clause would ban terrier work associated with hunting. He may be incorrect. I think that he will find that the new clause would ban all terrier work. He has previously said that he intends to table amendments in another place to allow terrier work and to allow dogs controlled by gamekeepers to go underground. How will the Minister differentiate between hunts and gamekeepers?

§ Alun Michael
The hon. Gentleman knows that I undertook to table an amendment on that in another place. He was wrong to suggest that I said that new clause 13 would do all of the things that I enumerated. I explained what the Bill would do and I have suggested what the Bill would do in addition to that, provided that new clause 13 is supported.

§ Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough)
At the Portcullis House hearings, which the Minister very kindly arranged, there were three days of evidence that, presumably, informed the drafting of the Bill that was presented to the House before Christmas. Subsequently, the Bill has been changed by Back-Bench amendments in Committee. The Minister now seems to be presenting a new clause that has very little to do with the evidence that we heard in Portcullis House. Will he explain the context of new clause 13 in terms of the Portcullis hearings, where he listened to a certain amount of evidence?

§ Alun Michael
The Bill is consistent with what we heard in Portcullis House, as well as with the Burns report. There was also considerable debate in Committee. That is what a Standing Committee is for. There was engaged debate involving many of my hon. Friends, and many people outside the Committee took an interest in our proceedings. As a result, amendments have been tabled that strengthen the Bill.

§ Mr. Kevin Hughes (Doncaster, North)
My right hon. Friend said that new clause 13 would strengthen the Bill. What is different in the new clause from what is already contained in clauses 6, 7 and 9, which he intends to remove? Could it not be construed that the reason for putting everything into one new clause was to configure the programme motion in a way that creates difficulties for the rest of our proceedings?

§ Alun Michael
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving me the opportunity to explain. New clause 13 has been around in draft form for some time. It is designed to consolidate and tidy up some amendments made in Committee. He is right to point out that it consolidates a number of provisions that were already in the Bill, in order to tidy it up. The main difference is the specific issue of cubbing, which is dealt with by the new clause.

§ Mr. Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton)
My right hon. Friend could have proposed the changes as amendments. He has shown some faulty understanding of procedure this afternoon, but he knows that new clauses come before amendments on Report, which is why he has chosen to use a new clause and shoehorn it ahead of new clause 11. He has done that deliberately, in order to pre-empt a proper decision by this House.

§ Alun Michael
My right hon. Friend is wrong. He is right about the order in which we consider matters, but he is wrong about the intention. I subscribed to new clause 13 to show Government support and ensure that it was protected, and that was before any question of selection was raised. I understand the point that he makes. I would have thought that the order would be to vote on new clause 13, then new clause 11, and then a consequential amendment relating to new clause 6. However, that is not the ruling, and obviously I accept the ruling on how we must vote. He will be aware that if new clause 13 is voted down, new clause 11 will be voted on and we will proceed accordingly. It is also the case that even without new clause 13 or new clause 11 we have an extremely powerful piece of legislation. I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends to focus on the strength of the Bill and the small size of the differences between us in relation to new clauses 13 and 11 and the Bill as already amended in Committee, not to mention amendments that we will reach later to honour undertakings given in Committee.

§ Mr. Kevin Hughes
It is not a question of selection by the Speaker: it is a deliberate selection by the way in which my right hon. Friend has worded the programme motion. The Speaker has no alternative but to call new clause 13 before new clause 11, because that is what it says in the programme motion.

§ Alun Michael
Let me explain to my hon. Friend that the programme motion follows the order that would have been laid down even without it, because new clause 13, having been subscribed to by the Government—which I did to keep faith with colleagues who had asked for that element of amendment—must take precedence. All we did was to consolidate that in the programme motion.
I understand why those hon. Friends who see conspiracy are concerned, but I can say with my hand on my heart that that was not the intention—[Interruption] No, it is simply the effect of reflecting in the programme motion the way in which the voting would have gone anyway. As I have said, the opportunity exists for Members who choose to go in a particular direction to do so

§ Mr. Garnier
At the outset of our deliberations before Christmas, the Minister said that there was a "golden thread" running through this legislation. When did he last see that golden thread?

§ Alun Michael
I see it very clearly in a Bill that bans the cruelty associated with hunting in all its forms. I have just pointed out the Bill's strengths. It will make good law because it will be enforceable, and it will deal in proper form with the mischiefs that Members have debated year after year. It is, as The Guardian said, tough but fair.
Having emerged from Committee the Bill is very tough, but it is still fair, and that is surely the best way to create legislation. That is why I seek to persuade hon. Friends to join me in supporting the Bill—so that we can enable Parliament to reach a conclusion on this issue.

§ Mr. Nicholas Soames (Mid-Sussex)
I am very grateful. Does the Minister recall the extensive debates that we shared in Committee, and the strong views that were expressed to him by the National Gamekeepers Organisation, during consultation in Portcullis House, on the importance of the use of terriers in the conduct of its members' work? In the light of new clause 13, has he considered further those discussions and the very powerful evidence put to him by the NGO as to why it is essential to allow its members to use terriers in the conduct of their work?

§ Alun Michael
The hon. Gentleman will recall the assurances that I gave to him and to my hon. Friends in Committee. Those assurances still stand, and indeed, we promised that we would look at this issue because there is a manifesto undertaking not to interfere with the sport of shooting. We will examine and deal with those concerns, and amendments will be tabled in another place in order to fulfil that undertaking. I certainly recall the hours that the hon. Gentleman and I spent in Committee—the longest Committee stage that any Bill on hunting has been given.
Many of the issues that we are going to deal with today were debated in Committee at considerable length—a fact that I recall because I was present for all of those proceedings.

§ Mrs. Angela Browning (Tiverton and Honiton)
The Minister mentioned the banning of mink hunting, but alluded to the need for some control on the ground of pest control. Exactly what will those methods be? Will they involve trapping and shooting, or will he advocate other methods?

§ Alun Michael
Various methods are already used for dealing with mink, including a variety of forms of trapping, and those options are available. The only situation in which mink hunting would be allowed under the Bill—in other words, in terms of hunting with dogs—is where it could be shown that those various methods were more cruel and involved more suffering than the particular option for which an applicant came forward. I make this point strongly: the Bill will allow the hunting of foxes or mink only for pest control, and only when it can be shown that alternative methods 59 cause significantly greater suffering. That is what the registration system in part 2 is for; without it, we would condemn some foxes to a death more cruel than that involving the use of dogs.

§ Lembit Öpik (Montgomeryshire)
I am grateful to the Minister. Nevertheless, under the terms of new clause 13(2)(a) and (b), hunting with dogs will be banned completely from 1 August to 1 November. What data can he offer the House to show that the methods that will replace hunting with dogs will not increase the suffering of the hunted animal?

§ Alun Michael
The hon. Gentleman, who was a member of the Committee, will recall the discussions that we had on this and a variety of other issues. Many Members of this House hold the strong view that cubbing is one of the most unacceptable of practices. I accepted the sense of an amendment moved by one of my hon. Friends, which is consolidated in this provision to ensure that that activity cannot take place. During the period in question, there is a consequent effect on activities other than direct cubbing. However, this appears to be the best available instrument for dealing with an issue that Members of this House made it very clear they wanted to deal with, and it is the right way to approach this issue.

§ Mr. Mike Hancock (Portsmouth, South)
If the Minister wants to achieve what he said at the beginning of his speech and eradicate cruelty once and for all, does he agree that the only way to achieve that is to pass new clause 11, or does he believe that registration will be so impossible to achieve by any hunt that hunting will be banned by that means, thus ending the cruelty about which he speaks?

§ Alun Michael
If the hon. Gentleman had studied the Bill, as amended in Committee, he would know that it was strengthened considerably and that the hurdles are very high. It is open to people to show first, that the activity is necessary, and secondly, that the alternatives in the circumstances for which the application is made would be more cruel. I am not going to get involved in the decisions that will be for the registrar and the tribunal to take. However, John Bryant, of Protect Our Wild Animals, estimated that the number of foxes killed by pest control under the Bill's requirements might be in the order of 100 in comparison with about 80,000 now. The point to remember is that, whatever that number may be, the animals would otherwise be killed by a more cruel method. That is the point of the Bill and the analysis on which it depends.

§ Mr. Simon Thomas (Ceredigion)
I supported the original Bill because I wanted the twin principles of utility and cruelty brought into play. Will the Minister say more about new clause 13? He should know that in Wales one third of the fox cull is by terrier work, and that about 40 per cent. of the cull occurs during the period in which he wants to ban fox hunting with hounds. Clearly, the principle of utility is not being played in new clause 13. What additional facts and evidence does the Minister have to show that killing 60 foxes during that period in that way is additionally cruel? Would it not be better to leave those matters to the registration officer?

§ Alun Michael
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that many problems are dealt with by using dogs to flush out the foxes and then shooting them, rather than by the requirements of the Bill. Various options exist. For example, lamping is available in a variety of circumstances. What the Bill provides is a series of stringent conditions that have to be satisfied in order for any activity that can be registered to take place. That is fair, reasonable and extremely tough and challenging for those who wish to make their case. That is the structure of the Bill.

§ Mr. Gray
I fear that the Minister may have inadvertently misled the House a moment ago. He suggested that using dogs to flush foxes to waiting guns would still be allowed under the Bill. Does he agree that that is incorrect?

§ Alun Michael
If the hon. Gentleman looked at the exceptions, he would find that control over the number of dogs that can be used is important, but he needs to restudy the Bill.
The Bill will also provide effective tools for stopping illegal hare coursing—something that is already illegal, but which existing law has proved unable to tackle. That is an important point—something that is currently illegal continues to take place. One of the most important points that I want to make to the House is that we need to pass legislation that is not just an aspiration, but actually works and prevents activities that are recognised as cruel—or cause unnecessary suffering—from taking place. The Bill will prove effective in dealing with illegal hare coursing and the other activities that it is intended to control.

§ Mr. James Paice (South-East Cambridgeshire)
I represent a constituency that has suffered from the scourge of illegal coursing for many years, but can the Minister tell us where the extra police officers to act against illegal coursing under the Bill will come from, when they are not there to act against illegal coursing at present?

§ Alun Michael
When the hon. Gentleman discusses the matter with the police in his constituency he will find out that part of the problem is that the police do not have the tools to do the job. They have to prove trespass—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman should be aware that the finances available to the police in rural areas have increased as a result of the Government's actions. When I was a Home Office Minister, I commissioned the research that led to the additional moneys becoming available—and that is quite apart from the general increase in finances available to the police. Presently, if the police find a group of people involved in illegal hare coursing, what can they do? They have to collect evidence of trespass. They can challenge people, who can respond by saying that they have permission. People can be intimidated. I am sure that, if the hon. Gentleman is having that problem in his constituency, he knows how difficult it is to police that activity.
61 With this Bill, the police will have the power immediately to say, "Are you registered for that activity? If you are not or if you are undertaking hare coursing, you are done." There will be the capacity to impose a level five fine, to confiscate animals and to confiscate equipment. It will be extremely effective in dealing with the current mischief of illegal hare coursing.

Several hon. Members
rose—

§ Alun Michael
I give way to the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown)

§ Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold)
When we started out on the hearings in Portcullis House, the right hon. Gentleman assured all those present that the Bill would be drafted on the basis of cruelty and utility tests and on the basis of proper scientific knowledge. Can he therefore now give us a clear answer? What is the scientific basis for banning autumn hunting? If he cannot give us that basis, we will have to conclude that he is merely pandering to the wishes of those behind him, which is what we have suspected all along.

§ Alun Michael
The hon. Gentleman is pandering to the prejudices of those in front of him. He should look at the Burns report, the evidence in that report and the three days of hearings at Portcullis House. He will see the evidence that was available and on which judgments were made before the Bill was introduced in the House and studied in Committee over a period of weeks.

§ Rob Marris (Wolverhampton, South-West)
I noted with interest the arguments that my right hon. Friend used in terms of the enforceability of the ban on hare coursing and how the Bill would make it easier for the police. Could not the same arguments be used as to the easier enforceability of a complete ban on fox hunting as envisaged in new clause 11?

§ Alun Michael
I thank my hon. Friend for his interesting question. I think that he knows that my answer to that is no. The difference between our measure and new clause 11, as I have indicated, is comparatively small but our measure—because of the variety of circumstances that exist in relation to hunting with dogs, as was indicated by the Burns report—allows those who have a genuine case that meets the cruelty test to make that case. That does not apply in relation to hare coursing. The coursing can never satisfy the utility test because it is for the purpose of comparing the speed of two animals, not for the purpose of pest control in any sense. It fails and that is why that decision is absolute.

§ Andrew George (St. Ives)
I would have thought that the Minister would agree that the pinch point between new clause 11 and new clause 13 is the area in which the Minister has identified circumstances in which hunting would become registered. He has given an example from Protect Our Wild Animals, saying that perhaps only 100 foxes would be killed by a hunt, but having considered the issue thoroughly himself he must know that there are circumstances in which hunts will be able to jump both hurdles of utility and least suffering. If he is not able to 62 do that, surely he needs to accept the fact that it would be far easier and less legally complex to go for an outright ban.

§ Alun Michael
I am not sure that I agree with the hon. Gentleman. We have seen the implications of an outright ban, for example, in Scotland. Again, the Scottish legislation is theoretically clear, but in practice the collection of evidence and the time that has to be taken in order to bring a prosecution means that there is a big gap between legislation being passed, in that case by the Scottish Parliament, and it actually taking effect in stopping the activity. I am interested in stopping that activity, which is cruel. I am about preventing that activity, rather than just voting in such a way as to appear to have that effect.

§ Kate Hoey (Vauxhall)
Will my right hon. Friend give way?

§ Alun Michael
Let me make this point and then I will certainly give way to my hon. Friend.
The Bill is no different in one sense from previous attempts at legislation, including the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster) and the Deadline 2000 Bill. Each was a ban with exceptions to allow for essential pest control. This Bill, as the animal welfare organisations acknowledge, is tougher and more enforceable than anything that has come before Parliament, as well as being clear and fair.

§ Kate Hoey
My right hon. Friend mentioned that he would be looking at amendments to secure the work of gamekeepers and terrier work. Can he explain and tell me whether he will include anyone other than gamekeepers? What is the difference between a gamekeeper using terriers to go underground and farmers using terriers to go underground?

§ Alun Michael
The very clear commitment that I gave in Committee was that I would look at the position of gamekeepers in relation to the sport of shooting, and that is what I shall do—

§ Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham)
That does not answer the question.

§ Alun Michael
Oh, but it does. The hon. Gentleman bounces around in his sedentary position. I have answered the question. It is specifically in relation to gamekeepers—

§ Mr. Bercow
Will the Minister give way?

§ Alun Michael
I will, Happily.

§ Mr. Bercow
I am grateful to the Minister, whose capacity for abuse is considerably greater than his capacity for reasoned argument. Will he seek to answer the specific question put to him? It was not about what he did or did not say by way of an undertaking in Committee, but what is the difference, intellectually or philosophically, between two things. That was the 63 question; let us have an answer instead of the down-market, substandard musical hall abuse in which the right hon. Gentleman specialises.

§ Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal)
Order.

§ Alun Michael
Well, was not that a really intelligent intervention? The hon. Gentleman is not interested in undertakings given to the Committee, but the House is usually interested in such undertakings being kept. He is not interested in a manifesto commitment; I am. I have made absolutely clear the answer to the question put by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey): yes, there is a difference in relation to the position of gamekeepers, to our manifesto commitment on shooting, and to the situation of activities in relation to the sport of hunting.

§ Mr. Hugo Swire (East Devon)
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for saying that he will revisit the problem concerning gamekeepers, particularly given that the Labour manifesto specifically said that the Government had no intention of placing restrictions on the sports of angling and shooting. That said, those matters were raised during the three days of hearings at Portcullis House, in the Burns report and frequently during almost 200 hours of Standing Committee deliberations. If the Minister intends to address the problem, why is he not doing it now? Why should we have to take it in good faith that he will return to it later or that the matter will be addressed in another place? That simply is not good enough. He should address these questions now.

§ Alun Michael
I have made it clear, as the hon. Gentleman would know if he looked back at the undertakings given, that the point depended on those involved with shooting providing a clear code of conduct that would bear down acceptably on unacceptable practice. We have had discussions with the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, and I understand that it will come forward with a code—

§ Mr. Swire
indicated dissent.

§ Alun Michael
The hon. Gentleman does not understand and does not want an answer. The commitment will be kept and, as promised in Committee, an amendment will come forward in another place. What we are dealing with now is the Government's new clause, which will, if it and others are accepted, ban all fox hunting from 1 August to 1 November every year to stop the practice of fox cubbing, prevent prolonged and unnecessary chasing, require dogs to be kept under close control, create new offences, and close possible loopholes to avoid the possibility of abuse. Those changes meet the final concerns expressed by leading animal welfare groups about the Bill, as amended in Committee.

§ Gregory Barker (Bexhill and Battle)
Will the Minister give way?

§ Alun Michael
I must make a little progress, but then I will.
I remind the House of the extent to which the Bill was strengthened in Committee by amendments. Jackie Ballard, director general of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, has said that with such improvements, it would be able to say that the Bill ends the cruel sport of fox hunting. Unlike the Scottish Act, the Hunting Bill will bite, and bite quickly. Although the Scottish Act sought to ban hunting with dogs outright, it will take years of accumulated case law before the legislation can effectively prevent it. I reinforce that point to my hon. Friends.

§ Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside)
I am pleased to hear my right hon. Friend bring up what Jackie Ballard has said. She also said:

§ Alun Michael
I think that my hon. Friend will find that animal welfare organisations, particularly the RSPCA, have recognised the strength of the Bill with the amendments before us today. My hon. Friend is, I think, referring to the February letter.

§ Gregory Barker
Will the Minister give way?

§ Alun Michael
All right. The hon. Gentleman has tried hard.

§ Gregory Barker
I thank the Minister for giving way, finally. It is clear from what he has said, and from his singular failure to marshal any scientific, clinical or veterinary evidence in support of any of his clauses, that the Portcullis House hearings were nothing more than a cunning dupe funded at the expense of the taxpayer. My hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) was a little unfair in saying that the Minister was simply pandering to his Back Benches; in fact, he is also pandering to the animal rights extremists who bunged the Labour party £1 million. Will he now declare that interest?

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. I remind all hon. Members that good temper and moderation are the hallmarks of parliamentary debate.

§ Alun Michael
It is entirely proper to listen to an organisation that exists to prevent cruelty to animals and I remind the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) that it said that it could live with the Bill that the Government have brought forward.
I shall briefly restate the underlying principles of the Bill, which new clause 13 will strengthen. The underlying purpose of the Bill is to ban all cruelty associated with hunting with dogs. The well-established definition of cruelty is "causing of unnecessary suffering". The Bill is based on the principle that unnecessary suffering must be prevented but that necessary pest control must be permitted for the well- 65 being of the countryside and, indeed, of all of us. No one, on either side of the House, could seriously disagree with those principles.
Where hon. Members disagree so widely is on their view—

§ Mr. John Gummer (Suffolk, Coastal)
As the right hon. Gentleman has returned to pest control and as, in the Standing Committee debates—although not later—he referred to the moral questions involved, will he explain the moral difference between a gamekeeper using terriers and a farmer using terriers?

§ Alun Michael
The right hon. Gentleman will understand that we are addressing issues associated with hunting. That is what the Bill deals with and that is what the House has sought to deal with year after year after year after year. I have tried to meet the requirements of the House by bringing forward a Bill that sets out clear principles that relate to the activity of hunting. It was because of the disagreements—

§ Mr. Garnier
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The long title of the Bill states make provision about hunting wild mammals with dogs". It is not a debating point but inaccurate reporting of what the Bill is about for the Minister to say in answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) that we are only talking about the subject that Ministers would like to talk about. Is it in order, Madam Deputy Speaker, for a Minister to misunderstand the nature of the Bill that he is supposed to be taking through the House and for him entirely to misunderstand the question and, therefore, seek to avoid it?

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
In answering that point of order, I remind the hon. and learned Gentleman that we are currently discussing new clause 13, which does relate to that subject.

§ Alun Michael
It is also true that the Bill is about hunting with dogs and that is the issue that I am trying to address, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The tests that have been set out look at, first, whether any purpose of the proposed activity with dogs is necessary for pest control and, secondly, whether the use of dogs will cause significantly less suffering than the alternative methods of pest control. The tests are sequential; both must be passed for the activity to continue. That is how the tests ensure that all unnecessary suffering associated with hunting with dogs will be prevented.

§ Mark Tami
When I intervened earlier, the Minister made a statement regarding the dating of a letter. I can confirm that the letter was dated 27 June.

§ Alun Michael
I can confirm to my hon. Friend that I understand, as recently as this weekend, that the organisation can live with the Bill as it has been brought forward, with the amendments in Committee.
Of course, there is a choice for hon. Members between two new clauses—between, in effect, what it is easy to term as a so-called complete ban and a complete ban on 66 cruelty that is effective and will work and be enforceable. That is, I suggest, all that there is in the difference between Labour Members.

§ Miss Ann Widdecombe (Maidstone and The Weald)
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. May I press him, once more, on the question that he has not answered? It is the duty of a Minister to explain Government thinking to the House when a Bill and a new clause are being proposed. My right hon. and hon. Friends say, "If a gamekeeper, why not a farmer?" I, of course, put it the other way: "If we ban it for farming, why not for gamekeeping?" There must be a difference. The Minister cannot say that it is between hunting and shooting because terriers are dogs, not guns. Will he please tell us the difference?

§ Alun Michael
The evidence was that there was a need for terrier work to be undertaken for the protection of birds, and that there was a danger that a Bill dealing with hunting might unintentionally interfere with that activity. There is a clear distinction in our manifesto commitments on hunting and shooting. That is why I made it clear, in accepting the amendment in Committee, that, provided there was a code of conduct to deal with any possible inconsistencies, I would bring forward an amendment or an amendment would be tabled in another place. That undertaking, given in Committee, was the basis on which I accepted the amendment on hunting and will be adhered to.

§ Mr. Henry Bellingham (North-West Norfolk)
I have a courteous intervention. The other day, I was contacted by a small farmer in my constituency who has a terrier and carries out his own pest control. He is not actually a qualified gamekeeper but he does exactly what such a person would do. On that reasoning, would he qualify as a gamekeeper for these purposes?

§ Alun Michael
My understanding is that he would not, because we made a specific commitment on the sport of shooting and the position of gamekeepers—the question that was asked.

§ Mr. Gummer
Could the right hon. Gentleman return to the point and explain why it is moral to use terriers when one goes shooting but not when one goes hunting? Why is it moral and acceptable to allow that use by gamekeepers, whom rich people can employ, but not by farmers who do it themselves?

§ Alun Michael
It is interesting that the right hon. Gentleman seeks to make an egalitarian argument. The point is not about differences of morality but about differences of practice and what it is necessary to do, and thus about the differences of evidence. I made clear in Committee the basis on which I accepted the amendment. Members will have to look at the amendment, when it is tabled, and the code of conduct allied to it, to deal with an issue that is outside that of hunting with dogs. That is what the Bill and the 67 amendments that I am trying to deal with are about, although I realise that Opposition Members want to take us on to other tracks.

§ Mr. Paice
Will the Minister give way?

§ Alun Michael
I will, but then I must make some progress.

§ Mr. Paice
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. He says that because the question is about shooting it is not related to the Bill, but if he plans to amend the Bill, it clearly is related to the Bill. Will he explain a little more about the detail of the amendment that he proposes to put before the House of Lords? Will he make clear who will fall under the heading "gamekeeper"? What sort of registration and qualifications will be needed? Will such people have to be full-time or part-time? Could it be a retired person? Who will actually be able to use terriers under his proposed amendment?

§ Alun Michael
I might be open to criticism if I spent time dealing with an amendment that will come before the House on a future occasion. If the hon. Gentleman wants to investigate the evidence and the distinctions, I refer him to chapter 5 of the Burns report. As I have indicated, everything that we have done refers back to the Burns report and to the evidence that I have been given during the period that I have been considering these issues.

§ Mr. Gray
Will the Minister give way?

§ Alun Michael
This must really be the last time. I must make progress.

§ Mr. Gray
I am sorry to tax the right hon. Gentleman on a procedural point. If he brings forward amendments in the other place and if, at some subsequent stage, the Bill is subject to the Parliament Act, is it his understanding that those amendments passed in the other place would also be subject to the Parliament Act at the same time?

§ Alun Michael
rose—

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. We are currently discussing new clause 13.

§ Alun Michael
May I make it clear that the provisions in part 2 mean that there should be evidence either that the activity does not serve a useful pest control purpose, which is broadly the case for banning hare hunting, or that the use of dogs would not result in significantly less suffering than the use of alternative methods? That is the case in deer hunting where it is clear that stalking and shooting by a trained marksman will always cause less suffering than hunting with dogs. In other cases, such as ratting, it is equally clear that the use of dogs will always be likely to cause less suffering than alternative methods, such as snaring or poisoning.

In between are the cases that are now at issue, where the evidence presented by Burns is less clear-cut, so the Bill as drafted will provide a strictly impartial and independent registrar and tribunal to apply the two tests on a case-by-case basis. The registrar and the tribunal will apply the same standards—the tests set out in clause 10—to all cases, having regard to the individual circumstances. That is a very brief outline of how the Bill works. It is based on principle and the application of evidence, and it will work. It will, for example, provide clarity and simplicity of enforcement because all that the police will need to ask a hunter is, "Are you registered?"

I shall contrast the amendments from the Conservatives and the middle way group with our proposals. The amendments tabled by the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) would remove the prohibitions on the registration of deer hunting and hare hunting. He will no doubt tell us that the proponents of those activities should have the opportunity to put their case to the registrar and tribunal, but he proposes in another groups of amendments to delete clause 10, so removing the tests of utility and least suffering from the Bill. I can detect no principled approach in that.

In fact, I shall advise the House to support the hon. Gentleman's amendments to delete clauses 6 and 7, in favour of my new clause 13, which would consolidate and replace their provisions, but the principle on which I stand is that it is right for Parliament to conclude that deer hunting and hare hunting could not pass the two tests and that therefore it would be wrong to enable proposals for those types of hunting to go to the tribunal. It would be misleading to applicants to suppose that they might be granted registration, and it would be a misuse of the registrar and the tribunal to require them to consider applications that could never be granted.

I shall similarly advise the House to support amendment No. 1, tabled by the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff), to delete clause 9, which prohibits the registration of hunting involving the use of dogs under ground. However, he would replace that clause with a feeble new clause—new clause 6—which would permit the use of dogs under ground and enable the Secretary of State to prescribe a code of practice, but which makes no provision for people to have to comply with that code.

New clause 13 would retain the prohibitions on the registration of deer hunting and hare hunting and the use of dogs underground that were agreed by the Standing Committee and consolidate them into one clear clause, but it would go beyond consolidation in relation to cub hunting. The Standing Committee regarded the practice of autumn or cub hunting as abhorrent and unnecessary, and I gave an undertaking that I would take away the Committee's concerns and introduce a suitable amendment—it is in new clause 13.

I now turn to new clause 13(4), which makes it clear that hunting foxes, mink and other species may only be registered under part 2 when the two tests of least suffering and utility are satisfied. That makes it clear that such hunting will be permitted only where it is necessary for pest control purposes and where it causes the least suffering. New clause 13 therefore both adds a 69 useful new measure to deal with the unnecessary suffering caused during autumn or cub hunting and clarifies the Bill's structure.

Clause 11, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks), seeks what is described as an absolute ban on fox hunting by precluding its registration. I appreciate that some of my hon. Friends believe that fox hunting with dogs is always so cruel that it can never be justified. I must respect that belief, but I say to my hon. Friends that it goes beyond the available evidence. Yes, a lot of fox hunting is unnecessary and, if it serves a useful pest control purpose, that purpose can be achieved by other means that cause less suffering, but that is not necessarily true of all fox hunting. Burns made it clear that there may be situations where using dogs may cause significantly less suffering than other methods.

§ Mr. Kaufman
The Minister says that some of his hon. Friends believe that fox hunting is cruel in all circumstances. I would draw his attention to the fact that among those hon. Friends is the Prime Minister, who said on 17 January 2001: I am opposed to fox hunting".—[Official Report, 17 January 2001; Vol. 361, c. 344.] Of course, that is in conformity with the Labour party election manifesto, which did not say that we would put the control of fox hunting in the hands of a registrar and a tribunal; it said that we would carry out the wish of the House to ban fox hunting.

§ Alun Michael
I point out to my right hon. Friend that, after the failure of previous Bills, I was asked to undertake a new process and to introduce a Bill to enable Parliament to resolve this issue and, in doing so, to fulfil a manifesto commitment from the last election. I also point out to him that I have voted for what can be described as a complete ban on fox hunting when such a proposal has come before the House previously, but I have concluded, having looked at all the evidence, that we need to target cruelty, rather than activity. We need to ban cruelty, rather than what activity people undertake or what clothes they wear. I have been consistent with that aim in introducing a Bill that completely bans cruelty in relation to fox hunting. I am certain that, in supporting the approach that I have taken, that is what the Prime Minister has in mind too.

§ Dr. Nick Palmer (Broxtowe)
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for being exceptionally generous in giving way in all directions. Can he clarify something? He set out very clearly that the Bill divides species into three categories—those for which hunting with dogs is always cruel, those for which it is never cruel and those for which it needs to be subject to registration. If we were to add one or two species to the first category, why would that action produce the need for consequential legislation?

§ Alun Michael
Because the Bill is structured to deal with all cruelty and to focus on cruelty. I am sure that my hon. Friend will recall that I said a moment ago that Burns made it clear—I underline these words—that there may be situations where using dogs may cause significantly less suffering than other methods. So I reached the conclusion that I could not, in good 70 conscience—this goes back to the golden thread that remains in the legislation—accept the idea of a complete ban on fox hunting, which is what is set out in new clause 11, as some people would be prevented from using the method of control that causes the least suffering. That may apply to a small number of cases, but the point is that it would be inconsistent to allow that. I ask my hon. Friends—in particular, my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer)—whether that is what they really want. Would that really be in the interests of animal welfare?
I have explained how the Bill, as it is now constructed, would ban all cruelty. The two tests ensure that the activity must be necessary and that hunting with dogs is only possible when it would cause significantly less suffering than alternative methods. There is no sleight of hand. The tests are strict. They will prevent the things that my hon. Friends and I rightly object to: the wilful, prolonged ceremonial pursuit and the inhumane slaughter of foxes for fun. That is very precise.

§ Mr. David Cameron (Witney)
Will the Minister give way?

§ Alun Michael
I gave an indication that I needed to make a little progress.
On new clause 14, tabled by the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes), the considerations that I have just discussed also apply in relation to the proposal to ban the registration of mink hunting. Banning mink hunting looks like a simple solution, but looks are deceptive. There is no certain evidence that hunting mink with dogs will always fail the two tests, and banning hunting, rather than the cruelty caused by hunting, may result in unnecessary suffering. Once again, that is not something that, in good conscience, I can recommend to the House, so I hope that I have again made clear the points of principle that apply to the new clauses.
I must also tell the House that, if it were to agree to my new clause 13, there will be nothing to prevent the Bill being agreed to on Third Reading and being sent to the other place tonight. The sooner that the Bill moves forward, the sooner the controls on hunting with dogs that it introduces can come into force. In contrast, if the House were to decide to accept new clauses 11 and 14, it would result in the Bill being unacceptable without further amendment. That is not a subterfuge. As I have indicated already, it is a simple matter of practicality.

§ Lynne Jones (Birmingham, Selly Oak)
I have signed new clauses 11 and 14, but I agree with my right hon. Friend that the most important point is to ban cruelty and to ensure that, when culling is necessary, the least cruel method is used. If he is telling me that passing new clauses 11 and 14 will hinder the banning of cruelty, I am perfectly prepared to accept his assurances that new clause 13, which I have also supported, will do what we on the Labour Benches want.

§ Alun Michael
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point.
Let me spell out the reasons for recommittal. Consequential technical amendments would have to be made to make a Bill to which new clauses 11 and 14 had 71 been added into workable legislation. For example, amendments would be needed to bring the new clauses into force one month after Royal Assent, which would be necessary for the proper working of the Bill. Amendment No. 100 in my name makes the necessary provision in relation to new clause 13.
Secondly, the Government could not agree to the establishment of the registrar and the hunting tribunal if their only task might be to consider applications for the hunting of wild boar if that ever happens. That would be an unjustifiable waste of taxpayers' money. If new clauses 11 and 14 were added to the Bill, it would therefore be necessary to recommit the Bill to strip out references to the registration and tribunal system. That would require detailed amendments to every part of the Bill.

§ Mr. Eric Martlew (Carlisle)
My right hon. Friend has been very generous in giving way. However, was he not aware that new clause 11 would be tabled, so was it not remiss of him not to have tabled the necessary amendments so that we would not have to recommit the Bill? He knew that new clause 11 would be tabled.

§ Alun Michael
I knew that amendments were going to be tabled, but I did not have sight of them.

§ Mr. Kaufman
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. You were not in the Chair during the debate on the programme motion when Mr. Speaker clarified a point that was accepted by the Minister without qualification. I put it to Mr. Speaker that, if new clause 11 were passed and there were consequential mendments, the Bill could complete its stages next week and would get to the House of Lords in time, if necessary, for the Parliament Act to be invoked this Session. That is what Mr. Speaker accepted from the Chair. That being so, is it acceptable for the Minister to read out now what he may have thought valid before Mr. Speaker gave his ruling but is no longer valid now? The Minister is threatening the House when Mr. Speaker has disposed of that threat.

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
With great respect to the right hon. Gentleman, that was not a point of order for the Chair but a point for debate.

§ Alun Michael
I make it clear that I have taken back nothing of what I agreed to earlier nor contradicted anything that Mr. Speaker said. I would do no such thing. It is simply a matter of fact that a vote for new clauses 11 and 14 is a vote for recommittal and some delay. My right hon. Friend has spelt out again the answers that he received from Mr. Speaker about the way things would apply, and I confirmed that there is nothing with which I would demur in those remarks. However, an element of delay would be involved and, in all the processes that involve the Parliament Act, there seem to be degrees of uncertainty because of the very small number of cases to which it has been applied.

§ Rob Marris
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his generosity, but I just understood him to say that, were new clause 13 not to be accepted and were new 72 clause 11 to be accepted, he would regard the Bill as unworkable and impractical and that it would therefore need to be recommitted. He gave two reasons for that. The first related to the one month for commencement and the second to the registration process for boar. Neither is legislatively necessary even if they are philosophically necessary for the Government. Under clause 52(2), the commencement could come in at three months rather than at one month as under clause 52(1) to which my right hon. Friend refers. The fact that the Government think money is not worth spending on wild boar registration is not a legislative problem. [Interruption.]

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. An hon. Gentleman is making his point.

§ Alun Michael
I make the point to my hon. Friend that, when the Government make sure that legislation goes through, they have to ensure that it is effective and that public money is not wasted. I indicated the defects that would be there by way of illustration only. Recommittal would be necessary for the reasons that I have given, because we could otherwise end up with defective legislation to which it could not be guaranteed that the Parliament Act would apply. Right hon. and hon. Friends have made clear their wish to see that Act apply should another place frustrate the Bill.

§ Mr. Soames
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for the hon. Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks) to be brutalised by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs? The expression of pain and anguish on his face is enough to turn the soul of any political opponent. He needs your protection.

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
I do not think that the hon. Gentleman needs my protection. I have seen no sign that he is being brutalised.

§ Alun Michael
We are talking about co-operation and sympathy across the Chamber. I just want to make it clear that, if at all possible, I am looking for the other place to receive a Bill that is in good order and that will be effective and to co-operate in getting a good Act on to the statute book as quickly as possible.
The Bill before us at this stage is not just the Bill as drafted and based on the evidence that we heard in the Burns inquiry and in the Portcullis House inquiry, but the Bill as tested and improved in Committee. In particular, I pay tribute to my hon. Friends who helped in Committee, and I make it clear that we have the opportunity today to get good legislation through the House and to send it in good order to another place and on to the statute book.

§ Miss Widdecombe
May I press the Minister on the necessity for recommittal? He knew that an attempt would be made today to get a complete ban. Furthermore, he knew the terms of the new clause because it was ready to be laid at the end of the Committee stage when Labour Members were most unadvisedly persuaded that the Government really wanted the whole House to have an opportunity to vote 73 on such a ban. He therefore knew that there would be such a move and he knew the terms of that move, so he could have worked out the effect of that on the Bill. Will he please tell us why he did not table contingency amendments today as any other Government would have done in the past and as is easy to do?

§ Alun Michael
Perhaps the right hon. Lady will explain to me why she uses the phrase "a complete ban" when what is on offer today is a complete ban on the cruelty associated with hunting with dogs and a complete ban on hunting as a sport. What does she want to do? Does she want to ban cruelty or does she simply want to ban activity? I seek to ban cruelty. I have always thought that Members of the House who have supported Bills in the past and who have supported a ban with exceptions wanted to make sure that they banned all cruelty. That is why I ask the House to support me and to pass the Bill today without new clauses 11 and 14, so that it can complete its passage through the House in time for Second Reading in another place on 17 July and to ensure that we end the cruelty that the House has always sought to end. [Interruption.]

Several hon. Members
rose—

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. Before I call the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray), I ask the House to calm down and to listen to the rest of the debate.

§ Mr. Gray
Calm, sensible and rational people across Britain and, more so, people in the rest of the world, will observe our proceedings with a mixture of horror and puzzlement. It is a bizarre waste of parliamentary time to discuss hunting when just 2 per cent. of the British public think that it is a priority issue. When most people are asked about hunting, they say, "Who cares? If they want to hunt, it is up to them." It is a matter for individual conscience. At a time when we have soldiers dying in Iraq and the health service, education and transport are in crisis, why are we wasting a valuable day of parliamentary time discussing fox hunting?

§ Dr. Howard Stoate (Dartford)
rose—

§ Mr. Gray
I have only just started my speech but I may give way in a moment.
It seems bizarre to discuss hunting because people in the countryside, especially, will not understand why the Government have not found time for a full debate on the mid-term review of the common agricultural policy, which is vital for the countryside. They will not understand why months have elapsed since we had any kind of debate on farming and why we are ignoring such crucial subjects as rural transport and housing, reviving our rural villages and businesses and saving the environment for future generations. Why are the Government ignoring those vital rural issues in favour of a little totemism on fox hunting?

§ Alun Michael
Does the hon. Gentleman pay tribute to the success of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State during negotiations on the common agricultural policy? He appears to be unaware of the many debates 74 that are held week after week in such places as Westminster Hall on what the Government are doing to help the countryside.

§ Mr. Gray
I fear that if I were to participate in a debate on the mid-term review of the common agricultural policy, Madam Deputy Speaker, you would quickly rule me out of order. All the Minister need do is ask any farmer, anyone in the countryside or anyone who is protesting in Parliament square at the moment what they think about the mid-term review and they will tell him straightforwardly.
Hon. Members of all parties will have seen the article in The Times on Friday in which the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) said that unless he got his way on the Hunting Bill, he would vote against his Government's health reforms, which he would otherwise support. By a cruel irony, today's debate displaces a debate on the Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill, which means that it is unlikely to receive its Second Reading in the other place until after the summer. Hunting with dogs has displaced the Government's keynote health service reforms, which demonstrates the triumph of their prejudice over the future of the nation's health.

§ David Winnick (Walsall, North)
Is the hon. Gentleman's logic that, because there are always other important issues, the House of Commons should be deprived of the opportunity to discuss hunting with dogs?

§ Mr. Gray
The House has discussed the issue on many occasions and given that the country and the health service are in such crisis, one would have thought that a Labour Government would have thought that those matters were much more important than hunting with dogs. Frankly, most people in the country could not care less about the issue.

§ Dr. Stoate
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Gray
I shall because the hon. Gentleman is very persistent.

§ Dr. Stoate
May I inform the hon. Gentleman that, although 2 per cent. of the population think that fox hunting is the most important issue for them, many of my constituents in Dartford think that ending the cruel and barbaric sport once and for all is a high priority? Although it might not be the only thing on their minds, it ranks as one of the most important things.

§ Mr. Gray
I grant the hon. Gentleman that of the 55 million people in this nation, there are no doubt a few thousand people on each side of the argument—mine as well as his—who think that the issue is overwhelmingly important. However, I challenge him to cite a poll of any kind that shows that people believe that it is important for the House to discuss hunting with dogs. It is a total and utter waste of time. Parliament should not consider 75 such a matter. It should be a matter for individuals' consciences and individuals should make up their own minds.

§ Dr. Palmer
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have not been in the House long, so am I right in thinking that the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) should be addressing new clause 12?

Hon. Members
Thirteen.

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. The debate that is currently under way certainly begins with new clause 13. I hope that the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) and others will address their remarks to the group of amendments.

§ Mr. Gray
I most certainly am doing so, Madam Deputy Speaker. New clause 13—rather than new clause 12—and the other new clauses and amendments in the group are central to the entire question of whether hunting should be banned outright, as many Labour Members want; whether, as we believe, it should be registered and all types of hunting should be licensed if that is the registrar's view; or whether the Minister's half-hearted view, which is a muddle between the two, should be adopted. The debate is almost like a Second Reading debate on fox hunting and the way in which it should be regulated, which is why it is important to address the general points.
The Bill—especially if it is amended in the way in which the Government wish—bears no resemblance to the Bill that we discussed on Second Reading. Fundamental changes were made in Committee and the Minister is now asking us to accept further changes.

§ Mr. Bellingham
My hon. Friend has explained that we are spending much more time on the issue. Surely the response to the point made by the hon. Member for Walsall, North (David Winnick) is that if we knock on 100 doors in our constituency, we might well find that 50 people would be against hunting and support a ban. However, perhaps only one out of those 100 people would tell us that it is a top 20 issue that should be a Government priority while so many other things are going on.

§ Mr. Gray
My hon. Friend makes a good point. I told a friend, who is a Labour Member, that a certain matter was a big issue in my postbag. When he asked me how many letters I had received, I said that I had received at least 100. He said that at least 89,900 people had not written to me.

§ Lynne Jones
Will the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues guarantee the House that they will never waste its time with any matter that is not in the top 20 of people's concerns?

§ Mr. Gray
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving me the opportunity to reiterate something that my right hon. Friend the leader of the Conservative party made plain recently. If hunting were banned under the Bill, an 76 incoming Conservative Government would give equivalent time to a private Member's Bill so that hunting could be reintroduced.
The Bill has already been subject to an extraordinary amount of consideration. The Burns report took six months to prepare, at huge national cost. There were three days of discussions in Portcullis House and we had 27 Committee sittings—a total of 75 hours and 43 minutes all told. After all that, we have a mere five and a half hours on Report, which is too little time, in which to consider 100 amendments and 15 new clauses, many of which are complex and fundamental measures that were tabled by the Government.

§ Mr. Gummer
Will my hon. Friend cast his mind back to the start of the Committee stage when the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality said that the Bill was presented on a moral ground? He talked about morality a great deal, but when we pointed out the extent to which the morality that he put forward was immoral, he stopped talking about it. Will my hon. Friend help the Minister by pointing out the moral basis of the proposals in the amendments?

§ Mr. Gray
My right hon. Friend's speech on the morality of banning hunting was probably the finest of the many speeches made in Committee. I shall return to the point that he raised in a moment.
The provisions in new clause 13 that the Minister is asking us to accept were not hinted at in the Burns report, in Portcullis House or in Committee. Neither he nor anyone else has suggested a close season for hunting. We heard no whisper of that brand new idea until today, and the same is true of several of his other novel ideas, such as limiting the chase. No one tabled such an amendment in Committee and no one in Portcullis House suggested such a measure. No one has suggested limiting the chase but all of a sudden, as the Bill reaches its final stages, the Minister has come up with that extraordinary idea.

§ Gregory Barker
Does my hon. Friend have any idea how the Government might enforce such a bizarre and ridiculous idea as limiting the chase? How would it be enforced if it reached the statute book?

§ Mr. Gray
My hon. Friend is right to raise that important point. The Minister has not thought through the provision at all, and I shall suggest why he has come up with the peculiar notion of limiting the chase in a moment.

§ Rob Marris
The general thrust of the hon. Gentleman's argument seems to be that new clause 13 is ill considered. Does he intend to vote against it?

§ Mr. Gray
Yes, indeed I shall vote against new clause 13. I cannot think why the hon. Gentleman asked that question because I thought that I had made that obvious but if I had not, I shall now. I hope that many Labour Members will join me in voting against it because of the 77 absurd procedure that the Minister disgracefully put in place to try to disfranchise them.
The group of amendments offers three approaches. First, there is the Minister's desperate struggle to keep his much abused licensing system, although frankly his attempt to add further bans wrecks any principle that ever existed behind the approach. The new clause tabled by the hon. Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks), which is supported by 150 Labour Members, would introduce a straightforward outright ban on all forms of fox hunting at all times of the year.
Incidentally, I mention in passing new clause 6 and amendment No. 1, tabled by my hon. Friends in the middle way group, which would allow terrier work underground to be licensed, a move that would be much welcomed by the shooting lobby. The Minister has failed to answer my procedural question: if he introduces amendments in the other place to differentiate—I have no idea how he would—between hunt terrier men and gamekeepers, and if, at a later stage, the Bill is subject to the Parliament Act, is it his understanding that any such amendment passed in the other place would be part of that Parliament Act procedure? I suspect not and if he has not tabled amendments in this place, any such lip service to the gamekeepers may bite the dust subsequently. Perhaps the Minister would care to give his view on that.

§ Alun Michael
Quite simply, there are ways, by means of resolution of the House, by which something that is not in the Bill when it leaves this place can be associated with a Parliament Act procedure.

§ Mr. Gray
The Minister has some pretty crafty things up his sleeve, and I am delighted to hear it. When his noble Friends table such amendments in the other place, I hope that he will reiterate that those amendments introduced in the House of Lords will remain part of the Bill irrespective of what happens in this House.

§ Mr. Garnier
We are extending the criminal law. Does my hon. Friend think it in the least acceptable that it should be extended so haphazardly by amendments and new clauses written on the back of an envelope and by exchanges between here and another place? We should know with certainty what the Government intend to do with the criminal law rather than fiddle around in an absurd way with this absurd Minister on this Bill.

§ Mr. Gray
My hon. and learned Friend is right.

§ Alun Michael
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Gray
I think that it would be procedurally correct to answer my hon. and learned Friend first. One would have thought that a Labour Government of all things would be able to ban fox hunting without getting into the appalling muddle, mix and Horlicks in which they find themselves. It is amusing for us to see Labour Members arguing with each other. It is a mess. My hon. and learned Friend is right. It is a terrible way to amend the criminal law.

§ Mr. Swire
The Minister has spoken of discussing with the British Association for Shooting and Conservation how gamekeepers could continue to use terriers in certain circumstances. Does my hon. Friend share my concern that amendments tabled in the other place may be contrary to the spirit and wording of the Labour party manifesto, which said: We have no intention whatsoever of placing restrictions on the sports of angling and shooting"? Such amendments would, by definition, place a restriction.

§ Mr. Gray
My hon. Friend is right. Perhaps I could gently suggest why the Minister has not chosen to table the amendments in this House and why he is waiting to introduce them in the other place. It would be an amusing scene to see him stand at the Dispatch Box and explain to his hon. Friends on the Back Benches that he intends to make the use of terriers underground a legal matter in certain circumstances. He knows perfectly well that there is no chance at all, under any circumstances, of even persuading the Minister for the Environment, who sits next to him, of the wisdom of that. That is why he has deferred the matter to the other place, in the hope that he will to get it through there.

§ Alun Michael
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing a break in the rhetoric for the question to be answered. We are waiting for the amendment to be tabled in another place so that the code of conduct is available. The first time that I took part in a debate in the House, I asked the then Conservative Government to produce information on a code of conduct that was part of legislation so that we were clear what we were voting on. I am practically doing the same thing with this measure so that it is effectively thought through and considered. I am responding to my undertaking in Committee. Although a Bill that is subject to the Parliament Act has to be the same as it is when it leaves this place, a separate motion can deal with the issue satisfactorily.

§ Mr. Gray
The Minister demonstrates that he is in a complete and utter muddle on terriers. If a dog goes down a hole to get a fox out, what does it matter whether the man at the top has a green coat, a red coat, keeper's tweeds or scruffy clothing? Terrier work is terrier work. The Minister is attempting to stick to the Labour party's manifesto commitment not to interfere with shooting by coming up with an absurd distinction between those people who work for hunts, those who work for the gentry and, indeed, those people who come out from towns one evening to stick their dogs down a hole. There is no such istinction.

§ Bob Spink (Castle Point)
While my hon. Friend is on that subject, as the Minister failed so miserably to define a gamekeeper, will he suggest where we might find such a definition? If not, will he encourage the Minister to get to his feet yet again to tell us where we can find it?

§ Mr. Gray:
My hon. Friend is right. The Minister is in a muddle. He has no clue about terriers. That is why he 79 wants to defer the matter to the other place. It is also why the middle way group's excellent new clause 6 and amendment No. 1 try to address that problem.

§ Lembit Öpik
rose—

§ Mr. Gray
I shall happily give way to one of the two leading members of the middle way group.

§ Lembit Öpik
Does the Minister's response not raise two core concerns? First, how on earth will he guarantee that the amendment that he wants will be passed in another place? It is entitled to take a different view and might have a much more wide-ranging approach to terrier work. Secondly, how can he possibly assure us that even if such an amendment is passed in another place, it will get through this House, given the evident discomfort about terrier work on the Government Back Benches?

§ Mr. Gray
rose—

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. We cannot discuss hypothetical amendments that may or may not be discussed in another place. We have a group of new clauses and amendments to address.

§ Mr. Gray
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I would not question what you say, but the truth is that new clause 6 is about terrier work—

§ Lembit Öpik
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Much as I dislike making points of order, I suggest that our discussion relates to an amendment in the string—new clause 6.

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
That is for me to decide. At this moment in time, I feel that we have a large enough group of amendments to discuss and we should make some progress.

§ Mr. Gray
You are, of course, right, Madam Deputy Speaker. I shall move on to other amendments in the group, not just new clause 6. However, I hope that we will have an opportunity to vote on new clause 6. It will be most interesting to see what the Minister does and how he advises his hon. Friends to vote. If he is in favour of terrier work, as he says he is under some circumstances, it might be a good idea to allow the registrar to decide whether it should happen, and voting for new clause 6 would be a way to achieve that.

§ Rob Marris
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Gray
I will, but I am trying to make progress.

§ Rob Marris
Does the hon. Gentleman share my surprise at what the Minister said about a code of conduct when a National Working Terrier Federation code of conduct already exists? I have a copy of it with me.

§ Mr. Gray
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. The National Working Terrier Federation is an excellent organisation and it controls the use of terriers satisfactorily. There is a code of conduct and I hope that the Government will consider it as an exemplar for the one that they propose.
The third option is offered in amendments Nos. 43 and 44, tabled in my name and those of my right hon. and hon. Friends. They would remove the outright bans on different categories altogether and allow them to be considered on an equal basis by the registrar. So there are three clear options: the Minister's muddled semi-licensing; the outright ban proposed by the hon. Member for West Ham; and my preferred option, for all forms of hunting to be capable of licensing by the registrar.
I have to admit that I would slightly prefer the Minister's licensing option to an outright ban. At least if we send a licensing option to the upper House, my noble Friends will be able to amend it into a workmanlike and liberal licensing structure. If we allow a licensing structure, an incoming Conservative Government, which will come along sooner or later, might be able to build on it to save hunting. I very much hope that the outright ban will not go to the other place. I hope that some kind of licensing regime will go instead. I also hope that my noble Friends in the other place will amend the Minister's illiberal and difficult licensing regime into a liberal and workmanlike regime.

§ David Burnside (South Antrim)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the immediate impact of the Government's licensing arrangements or a total ban would be the destruction of tens of thousands of foxes, which would be shot by farmers?

§ Mr. Gray
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, which I shall consider in a moment. There is no evidence that the abolition of hunting—whether by means of licensing or an outright ban—would result in fewer animals being killed. Indeed, most observers recognise that it would result in more animals being killed and be unselective. The great thing about using dogs to kill animals is that dogs are selective as to which animals are killed. If one is lamping at night, there is no telling whether one is killing a young, middle-aged or ageing fox. In most places where hunting has been stopped or abandoned for any reason, it is obvious that many more animals are killed and nearly always using less humane methods.

§ Mr. Cameron
rose—

§ Dr. Palmer
rose—

§ Mr. Gray
I shall give way to the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer) after I have given way to my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron).

§ Mr. Cameron
Did my hon. Friend notice the Minister shaking his head when he suggested that more foxes 81 would be killed. Does he recall that in the other place Lord Burns said: If hunting were subject to a ban I have little doubt that at least an equivalent number of foxes, deer and hare would be killed by other means"?—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 March 2001; Vol. 623, c. 532.] Does my hon. Friend think that the Minister does not bother to read this stuff before he brings deeply illiberal legislation to the House?

§ Mr. Gray
My hon. Friend makes a good point but in rather an unfair way. The Minister has spent a considerable part of the last year working on this nonsense. He must regret it deeply; he ought to be doing something more useful and he has not made a particularly good job of it. However, to be fair to him, he probably has read most of the documents that have come his way, although it is odd that he seems to have chosen to ignore them.

§ Bob Spink
Will my hon. Friend give way?

§ Mr. Gray
If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I will not. I have only just started and I would like to get to the meat of my speech.
Many of us on this side of the argument were encouraged by the Minister's approach to the issue at the time of the Portcullis House hearings. We accepted that some regulation of hunting was inevitable and worth while and that a fair, liberal licensing regime, such as that proposed in new clause 1 and new schedule 1, would be reasonable.
We were pleased by the Minister's assurance that he had listened carefully to the scientific arguments and that the Bill would be constructed on the firm foundation of principle rather than prejudice. We broadly accepted the principles of utility and least suffering on which he planned to base his registration regime, provided that they embraced all wild mammals and all methods of controlling them. Probably the only thing that the scientists and others at Portcullis House agreed on was that all mammals should be considered in precisely the same way.
Imagine our surprise then when the Bill was eventually published and it became clear that it was not based on the principle of scientific evidence but was a desperate effort to cobble together a deal to buy off the Minister's Back-Bench colleagues and his friends in the League Against Cruel Sports and the RSPCA. He had changed his tests of least suffering and utility in such a way as to make them extremely difficult to pass, but even more bizarrely and unjustifiably he wanted to impose an outright ban on deer hunting and organised hare coursing. There is no logic or principle in that. It may be reasonable and sensible to apply the tests of least suffering and utility to the hunting of all mammals, but why on earth should those two practices be singled out for an outright ban? Why should they not be subject to the same tests, and pass or fail, alongside fox and mink hunting?

§ Mrs. Browning
I know that my hon. Friend has taken the trouble to visit Exmoor. Is he as concerned as I am that when I questioned the Minister on Second Reading about what analysis he had made of the impact on 82 Exmoor of the ban on stag hunting, it was clear that he had made no analysis of the eventual demise of the deer herds there?

§ Mr. Gray
My hon. Friend is very kind. I think that the Minister took the trouble to visit Exmoor for two or three hours, but he certainly knows nothing of the social, cultural and economic effects of the ban on life on Exmoor. It is interesting to note that Lord Burns said that the Government should take into account such effects of a ban on places such as Exmoor, and the Government have chosen to ignore that advice. They have taken Burns very selectively.
The House will remember that on Second Reading on 3 December the Minister explained why he had chosen to ban stag hunting and hare coursing. He said: Incontrovertible evidence shows that the activities of hare coursing and deer hunting cannot meet the two tests, so these activities will be banned. He said later: Again, incontrovertible evidence has shown that such activities as ratting and rabbiting should be allowed to continue".—[Official Report, 3 December 2002; Vol. 395, c. 756.] In Committee, the Minister cited as that incontrovertible evidence the work of Professor, now Sir Patrick Bateson. We all congratulate him on his knighthood. The Minister said that Bateson gives incontrovertible evidence as to why stag hunting should be singled out. Let me quote, however, what Professor Bateson had to say about that.

§ Alun Michael
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Gray
I am sure that the Minister does not want to hear what I am about to say. I shall happily give way and allow him to answer once I have given the full story.
In an e-mail dated 21 January, Professor Bateson said: Only somebody who was scientifically illiterate could argue that evidence from a new area of research was 'incontrovertible'''. In a subsequent letter to the Minister, which I just happen to have here, Professor Bateson said, I am told that the evidence for the poor welfare of deer arising from hunting with dogs was described as 'incontrovertible'…I would not want to describe my conclusions in those terms. No serious scientist could do that in a new area of research. The Minister wants to try to correct Professor Bateson.

§ Alun Michael
This is boring for those of us who were in Committee because I have put the hon. Gentleman right on several occasions. I did not refer to evidence as incontrovertible—one can always argue about evidence. I said that the conclusion was incontrovertible. If one looks at all the evidence available to us, which includes that given by Professor Bateson, it is incontrovertible that, because of the way in which deer hunting is undertaken, there are always alternatives available that involve less suffering. The hon. Gentleman should refer to the correspondence, which makes it clear that his misrepresentations were refuted at the time.

§ Mr. Gray
The Minister is quite right he came up with precisely that bizarre argument in Committee to try to defend himself against the accusation from Professor Bateson. He was shot down in flames. He cleverly said: 83 I never said that the evidence was incontrovertible. I said that the argument was incontrovertible."—[Official Report, Standing Committee F, 13 February 2003; c. 1076.] Here we have it—we have controvertible evidence, which may or may not be correct, but the argument based on that evidence is incontrovertible. The Minister's confusion speaks for itself.

§ Kate Hoey
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that what is incontrovertible is the fact that if deer hunting is banned, within a very short time there will not be a deer left on Exmoor?

§ Mr. Gray
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Hunting has been stopped for brief periods on Exmoor, for example during the war, and the herd was significantly depleted. [Interruption.]

§ Kate Hoey
As some of my hon. Friends do not seem to understand that point, I shall explain it. The number of deer will fall because farmers will shoot them indiscriminately. At the moment, the culture on Exmoor means that farmers leave the deer to be dispersed by the hounds.

§ Mr. Gray
The hon. Lady makes an extremely good point. There would be no reason for farmers on Exmoor to allow large numbers of deer to roam freely on their land were it not for the existence of hunting. They allow the deer to roam and depredate their crops because they like to go hunting and they believe in the cultural and economic upsides of hunting. If it were not for hunting, they would certainly want to go out and shoot deer and perhaps to seek an income from the trophies. That is perfectly legitimate and we see a certain amount of that on Exmoor at the moment. [Interruption.]
It is interesting that the Minister, who does not know very much about these matters, asks, from a sedentary position, "What about Scotland?" He is entirely ignorant because the landscape and the land ownership on Exmoor are totally different from that in Scotland. There, the farmers have the opposite problem. There are far too many red deer in Scotland, and we have to find a more effective means of culling them because we simply cannot get rid of them, but on those large estates, where deer graze on heather and trees on high ground, there is no depredation for farmers to deal with. In Exmoor, the farms are about 200 or 300 acres, and farmers would not put up with depredation on their land if it were not for the existence of hunting.

§ Mr. Swire
This is a critical point, and it shoots a hole through the Minister's claim that the Bill has anything to do with animal welfare. In response to DEFRA's hunting consultation in 2002, the Exmoor national park authority said: No agreed alternative model to the current management regime yet exists for an appropriate mechanism for deer management that will maintain current numbers, quality and visibility of wild red deer on Exmoor. To alter the situation without putting a new model in place would be a criminal act.

§ Mr. Gray
My hon. Friend is of course right, but we are straying somewhat from the central point on which 84 I am challenging the Minister. He has, in his wisdom, chosen to single out deer hunting, organised hare coursing and one or two other activities to which I shall return later. He said that his reason for doing so was that he had incontrovertible evidence that deer hunting was demonstrably a great deal more cruel than, for example, fox hunting, which, at least at that time, was to be allowed to continue subject to the registration procedures. He said that he had incontrovertible evidence, but he never produced it. He says that Bateson is not incontrovertible, so he must have something else; he must tell us what it is.

§ Alun Michael
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Gray
If I must.

§ Alun Michael
Yes, it is rather boring—the hon. Gentleman repeats himself again and again. I said that the case against deer hunting was incontrovertible. As I reported to the Committee, I spent time with people on Exmoor and became absolutely convinced that the case remained incontrovertible. The case does not depend solely on Professor Bateson's evidence, important though that is. It also applies to hare coursing: it is impossible to make the case that hare coursing has utility—that argument must fail. That is what is incontrovertible. The hon. Gentleman does not appear to understand the English language.

§ Mr. Gray
Let us accept for a moment the Minister's argument that he has incontrovertible evidence that stag hunting and hare coursing are so wicked that they must be banned outright. If that is so, what is the incontrovertible evidence that proves that hare hunting, terrier work and now, apparently, autumn hunting also have to be banned outright? What has happened since Portcullis House that provides new evidence on those three activities? The right hon. Gentleman never said before that he had incontrovertible evidence in respect of them. He banned stag hunting and hare coursing saying that those things were cruel, but said that he would allow autumn hunting, terrier work and so on. However, since Portcullis House, since Second Reading, since Committee stage, the Minister has suddenly decided that there is an incontrovertible argument that those things too must be abolished.

§ Andrew George
The hon. Gentleman has considered the issues deeply and thoroughly examined evidence from a variety of sources, but has he looked at the management of deer on Bodmin moor and the strip of land from the moor down the Tamar? There is no hunting there, yet there is a substantial deer population and perfectly satisfactory deer population management. Has the hon. Gentleman understood that case?

§ Mr. Gray
The hon. Gentleman speaks for the Liberal party which, I understand, has as party policy a ban on all forms of hunting. He does not seem to have realised that the thrust of my argument has moved on. I am trying to establish what the Minister's incontrovertible evidence was that stag hunting ought to be banned, whereas other forms of hunting ought to be allowed. The Minister's argument is that there was incontrovertible evidence on that subject; I am trying to 85 establish what that evidence was, especially in the context of his decision that now three other activities must also be banned outright. He never argued that at Portcullis House or on Second Reading, and he never hinted at it during Committee stage. Something has happened—some new evidence has emerged—to make it absolutely plain that autumn hunting, for example, is as wicked as stag hunting. What we want to know is: why did the Minister not propose that it be banned before; what new evidence has emerged; and what has changed since Portcullis House?

§ The Minister for the Environment (Mr. Elliot Morley)
It is a shame that many of these points were dealt with in Committee and we seem to be going over them yet again. Will the hon. Gentleman answer one question? In the context of utility, is he trying to tell the House that the only effective way to control deer is to chase them for hours at a time?

§ Mr. Gray
The Minister was not listening. I sought to use the argument advanced by his right hon. Friend the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality in respect of stag hunting—that there was incontrovertible evidence that it was wicked—to explore the reasoning behind new clause 13. Incidentally, new clause 13 has nothing to do with stag hunting, so it would be quite out of order if I did answer the question.
New clause 13 is about the banning of autumn hunting and terrier work. The Minister has now chosen to ban those things; I am seeking to discover what has happened since Second Reading and Committee to make him do that. Why does the Bill allow the hunting of rabbits, but not of hares? Why does he propose a closed season for the use of dogs to cull foxes, but not for the shooting or snaring of foxes? Apparently, it is perfectly legitimate and acceptable to shoot or snare foxes, no matter how old, young or indifferent, in August, September and October, but not to hunt them using dogs in those months. Why does the Minister differentiate in that way?
Why has the Minister called autumn hunting, with his usual objectivity, a "mischief"? Is there any genuine animal welfare need for a closed season? If there is, surely it ought to be during the breeding season. Why has the Minister proposed a ban on fox hunting during August, September and October? Those of us who hunt would never do it, but the Minister's proposal means that theoretically it would be legitimate for us, under registration, to use dogs to hunt foxes in May, June and July—the time when vixens are pregnant and cubs are very young, still in the earth, and cannot look after themselves. It would be legitimate under the new clause for us to continue to use dogs under registration during that period, but apparently he wants to ban the practice during August, September and October. Why? Where is the animal welfare logic in that? There is none.
Why should not all fox hunting be subject to the tests of utility and least suffering? If the activity is as bad as the Minister has argued it is, presumably the registrar and the tribunal will find against all hunting, whether in autumn or winter. The truth is that new clause 13 has absolutely nothing to do with improving animal welfare 86 or humaneness. It has everything to do with sentimentality, ignorance and, overwhelmingly, with political deal making.

§ Dr. Palmer
I detect in the hon. Gentleman's speech a note of criticism of new clause 13. In an interesting passage, he said that if we introduced registration, a future Conservative Government might be able to use it to restore fox hunting. How many of the practices mentioned in new clause 13 would the Conservatives reintroduce?

Hon. Members
All of them.

§ Mr. Gray
Yes, all of them. That is the simple and straightforward answer. The activities are legal now and we see no reason to make them illegal. They are perfectly legitimate activities.

§ Mr. Simon Thomas
I am interested in the hon. Gentleman's response to the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer). Earlier, he said that the Conservative party now accepted that hunting should be regulated in some way. I, too, have taken that point on board, because there are issues of cruelty and utility that require some form of licensing and independent assessment. It therefore cannot be as simple as the hon. Gentleman says. If we state the twin principles of cruelty and utility, the only credible course open to us as politicians is to hand the matter to the independent authority and let the authority deal with hunting in every situation and at every time of the year. Surely he agrees with that.

§ Mr. Gray
The hon. Gentleman offers one possible solution, albeit not one that comes within the terms of the new clause. I have always accepted the need for some form of regulation or registration. Indeed, throughout my hunting life—I have hunted for 30 years—I have hunted under a licence. For the past seven years, the Labour Government have issued me with a licence to hunt on Salisbury plain with the Royal Artillery hunt. Forty hunts across Britain have hunted since the last war under Government-issued licences, and there is no reason why that licensing regime should not be expanded to cover all hunts—indeed, that was precisely the thrust of new clause 1 and new schedule 1, which I proposed and which we discussed briefly in Committee. It is perfectly sensible to register and to regulate hunting—there is no problem with that. We are perfectly confident that we would pass the tests if they were properly drafted.

§ David Winnick
If the Bill is passed, in one way or another, may we take it that at the next election the Conservatives will make it clear that if they are elected, the House of Commons will have the opportunity to discuss and to make a decision on this issue? Will the Conservative party itself be pledged to repealing the measure that we are now debating and to bringing back fox hunting?

§ Mr. Gray
The hon. Gentleman must have slipped out of the Chamber earlier, because I made the Conservative position clear. My right hon. Friend the leader of the Conservative party has always made it plain that 87 hunting is free vote territory and that members of the party can make up their own mind. A great many members of my party in North Wiltshire strongly oppose fox hunting and I respect their position—I have no problem with it. We have said that if the Bill becomes law, an incoming Conservative Government will provide Government time to debate a Back Bencher's motion to turn it around. That is the commitment that we have made, and we did so publicly. However, that has nothing to do with new clause 13.

I am keen to know why the Minister has decided, since Second Reading, consideration in Committee and Portcullis House, to introduce new clause 13, which would ban cub hunting and confirm the ban on all terrier work and the rest of it. The answer is that the clause is overwhelmingly to do with political deal making.

If that is doubted, we need to look no further than a letter that came my way from the Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister, dated 14 May 2003. The Minister writes: I attach a summary, Annex 2, of the amendments that I believe will further assist the Bill's passage …They meet specific concerns raised by Government backbenchers and/or animal welfare organisations … The RSPCA has now written to all MPs giving support to the Bill. That support is conditional on amendments at Report Stage, in particular to ban cub hunting—an activity about which both the public and MPs feel stronglyf…Given the value of RSPCA support, these amendments are very important to us in trying to secure the safe passage of the Bill. The Report stage will be crucial and the politics of this remain quite difficult. That is what the right hon. Gentleman had to say to the Deputy Prime Minister. It is nothing to do with animal welfare or human activity. It is because the politics of this remain quite difficult. The Minister had a dinner at Shepherd's with his friend Jackie Ballard, during which he did a dodgy deal. He agreed that he would bring forward a new clause that would ban cub hunting and do other things. That is not because he believes that that is the right course, but because he has done a deal with the RSPCA and one or two Labour Back-Bench Members. That is a disgraceful and ridiculous way in which to put together any sensible animal welfare measure. It is entirely contemptible. Any principle that the Bill ever had was destroyed by the Minister's attempt to ban certain activities outright in a desperate rearguard battle to save some vestige of his tattered Bill and some vestige of his tattered political career. The right hon. Gentleman might as well give up the unequal battle, and either give in to his straightforwardly abolitionist hon. Friends who supported new clauses 11 and 14, or allow me amendments Nos. 43 and 44, which would effectively bring all forms of hunting with dogs into the category that can be considered by the registrar.
Incidentally, I am grateful to the Minister and his parliamentary private secretary for supporting amendments Nos. 43 and 44. I hope that they will support them even if their useless new clause 13 is defeated. By doing so, they will be reconstructing the logic of the Bill along with the intellectual rigour of the 88 Bill, and allowing the registrar and the tribunal to decide whether or not any form of hunting should or should not be allowed. That would be an intellectually coherent position, unlike the present one.

§ Mr. Michael Jabez Foster (Hastings and Rye)
The hon. Gentleman suggests that all forms of hunting or other activity should be subject to registration. Can he think of a theoretical situation where a registration system would enable hare coursing to continue?

§ Mr. Gray
Indeed I can. It would be up to the registrar to decide whether hare coursing should be allowed to continue. I see no harm in it at all. The curious thing about what the Minister has said about hare coursing is that under even these proposals all that would be abolished would be organised hare coursing events such as the Waterloo Cup. Private hare coursing on private land would still be allowed. There is no suggestion that it is to be outlawed. If I wanted to take my two dogs on to my private land to chase a hare, I would be allowed to do so.
There is something worse than that. In the appendices to the Bill, there is a passage that provides that if one is hare coursing for the pot—that is to eat the hare—that is allowable. Even worse, if the hare is thought to be injured and runs away after it has been shot, the individual will be allowed to use his dogs to course it and catch it. Until now, illegal hare coursers have pursued their activities through threats and violence, but now they are incentivised to carry a gun to seek to shoot hares so that they can set their dogs on them. On this issue, the Minister is in as much of a muddle as he is anywhere else. The purpose behind organised hare coursing events is to kill as few hares as possible. About 200 hares a year are killed by organised hare coursing events, while many tens of thousands are killed by shooting.

§ Mr. Bellingham
My hon. Friend will be aware that in Norfolk there are a number of hare coursing clubs. It is those clubs, in conjunction with farmers and landowners, that police the situation to prevent illegal hare coursing. If the Bill is enacted as it stands, there will be a massive increase in illegal hare coursing, with all the problems that that causes.

§ Mr. Gray
My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. There is no reason to presume that the provisions in the Bill will reduce illegal hare coursing—indeed, they will increase it. The Bill makes illegal only the perfectly reasonable, sensible and respectable occupations of those who, for example, take part in the Waterloo Cup, which is the decent end of hare coursing. Those activities are being banned but the illegal end, as it were, that my hon. Friend describes, will not be stopped.

§ Lembit Öpik
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that if the Bill goes through in its current form—exempting the killing of rabbits by dogs in any way—dogs will have to be trained to understand the difference between a hare and a rabbit?

§ Mr. Gray
The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely good point, and one that the Minister has never answered. If we were to apply an entirely logical 89 approach to the Bill, which I believe that we would do by allowing the registration of all forms of hunting, perhaps requiring the use of dogs on rabbits and rats would be perfectly sensible, so long as it were a liberal and sensible regime that would be reasonably easy to pass. Why not? That would be a logical, sensible and coherent approach. As I have to admit, it is a logical and coherent approach to seek an outright ban on all forms of usage, although we disagree entirely with it. It is the Minister's entirely muddled approach that is illogical and unsustainable.
Opposition Members much prefer the Minister's original proposal that hunting should generally be allowed to continue if it passes practical and logical tests of least suffering and utility. We much prefer that to an outright ban. I call on my right hon. and hon. Friends to vote against new clause 13, which wrecks the Minister's principled and scientific approach. We are confident that the other place will have an opportunity to amend the Bill and introduce a workmanlike and sensible licensing regime. At the very least, an incoming Conservative Government would seek to do so.
The Minister's procedural tactic to prevent further discussion of the two amendments in my name—they would fall if new clause 13 is passed—is disgraceful and against the fundamental principles of democracy in this place. Let us have a vote on my amendments and a vote on the amendment to ban. That is what we are here for. The Minister's procedural activities are disgraceful.
The Minister has proposed amendment No. 100. Given that he says that he has no wish to ban all forms of foxhunting, I am more than a little puzzled by the amendment, which would change the title of clause 6 of the Bill from "Deer" to "Registered Hunting: Absolute Bans: Deer, Hares, Foxes and Terrier-work". As I understand it, the Minister has not proposed that there should be an absolute ban on the hunting of foxes, but by the change of the title he might be admitting defeat to his abolitionist colleagues.
Amendments Nos. 44 and 45 in the names of my hon. Friends and myself and of the Minister and his PPS offer an attractive alternative to both sides of the argument. Whatever kind of hunting it is, let it be considered by the registrar applying the Minister's tests of utility and least suffering, albeit amended and liberalised by my noble Friends in the other place. This should not be a debate about human activity; it should be about improving animal welfare, and it should be based on scientific evidence about the most humane way of culling certain mammal species.

§ Gregory Barker
There is a crucial point that has not so far been mentioned in the debate. I find it extraordinary that a Minister from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs should bring forward a Bill that has such a negative environmental impact. The Government's sustainable development credentials are increasingly tarnished. There is no assessment made of biodiversity and no assessment is made of—

§ Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. The intervention is becoming rather long.

§ Mr. Gray
You are right, Madam Deputy Speaker. I agree with my hon. Friend, but I am not sure that his intervention comes easily into the group of new clauses and amendments that we are discussing.
90 We do not accept that hunting with dogs is cruel. Nor did Scott Henderson and Lord Burns. Incidentally, their reports were commissioned by a Labour Government. Nor was it found to be cruel by Professor Sir Patrick Bateson. The same applies to the other scientists and vets who considered the matter. No one has ever said that hunting with dogs is cruel. Equally, no one has suggested that fewer foxes, hares or deer will be killed as a result of the Bill's enactment. Indeed, most people believe that more animals will be killed by less humane methods if a selective cull using dogs were to be outlawed. The issue is not how many animals are killed, it is about the means by which they are killed. Is shooting a fox with a shotgun more or less cruel than snaring one? Would we rather be one of the 9,000 foxes killed in the London boroughs during the past 12 months, or one of the couple of hundred selectively killed by the Beaufort hunt in my constituency? Would we rather die of gangrene after being shot, die of hunger while stuck in a snare, or die swiftly at the hands of an organised hunt?
We would argue that the use of dogs is the most selective and humane method of dispatch compared with, for example, indiscriminate shooting or snaring. After all, Lord Burns said at Portcullis House that the bulk of the concerns the Burns Report raised about hunting might be addressed through licensing, a regulatory approach or by changing the rules of the hunt. We realise that not everyone shares our view that hunting is the least cruel way of dealing with certain pests, and would be ready to argue our case, as originally set out by the Minister, before the registrar and tribunal. We are not afraid of a sensible and liberal licensing regime, but the Minister is now proposing that terrier work, autumn fox hunting, deer hunting, hare hunting and hare coursing should be banned outright on the basis of evidence known only to him, and that we should not have the opportunity to give evidence to the registrar. His Bill is now without principle or logic and cannot be justified by scientific evidence. The ridiculous new clause 13 wrecks it further, and is mainly a procedural ploy to prevent his hon. Friends from voting for an outright ban. We will join them in opposing new clause 13 tonight. Amendments Nos. 45 and 44 and new clause 6, by contrast, repair the logic and architecture of the Minister's Bill and would allow the continuation of hunting. I appeal to all reasonable hon. Members to support me in seeking a sensible licensing regime by voting for my amendments, which I commend to the House.

§ Mr. Tony Banks (West Ham)
May I tell the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) that we will be in the same Lobby as him this evening? I would like to know whether the flower that he is wearing is one of those squirty ones—it is certainly more attractive than his speech.

§ Mr. Bellingham
What did the Secretary of State say to the hon. Gentleman?

§ Mr. Banks
I shall explain that in a minute.
New clause 11, which I have signed along with 153 Members on both sides of the House, calls for a total ban. I agree with the hon. Member for North Wiltshire, and said so earlier, that our proceedings have been 91 structured in an unfortunate way. If new clause 13 is agreed, we will not have a vote for a total ban under new clause 11, which would be a shame. This is a matter of opinion, but I believe that it should be tested in the House, because we have given such an undertaking to the country. Whether we win or lose, we should have the opportunity to have a vote, so I agree with the hon. Gentleman on that, if on nothing else.
May I tell my right hon. Friend the Minister that his problem is that he is trying to be objective in an area where, frankly, views are highly subjective? It is as simple and straightforward as that. I am not going to rehearse all my feelings, but I believe that the killing of any animal for sport or fun is cruel and immoral and I make no distinction whatsoever between species in saying so. However, I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend because the Bill, even if unamended by new clauses 13 and 11, still represents the most significant advance yet in the interests of animal welfare and the end of blood sports in the countryside. He is to be congratulated on that. I also accept that he assumed in good faith that we would have a vote on new clause 11, as did the Secretary of State. That, I can tell the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham), is the gist of the gentle message that I was given by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and, of course, I accept her word.
However far the Bill goes, a ban on fox hunting is not the most significant animal welfare issue in the world. Because of everything that is going on, I had to miss a significant meeting today on elephant welfare in east Africa—an animal welfare issue of far greater environmental and ecological significance to the great chain of being than the fox. However, the matter is now highly political and, in many regards, has become totemic. It is not the most important issue, but the credibility of the Government is beginning to depend on whether or not we are able to effect a total ban. The reason for that, of course, is the inordinate delay since 1997 which has prevented the House from resolving the problem once and for all. Some of my right hon. Friends at the highest level believe that it is possible to achieve a solution that satisfies everyone, but I am afraid that that is not possible. The tests that my right hon. Friend the Minister referred to as objective do not apply to a situation in which passions and subjectivity rule the day.

§ David Winnick
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is worrying that some of the stories that appeared in the newspaper stories today and at the weekend gave the strong impression—I am not accusing the Minister, who is not Alastair Campbell—that if we insist on a total ban, the whole lot will be lost? I hate to use the word, but that is a sort of blackmail. We should stick to our guns, and vote for a total ban today.

§ Mr. Banks
Let us assume that that is journalistic ignorance, which is not infrequently encountered in Parliament, rather than Government malice, which is something that we encounter less frequently. In other words, I do not believe that those stories arose from a briefing, which would be a clumsy way of suggesting that new clause 11 was sprung on the House. As I have explained, it has been around since 27 February, and if 92 it posed any problems, they could have been eliminated. As I said earlier, we were asked by the Secretary of State not to move the provision in Committee, where we could have discussed it in full and eradicated any serious problems. We were told that we would have a debate, which we are now having, and a vote on the Floor of the House, where it really matters.
7.15 pm
New clause 11, which I support along with 153 Members from all parties, seeks a total ban on fox hunting while leaving the licensing system in place. If the Government believe that the Bill requires recommittal, that is only because they believe that it is too expensive to maintain a licensing system from which foxes have been removed. It would still be in place for mink, ferrets, stoats, wild boar and any other quarry species that the hunters can come up with. There is no reason why the Bill should be recommitted, but if the Government insist on it if we win the vote on new clause 11, we will accept that because we are not going to allow them to walk away and say that the supporters of new clause 11 have imperilled the Bill. That is not the case—even without new clause 11, this remains a good Bill which we could live with, although it does not go far enough.

§ Mr. Kaufman
I obviously agree with the trend of my hon. Friend's argument, but it is very important indeed that the House understand, following what the Speaker said to me and what the Minister was compelled to admit to me in the debate on the programme motion, that if we carry the vote on new clause 11, and if it forms part of the Bill, the Bill can go on to the House of Lords and will be eligible for the use of the Parliament Act. It is very important in this debate not to concede what is not true—that the Bill could be lost if we carry the vote on new clause 11.

§ Mr. Banks
I thank my right hon. Friend for his forensic searching out of that crucial fact—no one wants to lose the Bill on this side of the House; nor indeed do many Opposition Members. We have had sufficient assurances to know that if we achieve acceptance of new clause 11 by defeating new clause 13 we will not lose the Bill, which will still conform to the Parliament Act.
My right hon. Friend the Minister has said that, with new clause 13, the Bill will deliver Labour's long-cherished commitment to ban the sport and cruelty of hunting with dogs". I am afraid that I do not share his certainty. It is a good hope and thought but, unfortunately, it is not a certainty. If hunting is to be banned, why cannot the Bill say so? It should be like that old Ronseal advert—"It does what it says on the tin." If there is going to be a ban, we want the Bill to say so. I want that made quite clear.

§ Alun Michael
Does my hon. Friend accept that the first clause starts with the term "ban", because like previous legislation, it is a ban with exceptions? The difference between the present Bill and previous Bills is that the exceptions in this case are clinically examined in order to make sure that there is less cruelty involved. The specific targeting on cruelty is the strength of the Bill.

§ Mr. Banks
I have already conceded that this is a better Bill than we have had before, but it contains 93 exemptions that allow an as yet unknown registrar with unknown guidelines to determine what goes on. Those exemptions might move beyond our control and we will find that we have fox hunting under a different name. That is the problem that we foresee, and it is largely the reason why we have been opposed to the idea of a registration system.

§ Dr. Palmer
Does my hon. Friend agree that we would have a fundamental difficulty in persuading constituents that we were right to delegate a decision to a registrar, rather than take the decision, one way or the other, ourselves?

§ Mr. Banks
I agree. What disturbs and worries me so much about the Government's position is that if people can see that there is still hunting going on—there will be plenty of coverage of it—it will look as though we totally reneged on the undertaking that the Prime Minister and the party gave, and they will not understand it. People understand what a ban is, but exemptions can mean anything. Lawyers will argue that there is a justification for exemptions, they will make vast sums of money, as they usually do, and who knows?—there might even at some stage be a change of Government, the guidelines to the registrar might get tweaked, and as we have already heard, the Tories have promised that there will be another vote on the matter. Fox hunting could be reintroduced, and they do not necessarily have to do it through legislation—Ministers can change the guidelines.

§ Alun Michael
Has my hon. Friend noted that lawyers are arguing in Scotland, where there is an appearance of a ban in statute? There are two alternatives: either we delegate, as in this situation, to a registrar, who must take account of what Parliament will have decided, including the directions on matters such as the chase, which is dealt with in the Bill or in amendments; or we delegate interpretation to a court. That is what previous Bills would have done and what the Scottish legislation does, and it does not have the immediate enforceability of the Bill before us.

§ Mr. Banks
I do not want to take up too much time, but these points must be answered. The reason there is a problem in Scotland is that the flushing of foxes to guns is not restricted in terms of the number of dogs that can be used to achieve it, so a whole pack of hounds can be used to flush the foxes to the guns. That is hunting by another name. At least in the Bill the Minister has correctly limited the flushing to two dogs, so a pack of dogs cannot be used. There are exemptions, and even my new clause 11 allows for exemptions, as it allows for that exemption as well.
I accept what my right hon. Friend says. We all have to make compromises. We can never be 100 per cent. certain that a piece of legislation will work as we intended, because we are not infallible. We all have to give up something that we want. I would like to ban all killing of all animals under virtually all circumstances, but of course I am fairly moderate.

§ Mr. Kaufman
It is extremely important that as we go along, no false impressions are allowed to go on the 94 record. The Minister interrupted my hon. Friend by saying that the first clause refers to a ban. It does no such thing. Clause 1 states: Hunting wild mammals with dogs A person commits an offence if he hunts a wild mammal with a dog, unless his hunting is—

registered for the purpose of pest control, or

exempt."

The long title states that the Bill is to make provision about hunting wild mammals with dogs; to prohibit hare coursing; and for connected purposes. I cannot understand why the Minister got up a minute or two ago and said that the first clause contained the word "ban".

§ Mr. Banks
I think the Minister meant new clause 13, which refers to Registered hunting: absolute bans: deer, hares, foxes and terrier-work", rather than the Bill.

§ Alun Michael
I accept my right hon. Friend's comment. I was trying to make the point that the Bill is a ban with exemptions. Clause 1 makes that clear. New clause 13 puts it in explicit terms.

§ Mr. Banks
Exactly, and the exemptions are worrying. We cannot be certain how the registration system will work with regard to foxes, or what the exemptions will mean when someone who has not been attentive to our debates and has not sat through hours of the Committee is making decisions. That is why I am concerned about handing the matter over. I and my colleagues on all sides believe that a total ban is clear and unequivocal. It means exactly what it says: a total ban on the hunting of foxes with dogs, although as I said, we would still leave a registration system in place, if the Government wish to do so.
If new clause 11 is agreed to, stoats, weasels, wild boar and mink will remain covered by part 2, plus any other quarry species. With foxes in the licensing system, I believe that we will see a continuation, albeit limited, of fox hunting. As I mentioned, guidelines to the registrar and the tribunal could be altered over the years, to allow more and more hunts to operate. With a change of Government, we know how much easier it would be for the Government of the day to reintroduce fox hunting, whereas if there were a total ban, they would have to introduce legislation to effect a reintroduction of fox hunting. A ban would make it more difficult for a Government who were determined to change the regime to make legal something that is illegal, just as we are having difficulty making illegal something that is legal. We should learn from our own experience.
There are many other arguments that I could address, as my notes indicate, but the point is made and others want to make their arguments. New clause 11 is unequivocal. It states what it will do—it will ban fox hunting, which is what we want. We want to test that here in the House tonight, so I deeply regret the fact that the programme motion has been tabled, meaning that if 95 we allow new clause 13 to go through, that will prevent us pressing new clause 11—a total ban—to a Division.
To address the point made by one of my hon. Friends, the reason we are moving new clause 11 is that we do not believe that new clause 13 will give us the total ban on fox hunting that we promised the people who elected us Labour Members, or fulfil the undertakings given by a number of Opposition Members. So the House should vote against new clause 13 and vote for new clause 11 tonight.

§ Andrew George
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks), who put his finger on the pinch point in the debate. The House must decide whether it is prudent to go for what the Minister calls a workable solution of registration, or new clauses 11 and 14, which would be a total ban on hunting the species mentioned. Hon. Members will have to weigh up the legal arguments one way or the other. I shall return to that, but I do not intend to take up too much time as I know that many other hon. Members wish to speak.

§ The hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray)
argued that the debate was a waste of parliamentary time. I have said that before. The subject is not at the top of my priorities, but I am content that the Government have decided to give it time. A large number of people in the country have decided that it must be resolved by Parliament, and it must undergo due parliamentary process to resolve it one way or the other. I do not want us to return to the issue time and again. I want it dealt with as quickly as possible. According to the hon. Member for North Wiltshire, I spent 75 or more hours in Committee on the issue. It felt like 100 hours; in fact, it felt like 1,000 hours. I do not want to go over the issue again, as we would be repeating arguments that we have had before. There is sufficient demand to get the issue resolved quickly.
The procedural pressure this evening is weighing heavily on us—the hon. Member for West Ham illuminated the House as to what is going on in various committees of the parliamentary Labour party—and is acting like a large shadow hanging over the Chamber. In effect, we are not being presented with an equal choice. We could go for something that we know the Government will support and which will go to the Lords on 17 July, content that even if it is held up there, the Parliament Act will be applied and we will end up with a workable Act—not perhaps the one that the hon. Member for West Ham and his supporters want, but something that we know can work—or we have a query as to whether the new clauses can be presented in time to ensure that we have a workable Act. Like the hon. Gentleman I have serious concerns about this choice and the way in which it has been presented. As the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) said, the procedural pressure is bearing heavily on which of the two amendments we choose.

§ Mr. Kaufman
The hon. Gentleman is quite right to say that it is not an equal choice. As he has been present today, he will have seen that we have established beyond doubt or equivocation that if new clause 11 is carried, we can get the Bill through to the House of Lords in time for the Parliament Act to be invoked. The hon. Gentleman 96 referred to what my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) has said. If I catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I hope to discuss that point with my hon. Friend.

§ Andrew George
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, whose interventions and point of order earlier helped to inform the House about this crucial issue. Many are on the horns of a dilemma on this matter.
7.30 pm
The new clause may have an impact on farming. The Minister knows that wherever there has been a potential impact on farming, I have raised it with him. He will know that the delayed implementation tomorrow of the animal by-products regulations will result in what we hope will be a form of either national, local or alternative collection schemes for those farmers unable to bury or burn fallen stock on their farms. Some kennels provide that service; they certainly do in my constituency. It would be helpful if the Minister gave a clear indication as to how the proposals will impact on this matter.
I do not know whether the Minister thinks that by bringing in a registration scheme he can morally and effectively get out of providing compensation for those hunts that are de facto banned. However, if a total ban comes in, there may be an argument that compensation might be due for job losses and other costs. The Minister has ruled that out in relation to his proposed registration scheme. Perhaps if he has an opportunity later, he will address the issue again.
Since the Committee, I have looked at further evidence and I do not think that any sufficient evidence has been provided that has any material impact on our debate today, whether that is the middle way group's recently published work on the welfare aspects of shooting foxes or any other research.

§ Lembit Öpik
Will my hon. Friend explain why he rejects the finding that wounding rates in connection with shooting are inevitably and consistently higher than wounding rates involved in hunting foxes with dogs?

§ Andrew George
I did not wish to go into that, but I found the middle way group's research rather an insult to our intelligence, and those marksmen who have looked at it found the whole study rather laughable. Indiscriminate and amateur shooting using inadequate guns that shoot low-calibre shot at a moving target too far away will result inevitably in the maiming of a species. That is what I call "blow me over with a feather duster" research. I had no idea that that would be the outcome. The fundamental methodology of the research is flawed.

§ Mark Tami
Will the hon. Gentleman join me in saying that the report insults the sport of shooting?

§ Andrew George
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. We can draw one conclusion from the middle way group's research, which I do not think was intended—it presents a good argument for the registration of shooting. In effect, the research says that 97 there is a tremendous amount of indiscriminate, inadequate and unacceptable shooting that perhaps needs to be regulated. If the level of maiming and missing is as suggested by the middle way group, this is a matter of deep concern. The group has raised a difficult issue, which should perhaps be revisited by this House at a future date. Perhaps we will need a registration of shooting Bill.

§ Mr. Gray
The hon. Gentleman is the official spokesman for the Liberal Democrats. Is he now telling us that it is official Liberal Democrat policy to seek the registration of shooting?

§ Andrew George
I am responding to research that has been presented to me. The middle way group tells us that one cannot shoot and expect not to maim. The hon. Gentleman entertained the Committee on its second day by telling us categorically—in column 59 on 9 January, I think—that his friend went out on his 2,000 acre estate on two consecutive nights and shot and killed, not maimed, 126 foxes. That is remarkable. Presumably, the hon. Gentleman would not wish to besmirch the reputation of his friend by arguing that he shot and maimed those foxes. We were told categorically that they had been shot and killed. Perhaps the middle way group should base its studies on the hon. Gentleman's friend.

§ Mr. Gray
The hon. Gentleman is quite right to use the figure of 126 killed, but of course many more were maimed.

§ Andrew George
I should like to see the evidence for that. The fact is, the hon. Gentleman failed to bring it to our attention. Of course, if one sets up parameters in such a way that one is bound to maim foxes, that is the result that will be shown. It was a politically inspired and sponsored study.

§ Mr. Peter Luff (Mid-Worcestershire)
No.

§ Andrew George
The hon. Gentleman may not like it, but that is the only conclusion to which one can come.

§ Lembit Öpik
I am hesitant to question my hon. Friend when I am sitting so close to him—at least rebels on the Government side have the decency to sit a few Benches away—but is he seriously saying that having a range of targets from 25 yd to 150 yd does not replicate the reality of the situation? In what sense is he questioning the sample of shooters who participated in the research? If he is saying that we chose the wrong people, he needs to explain why he thinks that.

§ Andrew George
I think that I have explained that adequately already. Many of the trials used inadequate calibre and inadequate shot, with a moving target far too far away.

§ Mr. Luff
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Andrew George
If the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friend are arguing that the methodology was adequate to assess the effectiveness of shooting, they are suggesting that people would go out into the 98 countryside and take a positive decision to shoot in circumstances in which the only possible outcome would be to maim an animal—and that is certainly something that should be subject to registration.

§ Rob Marris
It seems that, according to the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray), the farmer who killed 126 foxes did not do any wounding. He said: I asked him how many foxes he thought the farmer killed in the course of those two nights. Most people would say six, 10 or 14. The actual number was 126. The farmer said that he obliterated the fox population, wiped them out and that they will not come back for years".—[Official Report, Standing Committee F, 9 January 2003; c. 59.] No wounding.

§ Andrew George
That is very interesting.

§ Mr. Luff
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the only calibre of shot not included in the study was No. 3 and 4 shot, which the British Association for Shooting and Conservation says is its preferred regime for shooting foxes? We have said that we would happily facilitate trials of that shot, but the Government's preferred regime, recommended in parliamentary answers, was tested exhaustively in the study. That is shown in the report, and the hon. Gentleman has a copy. It is not right to say that many shot permutations were not included in the study. That is simply wrong, and I am sure that he will want to correct that unintentionally misleading point.

§ Andrew George
If the hon. Gentleman is saying that the study shows that Government advice is incorrect, I am sure that the Government would take that on board. I am saying that the methodology was flawed. We are waiting for peer review of the study. The only academic analysis that I have seen so far suggests that it is statistically flawed and the target was not based on an adequate anatomical assessment. That raises serious questions, not about fox hunting but about shooting, and perhaps that is something that the middle way group was not expecting.

§ Mr. Clifton-Brown
If hunting is banned, people who have never shot at a fox before will go out with their shotguns, with inadequate shot, and start shooting at foxes, with the net result that there is likely to be wounding. Those people will be so exasperated that they will have to go out and use such weapons.

§ Andrew George
That is very interesting. I find that argument reprehensible. I know many farmers—many of my family are farmers and landowners. The hon. Gentleman seems to be arguing that farmers will take a bloody-minded attitude, that they will go out in exasperation—in an emotional state—and shoot at anything that moves in the countryside. That is clearly an absurd and extremely irresponsible argument. It adds further to my argument that shooting itself may need to be regulated. If that is what people with guns will do, they need to be constrained from doing it.
Those who are in favour of hunting come back again and again to the argument that it is about liberty and morality. We had a debate on that early in our 99 Committee proceedings, and I am unpersuaded. In fact, one could argue either way about who has the preeminent right, those who live in the countryside and know it and its ways intimately, or those who may come to the countryside and demand their pleasure from hunting. The argument about whose liberty needs to be protected is at best inconclusive, and I would argue that the country dweller would indeed have the pre-eminent right. The hon. Member for North Wiltshire claims to be defending liberties, but I am not so sure.
When questioned earlier, the Minister made it clear that figures from Protect Our Wild Animals suggest that the result of registration would be a total of 100 foxes that may be killed per annum by hunting. That is an infinitesimally small number of foxes, yet the legal system for registration would be enormously complicated. He needs to consider whether that complex registration system and the setting up of the tribunals would really be worth it for only 100 foxes. He has not said in which circumstances he believes that fox hunting would be registered, and whether it would be worth the effort. He seemed to imply that going down the registration route might be preferable to delegating the matter to a court, and we need to review that.
The key issue is workability, and we want to get something through Parliament as quickly as possible. We need the Bill to be wrapped up and enacted as soon as possible.

§ Mr. Michael Foster
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George), especially when he is able to flush out the ability of the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) to make facts up as he goes along, hoping that they will never be disproved later on. Members of the Committee will regret, however, that he did not mention his cousin's home-made humane fox trap, and we do not know how it is faring. Perhaps he will tell me later.
The new clauses represent a point of balance about where we are going with this legislation. It is a very fine judgment as to what we do for the best. I signed up to new clause 13 for a number of reasons, but primarily because of the commitment in it to ban cub hunting—or autumn hunting, as it is now called, because "cub hunting" sounds a little offensive to the broad mass of the population. Hunters would argue that cub hunting involves the dispersal of cubs into wider parts of the countryside. I could never understand why those who fear a pest that is predating on their livestock would want to disperse it in the first place. If people know where it is, at least they have a chance to control it. And we all know why those cubs are dispersed: to provide more varied territory in which to conduct the sport of hunting with dogs. That is what it is all about.
Hunters would also argue that cub hunting enables the hounds to be trained: trained in the way in which they pursue the fox and, of course, kill it at the end of the chase. I was keen to make sure that cub hunting was dealt with because it accounts for 40 per cent. of the foxes killed in hunting. That was a great prize worth having on its own: to make sure that we accounted for that 40 per cent.
If new clause 13 were added to the Bill, we would have incredibly strong legislation with which to tackle hunting with dogs. People would have to prove the need 100 to hunt, which would be a very steep hurdle to clear in itself. We in this House have read lots of evidence on the nature of predation by foxes in particular, and—to be fair—about some of the more spurious claims of those who want to continue hunting. If that test were passed, to gain permission to hunt such people would have to prove that it was the most humane way of dealing with the pest. So far as I am concerned, Lord Burns made it absolutely clear that shooting with a rifle and lamping at night is the most humane way of killing a fox, if it has to be killed. There has been no dispute, certainly on the Labour Benches, about the fact that that remains the case.
The legislation was also going to address the need to minimise the chase. Part of the objection to hunting is the way in which the kill is conducted by the dogs; but as the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) has always maintained, the chase itself is fundamentally wrong and abhorrent. We should tackle that as well.

§ Lembit Öpik
What data does the hon. Gentleman have to show that the chase is necessarily cruel?

§ Mr. Foster
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point about the available data. I would suggest that in general in this country, the fox does not have a natural predator. If it has to run because of fear, it will sprint quickly to avoid danger and then hide, usually underground. Hounds are bred for their stamina. They are not sprinting dogs; they are bred to pursue for a long time. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has witnessed what hunts practise, but I have. Before the hunt takes place, the hole is blocked up so that the fox cannot follow its natural instinct, which is to hide. So the fox is forced to run greater distances than it is naturally equipped to run. A hound with stamina following a fox that does not have such stamina means that, in time, the hound will catch the fox. Nature has not designed the fox to escape from the hound in that way. We do not need data to understand how the animals behave in this case.

§ Gregory Barker
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Foster
I shall make a little progress first and give way shortly.
If new clause 13 were added, the Bill would be strengthened to cover, as my right hon. Friend the Minister said, some 100 animals, particularly foxes, that could fall foul of this practice. We would achieve some 99 per cent. of what we on the Labour Benches want, but the question is: do we go for the whole lot?

§ Ms Candy Atherton (Falmouth and Camborne)
What evidence does my hon. Friend have that we are talking about 100 foxes, other than a single suggestion that was made by one person?

§ Mr. Foster
I accept that the evidence consists simply of judgments by individuals or groups and that it has not been peer reviewed. The number may be greater than that, but on the other hand it may be less. However, I am willing to back the judgment that we are talking about a 101 relatively small difference. Although we would not achieve 99.9 per cent. of what we want, we might well achieve 99 per cent.

§ Miss Widdecombe
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Foster
I shall make a little more progress first and then give way.
The test that I look for is: how does this legislation compare with the Foster Bill of 1997? Does it do more than that Bill did? I have to say, hand on heart, that it does. If new clause 13 were added to this Bill, it would be tougher than the Foster Bill.

§ Miss Widdecombe
I follow the hon. Gentleman's argument that new clause 13 and the current Bill are a vast improvement on the existing situation—that is inarguable. But will he make it clear what new clause 13 offers us that new clause 11 does not? If new clause 11 were accepted and there were a total ban, the whole issue of tubbing would become academic.

§ Mr. Foster
I understand the right hon. Lady's point and I shall answer it, because that is the decision point on which this debate rests. What is the difference between new clause 11 and new clause 13, and what is the degree of certainty of one or the other's passing through this House and the other place, and getting on to the statute book?

§ Gregory Barker
rose—

§ Mr. Foster
I promised to give way to the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker), and I am always a man of my word.

§ Gregory Barker
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman. He mentioned a little earlier that the use of high-powered rifles was his preferred form of controlling foxes, but the most widespread form of control in the countryside, in the absence of fox hunting, would be the use of shotguns. Has he taken into account the welfare report that was published post-Burns? It is the first detailed research into wounding rates, which we all agreed was severely lacking when were in Committee. The report states: We consider that under common field conditions, for every fox shot dead with a shotgun, at least the same number of foxes are wounded and many of these are never found. Has the hon. Gentleman really taken into account the welfare implications of a dramatic increase in the use of shotguns in the countryside against foxes?

§ Mr. Foster
I am grateful for that intervention. I should clarify one point: it was Lord Burns who said that shooting with a rifle was the most humane method, and I happen to agree with that. However, I should urge caution on the hon. Gentleman, who is leading the debate in the direction of the possible registration of shooting—to which the hon. Member for St. Ives alluded. I am sure that that is not what the hon. Gentleman wants, but if evidence is continually provided of people going into the countryside and 102 blasting away willy-nilly at anything that moves with inappropriate weaponry, such behaviour is clearly wrong.

§ Kate Hoey
My hon. Friend talks of the danger of people demanding that shooting be stopped, but is not the policy of the International Fund for Animal Welfare and of members of the League Against Cruel Sports that once they get their hunting ban, the next thing will be a ban on shooting, and then fishing?

§ Mr. Foster
I have no remit to speak on behalf of the two organisations mentioned. I speak for myself in this House, and I have absolutely no intention of pursuing any possible ban on shooting or angling.

§ Andrew George
rose—

§ Gregory Barker
rose—

§ Mr. Foster
I want to make some progress on the choice between new clause 13 and new clause 11. I went on the record yesterday evening, on that most excellent programme "The Westminster Hour", as saying that I wanted to vote in favour of new clause 13, and I made it clear why. I wrote to colleagues earlier today to say that in my view, it is necessary to vote for new clause 13 because of the risk of not getting the legislation in time.

§ David Winnick
I have the greatest respect for what my hon. Friend has done on this issue; we all know of the abuse that he has suffered. But is it not true that if new clause 13 were accepted, there would be endless arguments over the years about registration, exemption and so on? As my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks) said, a future Government of a different colour could use that provision to extend exemptions, whereas a ban would be bound to end a debate that has gone on for years. That is why, in my view, new clause 11 should be supported.

§ Mr. Foster
I am grateful for my hon. Friend's words. Yes, I have a nice file in my filing cabinet titled abuse and death threats. In all honesty, however, I do not believe that the debate will end in the near future. We have already heard from Conservative Members that, if a Conservative Government were re-elected at the next general election, they would look to facilitate a Bill to bring hack hunting with dogs. The debate is not going to end, but I want to make a little more progress on where in my judgment we have reached.
8 pm
We have heard some highly significant information today. When I signed up to new clause 13, I did not know—and no one could have known at the time—the order in which the debate would be run or the order in which the votes would be taken. What I feared—a fear shared with colleagues—was losing the 99.9 per cent. of what we had achieved so far. I feared losing it to a recommittal—and the impression given at the end of last week was that that would mean not sorting the legislation out in the summer. If we went into the autumn, who could know what events might take place, and I was conscious of the month-long period in which 103 the Bill would have to be in the House of Lords if, as sometimes happens, we had to use the Parliament Act. On account of that uncertainty, I made the judgment that new clause 13 is the bird in the hand.
Having now heard the Minister's reassurances about the recommittal and how speedily it can be done and having heard earlier this afternoon from Mr. Speaker about the significance of the calendar month as opposed to the sitting month of the House, my judgment has changed. Because of the assurances and comments that I have mentioned, I no longer feel that it is necessary to support new clause 13. I can tell the House, as I have said before, that if new clause 13 were to fall, I always intended to vote for new clause 11. Because of the assurances given by my right hon. Friend and by Mr. Speaker, there is no longer a need to vote for new clause 13 and every need to finish the issue off and vote for new clause 11.

§ Miss Widdecombe
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his courageous change of mind. It is always extremely difficult, when one has signed up to something and publicly promoted it, to change course. I congratulate him on showing the same courage tonight as he showed when he introduced his own Bill to a huge amount of disapprobation.
I have made the argument against hunting too often in this House to want to repeat it in any detail tonight. I would rather concentrate on the relative merits of new clauses 11 and 13. I very much appreciate what the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster) said, but he was sitting in the Chamber listening to the exchange of assurances earlier, whereas many of his hon. Friends will not have had that benefit and might well be thinking that new clause 13 is a bird in the hand and that new clause 11 still represents birds in the bush. It is crucial that between now and the vote, the hon. Gentleman ensures that everyone has the benefit of understanding the effects of the reassurances that we have received from the Minister and from Mr. Speaker. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will be busily occupied in that, so if he wishes to leave during my speech, I shall have no objection whatever.

§ Mr. Gerry Steinberg (City of Durham)
Now that we can see how circumstances have turned out, does the right hon. Lady agree that the Minister should now withdraw his new clause?

§ Miss Widdecombe
I have no hesitation in supporting the call for the Minister to withdraw his new clause, but I equally have no hesitation in predicting that he will not do so, so I need not spend time attempting to persuade him.
Whichever of the new clauses is passed tonight, if the Bill comes to fruition, we shall be living in a more civilised and kinder society than the one in which we live now. I would be the first to accept that it is necessary to kill foxes, and the first to accept that an argument of necessity can be made for killing other species. However, at the beginning of the 21st century, the fact that people should want to make a sport and gain pleasure out of it absolutely beggars belief.

§ Mr. Gray
Am I right to interpret what my right hon. Friend has said as meaning that she is less concerned 104 about animal welfare than with human behaviour? She objects to people gaining pleasure out of fox hunting as a sport. It is nothing to do with killing foxes, but all about human behaviour. Is that correct?

§ Miss Widdecombe
I have never said that. If my hon. and usual Friend had waited for me to get to the next sentence, he would have heard the answer to the question that he has just raised. I have always said that the chase, as opposed to the kill, is particularly objectionable.

§ Gregory Barker
rose—

§ Miss Widdecombe
I find it doubly objectionable that people should make sport out of it, but even if they did not, I would still object to hunting on the ground of the chase. What I said was that it beggars belief that at the beginning of the 21st century people can make sport out of killing an animal. I did not say that that determined my vote or my attitude towards hunting; merely that it added an extra dimension of horror.

§ Gregory Barker
rose—

§ Miss Widdecombe
There seems to be a jack-in-a-box behind me, so I will give way.

§ Gregory Barker
Is my right hon. Friend against all blood sports, including shooting and fishing?

§ Miss Widdecombe
We are debating hunting today—[Interruption] If my hon. Friend had ears to hear, I have said in the past that I am not against shooting, which aims for a quick, clean kill; nor am I against fishing when, as I have always said, one can eat the end result. But today we are discussing hunting and you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, would be the first to call me to order if I started a discourse on other sports.
I wish specifically to address the difference between new clause 11 and new clause 13. I have a great deal of respect for my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray), but I do not believe that it is wise for our party to pledge that, if hunting is banned, we will devote parliamentary time to restoring it. The shadow Leader of the House made an extremely persuasive case about what a waste of time it all was. If people do not have the appetite to spend time banning the sport, when Parliament has finally reached a conclusion and banned it, they will have even less appetite for spending time to restore it. We should be mighty careful before we go to the electorate with that proposition.
I want to concentrate now on the relative merits of new clause 11 and new clause 13. The first point is directly relevant to what I have just said and echoes what was said by the hon. Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks). If we have a licensing system, it will be easy to use it to overturn what the House decides tonight; whereas if we have a ban and the sport becomes illegal, we will have to legislate de novo, which is a much more difficult proposition. One of the reasons why I veer towards new clause 11 rather than new clause 13 is that new clause 13 does not close the door on something that the House has for many years regularly voted to close the door on.
105 The second reason is that I do not trust registration and I do not trust licensing bodies. Although Labour Members will not have had much sympathy with the long fight that I have put up in the House against abortion, I think that they will admit that the law as envisaged in 1967 and the law that it became in practice by 1990 were completely different. Once one passes licensing over to the judgment of people who will be appointed by Government, one can end up having very loose interpretations, even of an issue that Parliament believes in good faith that it has drawn very tightly. That is another reason why I do not believe that new clause 13 does the job.

§ Mr. Adrian Flook (Taunton)
Some moments ago, my right hon. Friend referred to the fact that Parliament would speak on the issue and make its voice heard, but, bearing in mind her great history of having a different view on the issue from me, does she not believe that Parliament also includes the other place? What does she think it might say if the Bill bans hunting outright?

§ Miss Widdecombe
We must have the courage of our convictions in this House and worry about dealing with the other place at such time as it makes its views known.
My third reason for preferring new clause 11 to new clause 13 is that this is the best chance that we have ever had to get an absolute ban. It will be a mark of shame for all of us who have fought for it if we give in now, when we are at the door of achieving it, to some shoddy compromise that a blackmailing Government have tried to impose on their own Back Benchers. It is utterly crucial that Labour Members have huge courage tonight and do not let themselves be packed like weeds beneath the compost of the Prime Minister's timidity. We must go for it in the way that we have never had an opportunity to do in the past. Let our voice be heard tonight. Let us send up to the other end of the corridor what we actually believe in, not what we believe it smiles on.

§ David Winnick
Look at the faces of Conservative Members.

§ Miss Widdecombe
Oh, they will not be happy. I know that. Do not worry about it.
What we have to do tonight is to bring to fruition all past efforts, efforts even before the hon. Member for Worcester introduced his Bill. We can all remember free vote after free vote, which said ban this barbarism. Tonight we have that chance. Let us really go for it. Let us do what we want to do. Let us not be blackmailed either by fear of their lordships or fear of the Government. It is not worth being blackmailed. This is our best chance for years. If we give it up, ours is the shame, not hunting's.

§ Mr. Kaufman
I pay tribute to the four hon. Members who have spoken from the Back Benches so far. All four have dedicated themselves to this issue for many years, and there is no doubt that they have become intensely knowledgeable on the subject. Each one of them deserves the thanks of the House of Commons.
I pay particular tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster), not simply because he has announced a change of mind here this evening, 106 but because he started this off after Labour came to office in 1997 and because the Labour Government attempted to discourage him from using his chance in a private Member's Bill. However, he went through with it. He blazed the trail and we would not be where we are this evening if he had not started that, although that is not in any way to discount the incredible work of my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks), or the courage of the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe).
8.15 pm
My right hon. Friend the Minister both on Second Reading—heaven knows, as long ago as 16 December last year—and again today put his view that he is presenting a perfect Bill. By his criteria, it is perfect. He has invented the criteria and then said, "By my criteria, which I have invented, I have brought you the best Bill it is possible to bring." He has two criteria: one is cruelty, one is utility. What he has not mentioned—he is a South Walian, so I am surprised that he did not—is morality. There is an issue of morality relating to what we want to do about the issue.
My right hon. Friend has created criteria for a Bill that suits him but is not in conformity with the Labour party manifesto. I was not only elected on that manifesto but campaigned very prominently on the issue in my constituency because it is one that I and many of my constituents care about. I believe that many of the people who voted for me at the last election did so because of the pledge in the Labour party manifesto.
What did the manifesto say? It said: The House of Commons elected in 1997 made clear its wish to ban fox-hunting. That was on the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester. The manifesto went on: We will — enable Parliament to reach a conclusion on this issue. The right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald is absolutely right. Today is the day. If we do not seize this moment, it will not come back.
Those of us who have studied the history of other legislation to deal with cruelty to animals will know that it took the House of Commons 35 years to ban bull baiting. Its record on issues of decency has not been very good over the years, whether issues relating to cruelty against animals or to sexual behaviour. It is always belated, but today we have the opportunity.
I came into the House just over 33 years ago. One of the first things that I did was to work with my hon. Friend the Member for Hull, North (Mr. McNamara) to get a ban on hare coursing. It has taken 33 years to get to that point. I am not going to give up the opportunity of doing what I have tried to do in the House of Commons for a third of a century through being talked out of it by amendments that do not deliver what we are asking for.
I wish that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) were here so that I could put the point to her, but my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester was right to say that new clause 13 may—but nobody can be sure—alleviate part of the evil with which we are trying to deal. I repeat that it is impossible to be sure. What is for sure is that if we pass 107 new clause 11—enforcement may be a problem; I do not argue with that—we will not be calculating on exceptions or trying to add up sums: we will have done it. No law is ever perfect—there is a law against murder, but people still commit the crime—but new clause 11 will provide as good a law as we are liable to get in all our political lifetimes if we want to ban hunting, and I am sure that many hon. Members do.
When the Labour manifesto talked about a wish to ban fox hunting, it did not say—it was carefully drawn up and could have said this if it had been wished—that we wanted to hand over fox hunting, in whole or in part, to a registrar, unanswerable to the House of Commons, and to a tribunal, unanswerable to the House of Commons. It said that we wanted to deal with it as a Parliament. Nor am I alone in saying that; the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality said it on Second Reading: It is Parliament that has to take the decision".—[Official Report, 16 December 2002; Vol. 396, c. 581.] Parliament will have its opportunity in an hour and a half to make that decision.
My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has said in this House: I am opposed to fox hunting."—[Official Report,16 January 2001; Vol. 361, c. 344.] He did not say, "I want to alleviate fox hunting." He did not say, "I want to make fox hunting registrable". He said, "I am opposed". On Radio 4, on 30 September 1999, he said: I am opposed to hunting". He did not say, "I want to alleviate it and make it less horrible." He said, "I want to be rid of it."

§ Mr. Soames
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that those of us who support hunting entered into detailed consultation, held by the Minister of State at Portcullis House, on the basis that a fair and sensible system would be produced that would do precisely what he argues against? It was on that basis that a great deal of work was done in Portcullis House, which, allegedly, played a part in framing the Bill that many of us spent many hours dealing with in Committee. What the right hon. Gentleman proposes—I hope that he understands the deep and abiding resentment that will exist if it goes ahead—is diametrically contrary to the assurances that the countryside was given by the Minister of State on how this matter would be handled.

§ Mr. Kaufman
That is between the Minister and the countryside. This is the House of Commons, and it is the House of Commons that must make the decision. The manifesto on which I went before the electorate in Gorton, as did my right hon. and hon. Friends all over the country, did not say that we would enter into consultation in Portcullis House. It said that we would give the House of Commons an opportunity to ban fox hunting. That is what we have tonight. With all respect to my constituents, whom I love and who, by definition, are the most intelligent people in the country, I do not believe that all of them are totally acquainted with what Portcullis House is and what goes on there. I accept that the hon. Gentleman takes an entirely different view from 108 mine, and I respect him for it. However, I am asking the House of Commons to fulfil the Labour party manifesto. It is for others who do not subscribe to that manifesto to make their own points.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs put out a statement over the weekend. She is a good personal friend of mine, and she invites me to speak on her behalf in her constituency at every general election, although whether she will do so next time, I do not know. She said: No Bill on a simple ban has ever been thought to be workable. The Prime Minister thought it was workable; that is what he said. The Labour party manifesto, on which I supported my right hon. Friend in Derby when I went to speak for her, said it was workable. She also—a clever piece of phraseology—said: On Monday, MPs on a free vote, can choose between what is simple to explain and what is simple to enforce. In fact, what is in the Bill is not simple to enforce. It requires the convincing of a registrar and a hunting tribunal. What is in new clause 13 requires the most rigid policing one can imagine, to maintain a ban on the categories set out in that provision. Okay, new clause 11 will never be 100 per cent. enforceable, just as no law in this land has ever been 100 per cent. enforceable, but, by heavens, it is the best that we are ever going to have.
What does the Bill do? When my right hon. Friend the Minister introduced the Bill on 16 December, he and others quoted from Burns. They said that the Bill would ban 2 per cent. of hunting with dogs— [Interruption.]

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst)
Order. I am sorry to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman. Less discussion should be going on in the House. If hon. Members wish to discuss something else, they should leave the Chamber.

§ Mr. Kaufman
I am baffled that hon. Members are not spellbound by what I am saying and that they need to entertain themselves in some other way.
When my right hon. Friend the Minister introduced the Bill and asked us to support it, what did it declare illegal? The killing of 160 red deer—obviously, I am in favour of making that illegal—and the killing of about 250 hares a year through hare coursing. That was it. As a result of an amendment in Standing Committee and after pressure from my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester, who referred to the matter on Second Reading, the Government added 1,650 hares. Of course, anyone who knows anything about such matters knows that hare coursing is exceptionally cruel, but the Burns figures show that registered packs are estimated to kill between 21,000 and 25,000 foxes a year. We do not know how many of those foxes new clause 13 would save.
Whom are the Government trying to please by introducing this Bill rather than one comparable to the Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester? We know whom they are trying to appease, because we saw the countryside march last September. The League Against Cruel Sports commissioned a MORI poll of the people taking part in the march. What 109 was the political allegiance of the people taking part in the countryside march? Eighty-two per cent. were Conservative and 4 per cent. were Labour, so my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will certainly not offend the middle ground if he comes to the House to vote for new clause 11, because there is no middle ground on the issue. About 6 or 8 per cent. of the marchers were Liberal Democrats, so I do not know whom my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Minister are trying to win over.

§ David Winnick
Is not it interesting that a poll commissioned by the Countryside Alliance in March 2002 found that about 25 per cent. of people said that the Government should drop the hunting proposals, but 48 per cent. felt that the Government should insist on a ban? Even among those in the countryside, there is undoubtedly a majority in favour of what we want to be accomplished.

§ Mr. Kaufman
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for adding to the polling evidence.

§ Lembit Öpik
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Kaufman
Yes, I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman. We met on the Dimbleby programme and I got quite a good postbag afterwards.

§ Lembit Öpik
I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman got my letters.
The point may be slightly peripheral to the main debate, but if the right hon. Gentleman accepts the figures given by the hon. Member for Walsall, North (David Winnick), is he really saying that a minority—48 per cent. of the public—is sufficient to justify a ban on these activities? More to the point, what does he say to the two in three vets who oppose a ban on hunting with dogs?

§ Mr. Kaufman
I may be wrong, but I think that the Liberal Democrats would be quite pleased if they had 48 per cent. support among the electorate for anything whatever that they proposed.
8.30 pm
I want to return, however, to what the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald said. My right hon. Friend the Minister in his speech on Second Reading said: We cannot go on debating this subject year after year after year without a conclusion."—[Official Report, 16 December 2002; Vol. 396, c. 582.] I tell the House that, if we do not pass new clause 11 tonight, that is exactly what we will do because many hon. Members will not let go until we get the ban promised in the Labour party manifesto. So the only way we will end these constant debates is to pass new clause 11, incorporate it into the Bill and send it to the House of Lords. The fact is that this is the best chance that any of us sitting in the House of Commons have ever had, or will ever get, for a ban. The Government have made it clear that we will get it procedurally if we vote for it, so let us go for it.

§ Mr. Peter Atkinson (Hexham)
The right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman), in his usual way, dismissed the accusations about why people in the countryside are so angry about the Bill, but then, illogically, started to quote public opinion surveys on hunting. May I tell him that people in the countryside are so angry about the Bill because I cannot remember any Bill that has been attended by so much dishonesty and duplicity by the Government in the history of my time in Parliament?
I apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker; I should have drawn the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members' Interests at the outset of my speech.
May I further tell the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton that people in the countryside have spent thousands of pounds and thousands of hours preparing cases and coming to give evidence at Portcullis House on the ground that what they were saying would be treated honestly and with respect? The Minister indicated, when he first started on this voyage, that he would make judgments based on science, logical conclusions and an understanding of what goes on in the countryside, but, at the end of day, judgments have now been made on the basis of the mood in the parliamentary labour party. Today, new clause 13 appears on the Order Paper, and what is it? It is the result of a shabby political compromise with the RSPCA.

§ Mr. Soames
May I point out to my hon. Friend that there has come into my hands a copy of the parliamentary brief issued by the Minister to his colleagues in the Labour party? I have obtained a copy for greater accuracy. In the penultimate paragraph, in possibly the culminating phrase of a long catalogue of deceit on his part, he says: On Monday we have at long last the opportunity to fulfil our pledge to ban the cruel sport of hunting with dogs. That shows all the charade of the six months' consultation, wrapped up in the deceit that is being practised on the people of Britain tonight.

§ Mr. Atkinson
There we have it. That is exactly it, and when the Minister spoke at a meeting of about 200 to 300 hunting and shooting supporters in my constituency, he clearly indicated to them that he would keep an open mind, and they went away partially reassured that he would do so. When we see what he has finally come up with, we can understand why they feel so betrayed.

§ Mr. Swire
Now that the Minister's base motives have been exposed for what they always were—he is at least consistent in that—what will my hon. Friend say to the fishermen and shooting people whom the Minister addressed? What hope can he give them that the Minister will not behave towards them as he is behaving towards the hunting fraternity?

§ Mr. Atkinson
That is a good point that needs answering. The people who hunt, shoot and fish will have seen what has happened in the months leading up to this stage in the Bill's consideration and will know full well what is in store for them. If they believe that hunting, shooting and fishing are safe, they should learn a lesson from this case.

§ Mr. Morley
It is not fair to cast aspersions on my right hon. Friend the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality, who is not in the Chamber at present. The brief that was just read out is entirely consistent with the argument for applying the principle of cruelty in relation to the ban. It is also entirely consistent on an issue for which a free vote has been promised for the views of the House of Commons to be taken into account as well. There is nothing inconsistent in that, and my right hon. Friend has been entirely committed, straightforward and honest in all his dealings on this issue.

§ Mr. Atkinson
With the greatest respect to the Minister—we have crossed swords for a long time and often, I hope, with good humour—we are not going to believe that. Anybody who met the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality outside this place and heard what he said would have thought that he was approaching the issue with a reasonably open mind. However, events show that his mind was closed to start with, but that it has changed as the mood of the parliamentary Labour party has changed.

§ Lembit Öpik
Perhaps this point will help the hon. Gentleman return to the main thread in his remarks. He referred to the massive preparations that many in the pro-hunting community made to give evidence in good faith to the representatives on the pseudo-Select Committee in Portcullis House and elsewhere, so does he not agree that it is a matter of concern and perhaps very telling that the hon. Members for West Ham (Mr. Banks) and for Worcester (Mr. Foster) indicated that they did not need data to come to a decision? The hon. Member for West Ham went as far as to describe the decision as one related to passion and to prejudice. That is hardly a good basis for legislation.

§ Mr. Atkinson
The hon. Gentleman is right. Evidence was piled high, witnesses were called and scientific research was carried out all in the name of the Bill. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that, at the end of the day, it was simply a matter of passion and prejudice.

§ Lembit Öpik
In fairness to the hon. Member for West Ham, I should correct what I said. He referred to passion and subjectivity and not to passion and prejudice. However, if one adds passion and subjectivity, one gets prejudice.

§ Mr. Atkinson
The hon. Gentleman has slightly lost me on that one, but I shall read the record.
One of the points about new clause 13 are the words that the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality said at the start of his speech. I wrote them down and I hope that I have got them more or less right. He said that, in some circumstances, hunting causes significantly less suffering than other methods of control. If that is what he believes, why is he saying that one cannot hunt between 1 August and 1 November? Where is the logic to introducing a close season when he accepts that, in certain circumstances, it is necessary to control foxes by the use of hounds because that causes less suffering?
112 Imposing a close season is done for no other reason than to protect a species, but new clause 13 will not protect a species. It will simply stop an activity—hunting—during that time. This ludicrous and illogical new clause is the result of a shabby deal with the RSPCA and says that one can snare foxes between I August and 1 November, but not hunt them. Where is the logic in that? The research carried out by hunting organisations shows that the foxes killed in the period of what is now known as autumn hunting are not necessarily young foxes. Up to nearly half of them are adult foxes. Any land manager or gamekeeper will say that is when they put pheasants in release pens and that it is an important time for fox control. To close off a useful method of control in that time is utterly illogical.

§ Mr. Gray
My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. Does he not agree that one of the oddest aspects of new clause 13 is that it will still make it theoretically strictly legal to kill newly born foxes in May, June and July but that it will make it illegal to kill them in August, September and October when they are grown up?

§ Mr. Atkinson
That is right. Although it might not be pleasant, if I were a gamekeeper or farmer, I would say that the only way to control fox numbers is to shoot lactating vixens. In that way, the cubs die. That is the way to reduce fox numbers. I would deplore that, and I am sure that my hon. Friend would. However, if we leave fox control to inexperienced people, such activities will happen.
I tell the hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) that farmers do not have lamps and high-power rifles. Some have shotguns and some do not. I have an upland constituency in which there are sheep farms. In one area, all the tenant farmers of the Ministry of Defence elect the local hunt as their pest controller. If the hunt did not exist, the farmers would have to control foxes despite having little time or expertise. The methods used would vastly increase foxes' suffering compared with that caused by traditional hunting methods.

§ Gregory Barker
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that there are few high-power rifles in the community. In my part of East Sussex, the general population would be absolutely horrified by the thought of a proliferation of high-power rifles, especially because no settlement, road, village, farmhouse or livestock are more than a short distance from anywhere that could be a vantage point for the firing of such a rifle. The prospect is grotesque.

§ Mr. Atkinson
My hon. Friend makes a good point that brings me on to deer control on Exmoor. Bodmin moor has been mentioned and it has a completely different landscape to Exmoor. Exmoor is a small patchwork of land with high hedges and many wooded areas. It would be extremely dangerous to use a rifle in such an area. Over the years, small patches of land have been created, often with different owners, which is a different type of land ownership to that in Scotland, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray).
113 If a deer were shot and wounded in a field in Exmoor, it would move to another field in no time at all. That field would not necessarily belong to the same person as that in which the deer was shot, so anyone who tried to shoot it again would be guilty of an offence. That is why the overarching control carried out by the three packs of deer hounds in the south-west has resulted in an extremely healthy deer population.

§ Mr. Swire
My hon. Friend makes a good point that is substantiated by the situation on Dartmoor. The military has to be extremely careful when firing weapons because of the rightful proliferation of those who wish to walk in Dartmoor and experience its natural beauty. Can he imagine a whole lot of farmers being released on to Dartmoor and loosing off against foxes while ramblers were all over the place? The idea beggars belief.

§ Mr. Atkinson
I can predict what would happen on Exmoor without staghounds. Farmers would have to get together to operate a system of deer control. A red deer is a hungry animal but it has another characteristic: it is valuable. The venison from a red deer is worth much more than most of the livestock that Exmoor farmers rear commercially. The temptation to organise deer drives to convert a pest into the valuable commodity of venison would be overwhelming. I assure hon. Members that within a year or two of the end of deer hunting on Exmoor, there would be a decline in the number and quality of deer and a change to methods of deer management.
Many of my hon. Friends and I put our names to an amendment that the Government have taken from us relating to hares and coursing. It is disappointing—and also wrong—that an argument cannot be made to show that utility is attached to coursing. If we are to have a licensing system, the registrar should consider coursing and deer hunting in the same light as fox hunting. A strong argument for why coursing has utility is that it preserves many hares. Some hon. Members and, I fear, many people in the country think that a hare is simply let out of a box during organised coursing. The hon. Member for West Lancashire (Mr. Pickthall) will know that that is not the case. All hares at a coursing meeting are wild. Between 600 and 700 healthy hares are required to hold a coursing meeting on such a scale as the Waterloo cup. Much game management is required to encourage hares to live on an estate of such a size wildly and freely. If the activity were banned, the impetus for that would be gone.
There are parts of East Anglia in which hares are usually numerous. However, one will hardly see a hare on estates in which coursing no longer takes place, but there are masses on estates in which coursing occurs, such as those in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham). That represents a good argument to support the utility of coursing.

§ Mr. Bellingham
My hon. Friend is right. The Swaffham coursing club courses more than 10,000 acres of my constituency, and there are a large number of hares on those acres. On the other side of the River Ouse, in fen country, one hardly sees a hare.

§ Mr. Atkinson
That is right. One hardly sees hares in areas where coursing used to take place, like parts of Northumberland and Durham, which used to have the famous Durham union club. That is a great pity.

§ Mr. Russell Brown (Dumfries)
Hare coursing has taken place in my constituency for many years. Hares are brought in from Yorkshire because of the shortage.

§ Mr. Atkinson
That is not the case. I know the estate where that coursing meeting occurs. The historical reason for moving hares is as part of game management. It is possible to improve the breeding stock by introducing new blood into it. That is what the coursing world has done for many years. In my view, that is good game management and something to be proud of, not something to condemn.

§ Mr. Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire)
Is it not also the case that, from time to time, hares are specifically brought into coursing areas where there is a shortage in order to be coursed, not to improve bloodstock? It is not possible to improve bloodstock if the hare has been coursed and killed.

§ Mr. Atkinson
The hon. Gentleman has attended the Waterloo cup for a few years, at least at a distance, because I have seen him. He should know that that is not the case. If a hare is put down in a place with which it is unfamiliar, it will be uncourseable. It will run around in circles and be completely lost. It will not test the dogs properly, which is what people who like coursing want it to do. The object of coursing is to test greyhounds, not to kill hares. If a hare does not know where it is, it will be an unsatisfactory hare. Hare coursers do not do what the hon. Gentleman suggests, but they do introduce hares for breeding purposes.
I do not want to get into a long discourse on the nuances of coursing, although I would be happy to do so. It is shame that hare coursers cannot make the same case of utility. Whether the registrar agrees with their case is neither here nor there, but they should at least have the opportunity to make that case.
We have come to a sad moment for Conservative Members. There are two choices: new clause 13, which is death by 1,000 cuts for the countryside, or new clause 11, which is an outright and total ban. I hope that their lordships give the Bill the savaging it richly deserves.

Several hon. Members
rose—

§ Mr. Deputy Speaker
Order. We are running out of time and there have only been five Back-Bench contributions so far. If hon. Members bear that in mind, we might manage to include everyone who wants to speak.

§ Kate Hoey
I do not know how different my constituents are from those of other Labour Members, but I have one of the largest surgeries, with 35 to 45 people attending, and I have yet to come across someone who has raised this issue with me. I want to put the debate in context: it is not a priority issue for people in my constituency. That is not to say that some of my constituents do not want to ban hunting, but it certainly does not warrant the time that we have spent on it over the past five years. It is however deplorable that if we are to discuss the Bill, we have so little time in which to do it that we will fail to reach many of the new clauses and amendments.
When the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality spoke on Second Reading, I genuinely thought it was an attempt, in his words, to find something that will stand the test of time."—[Official Report, 16 December 2002; Vol. 396, c. 571.] He said that he would stick to principle and evidence, but he has not stood by his principles. It seems that the Minister applied no logic to the way in which he treated the Bill in Committee. If hunting is to be subject to utility tests, all types of hunting should be subject to the same utility tests. Without ever really looking at the evidence, we said that deer hunting and hare coursing should be banned. In Committee, we introduced extra bans, which were supported by the Minister, even though he had said that he would consider the evidence and apply the test of cruelty every time a ban was proposed.
We have got into the absurd situation whereby we are to ban the use of terriers underground, but the Minister hopes that an amendment will be passed, perhaps in the other place, to allow gamekeepers to continue to use terriers. There is no logic to that. It is nonsensical to say that it is okay for gamekeepers to use terriers underground to flush out foxes, but not for farmers, people who are hunting or landowners who need to dispatch a fox. That shows that, as we know deep down, the Bill is not about animal welfare. I wish it were about animal welfare. If the House really cared about that, we would be discussing a huge number of other issues, such as battery farming. Despite the efforts of Labour Members to promote those issues, however, we never get time to discuss the real cruelty that goes on, such as the way in which we allow horses to be exported to Europe and killed using appalling methods.
Nobody takes an interest in such issues because there is a zealotry about hunting, and about people in red coats taking part in a sport that has been around for a long time. Some Labour Members, and a few Opposition Members, would not accept any evidence that favoured hunting by people in red coats. They might go along with the idea of hunting by people in Wales or the idea of an occasional fell hunt. In fact, however, if the Bill is passed, the gun packs will be affected, and there will be little chance of such hunting taking place.
What do the people who supposedly care about animal welfare want to take place instead of hunting? They want to allow practices such as lamping. Lamping can work in some situations. However, in a 2003 report called "The Futility of Upland Hunting", the League Against Cruel Sports interviewed people who go out 116 lamping. They tried to pretend that lamping is a serious method of killing foxes and that no one would dare enjoy it. However, the interviews showed that lampers were indulging in a sport, not simply killing foxes; they were out to have a good time. They described how they enjoyed going out with a spot lamp at night, looking for foxes' eyes glowing. Of course, there have been many incidents of domestic animals being killed in lamping.

§ Mr. Soames
Does the hon. Lady also accept that many people go out to shoot rabbits using precisely the same method, and yet rabbiting is apparently to be entirely exempt from a ban, as is ratting?

§ Kate Hoey
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The Bill is inconsistent. Why is it not okay to hunt hares when it is okay to hunt rabbits? That shows that the Bill has been devised by people who take an attitude of zealotry towards those who hunt. They are opposed to hunting, and they are not prepared to listen.
I want to pay tribute to the hundreds of women who spent last night and all day in Parliament square. If only some of my hon. Friends had had the decency to go and talk to those young, middle-aged and elderly women who live in the countryside and know what this is all about, rather than treating them with contempt.
The saddest thing about this whole process is that there has been no listening at all. At Portcullis House, everyone involved in hunting produced a huge amount of work and put in great deal of effort, but it was all simply ignored because some of the facts did not fit in with the Minister's or the Government's intentions.

§ Mr. Garnier
I have had occasion in previous debates to thank the hon. Lady, who is my London Member of Parliament—in fact, I think she represents quite a few hon. Members—for the position that she has, very bravely, taken on this issue. I asked the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality about his wonderful golden thread. During parliamentary Labour party discussions about the Bill, has the hon. Lady been able to discern the golden thread, or does she think that it exists only in the Minister's mind and has no real connection with the philosophy behind the Bill?

§ Kate Hoey
There could only have been a golden thread if the utility test had been made much wider to encompass wildlife management and conservation, but those concepts have been left out of the utility test, so it is not a real utility test at all.
Let me talk about some of the other methods that we are expected to go along with because fox hunting is so cruel. Poison baits—

§ Mr. Michael Jabez Foster
Before the hon. Lady leaves the issue of collateral damage to cats and dogs caused by lamping, is she interested to know that I, who represent a rural constituency, hear from my constituents that their cats and dogs are often the subject of the hunt's fury in their own gardens? How can that be dealt with?

§ Kate Hoey
In fact, I did not mention cats—I would not dream of mentioning cats, as I do not particularly like them. Clearly such incidents are traumatic for the people concerned. However, I am absolutely clear that the middle way group licensing proposals and the regulation that already exists could be used to ensure that the hunts involved in such incidents have to make reparations and ensure that it does not happen again. That is not a reason to ban hunting. Accidents happen in every activity.
To return to poison baits, DEFRA is currently testing a poison known as T3327 for use in poison bait for possible use against foxes during a rabies outbreak. In tests, caged foxes convulsed, retched and showed obvious signs of distress before death occurred—but that is all right to those who want a ban. If it is not being done by people in red coats, it is fine.
In Committee, the hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) talked a lot about live cages as the way to trap foxes. It is interesting that the National Federation of Badger Groups is totally opposed to live cages, saying that they inflict a brutal death on badgers. Presumably, however, it is all right to be brutal to foxes—they do not matter.

§ Andrew George
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving me the opportunity to mention—for the fourth time, I believe—my cousin's live cage on his poultry farm in the middle of a deeply rural area. It has often been argued that live cages can only be used in an urban setting, but that is clearly not true. As far as I am concerned, live cages offer the most humane way to dispatch foxes. If she wants to come to my constituency, meet my cousin and see the live cage in action, with the fox dispatched with a single shot on every occasion, I will be happy to show her.

§ Kate Hoey
The hon. Gentleman extended the same invitation to members of the Committee. If any of them took advantage of it, perhaps I can talk to them about it. However, it cannot be true that live cage traps are humane for use on foxes and mink but inhumane for use on badgers. The alternatives to hunting—

§ Mr. Morley
Will my hon. Friend give way?

§ Kate Hoey
I will give way to the Minister in my own time.
People who are seriously concerned about animal welfare and cruelty cannot possibly believe that any of the alternatives to hunting are better than what is happening at the moment.

§ Mr. Morley
I want to correct my hon. Friend on the issue of live traps and badgers. The National Federation of Badger Groups—it is a fine organisation—is entitled to its views. However, in relation to the badger control experiments that are supervised by Professor Burns, there is an independent welfare audit of cage trapping. That audit has come to the conclusion that it is a humane method if it is carried out properly. Overall, 118 cage trapping is recognised by all who are involved in pest control or wildlife management as one of the most humane ways of trapping and dispatching animals.

§ Kate Hoey
I would rather listen to fox hunters and see things for myself, and I went to see what happened on Exmoor. On this issue, I would rather listen to the National Federation of Badger Groups than perhaps the contents of an independent analysis which I have not read, or the Minister. I know that my hon. Friend has a long-standing view and wants to ban fox hunting. Presumably he will be in a position this evening to urge his right hon. and hon. Friends to vote for his new clause, although I know that he would like to be arguing that they should vote for new clause 11.
The Government said that they wanted to win support for a new way of handling this contentious issue. However, I think that they have failed to win the consent of the people who are being legislated against and whom he is seeking to legislate upon. I do not believe that the Minister will ever obtain his goal of securing legislation that will stand the test of time by going down the route that is being pursued. If one of the options is adopted this evening and if the Government try to force through the Parliament Act, it would be outrageous.

§ Paul Holmes (Chesterfield)
The Bill, as amended in Committee, bans all hare and deer hunting with dogs. It is highly likely that the House will pass new clause 11, thereby adding the fox to that list. Of the existing hunting packs, that would leave only the mink hunts to be able to attempt to register on grounds of least cruelty or utility. On those grounds, I think that the case against mink hunting with dogs is as clear cut as that against the hunting of hare, deer or foxes with dogs.
I accept the need to control mink and, if possible, to eradicate them. They are an alien species that were introduced artificially to the United Kingdom, as were many other species such as the grey squirrel or the pheasant, which no one seeks to eradicate, or the coypu or the muskrat, which have been eradicated.
The evidence is clear that hunting with dogs will not achieve either the eradication or control of mink, and certainly not without unnecessary cruelty. Mink hunting with dogs therefore fails both the utility and cruelty tests. I believe that at best it would remain in the Bill as a fig leaf for the concept of registration.
We are told that we should take a great deal of notice of the Burns report. We know that widespread evidence was taken on these issues. On page 106, it concluded: It is clear that the contribution made by mink hunts to the control of the mink population nationally is insignificant…Because mink hunts kill relatively small numbers of mink…and the hunting does not have any significant effect on the mink population at a national or regional level…the majority of mink found by hounds evade capture. On the other hand, at page 105 the Burns report concluded that trapping is recognised as the main method of controlling mink, and it is widely used by gamekeepers, water bailiffs, farmers and others. Trapping has been used to eradicate coypu and muskrat entirely. The Hebridean project has found 10 per cent. 119 of mink to be trap shy. However, as the Minister said in Committee on 6 February, a range of measures to improve trap success could be applied, such as baits, attractants, lures, mirrors and trap design."—[Official Report, Standing Committee F, 6 February 2003; c. 848.] The Burns inquiry concluded that research shows that intensive trapping in an area can remove most of the local population of mink.
Hunting mink with packs of dogs is inefficient and so fails the utility test, but it is also damaging both to ground-nesting birds and to the otter populations that the pro-hunters say they are keen to protect. The wildlife trusts in their submission to the Burns inquiry said: Mink hunting may, in some cases, damage riverine habitat and disturb riverine species at particularly sensitive times of the year…Mink hunting may have a direct impact on otters both in terms of disturbance and in preventing otters from re-colonising and establishing in sensitive areas. They concluded: Mink hunting is not the most effective form of pest control. The Environment Agency said in its evidence that mink hunting with dogs was an ineffective method of control". It wishes to discourage mink hunting where otters and other wildlife may be disturbed, which effectively means along any river bank. Indeed, it could be argued that as the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 makes it illegal to disturb an otter or its holt, mink hunts are already illegal.
Let us be under no illusion—mink hunting with dogs is as cruel as the hunting of foxes, deer or hares with dogs. The mink hunting season runs from March to September and straddles the breeding season. Female mink are therefore hunted when pregnant or nursing their cubs. The dogs, often retrained foxhounds, are followed on foot, and the so-called sporting element derives from the contest between the huntsman, enabling his dogs to follow the scent left by the tiring quarry, and the frantic escape attempts of the mink.
Donald Broom, a professor of animal welfare at Cambridge university, concluded in a scientific review of the literature on the welfare of hunted animals that as mink are able to learn simple tasks in laboratories, exhibit complex social organisation and live in established areas it can be assumed that hunting with hounds may cause considerable disruption of their normal behaviour patterns as well as fear and distress.

§ Gregory Barker
What scientific evidence does the hon. Gentleman have to support the theory that the killing of mink with dogs is crueller than killing them in any other way, such as wounding with a rifle?

§ Paul Holmes
If the hon. Gentleman had been listening carefully, he would know that I have already answered that in great detail. I have not talked about shooting mink at all but about humane trapping, and have cited extensive evidence submitted to the Burns inquiry and the clear-cut conclusion on three separate pages of the Burns report that trapping was far more humane and effective than hunting with dogs.
120 The Burns inquiry was specifically told not to look into cruelty issues surrounding hunting or pass judgment on them. None the less, as with most of the hunted species that Burns looked at, the inquiry concluded that mink hunting with dogs

§ Dr. Palmer
The hon. Gentleman is making a quietly persuasive speech, as he often does. I do not know whether he was in the Chamber when I asked the Minister about the impact of voting on the later stages of the Bill. However, now that the Minister has confirmed that if the vote on the banning of fox hunting is carried, part 2 will be dropped, does he agree that the argument for dropping mink hunting to smooth the passage of the Bill falls away? If we are going to have to tidy up the Bill anyway, we may as well take the unique opportunity to end the cruel sport of mink hunting.

§ Paul Holmes
I agree completely. I referred earlier to the fact that mink hunting may be left as a fig leaf for the registration process. However, given the assurance that we received earlier—and I have been present throughout our debate—that defence, or fig leaf, is, as the hon. Gentleman says, no longer necessary.
Mink escaped into the wild after their introduction to the UK for fur farming in 1928. However, the 20 mink hunts only appeared in the 1970s after otter hunting was outlawed in the face of the same vociferous opposition from hunters as we hear today. Mink hunting with packs of dogs is a sport, if such an activity can be so termed. However, as a means of controlling or eradicating mink, it fails the utility and cruelty tests. Many pro-hunters often accuse anti-hunters of having a strange anthropomorphic view of animals—the fox, hare or deer are cuddly animals that should not be hunted or killed. Members who are going to vote for new clause 11, if they do not agree with that interpretation, should support clause 14, unless they are guilty of regarding practices that they believe to be cruel and lacking utility when applied to hunting hare, deer or foxes as acceptable if applied to the hunting of mink.

§ Mr. Steinberg
I support new clause 11 and will vote against Government new clause 13 with pleasure. Let me make it clear from the start that new clause 11 will not in any way wreck the Bill, as was reported in the newspapers over the weekend. In fact, as far as I am concerned, it will make the Bill acceptable, and it will keep the promise that I have made to my constituents since I became a Member of Parliament in 1987.
I am bitterly disappointed with the Government's attitude towards hunting with dogs. If my memory serves me correctly, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) substantiated this, it has been a manifesto commitment since about 1987. The manipulation that we have witnessed today, whether it has come from the Whips Office or the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has been a disgraceful attempt to stop us pressing new clause 11 to a Division. From the stories that I have heard, it seems that the Committee, too, was conned. This entire debate should have taken place in Committee and we should not be voting this evening on a clause to ban fox hunting. That should have been done in Committee.
121 My disappointment began in 1997, when an overwhelming majority of the House voted for fox hunting to be banned—411 voted for and 151 voted against a ban. What did the Labour Government do? With a long history of commitment to the issue and a magnificent majority to carry it out, they did nothing. The party leadership let the Bill fall.

§ Dr. Palmer
Although I sympathise up to a point, does not my hon. Friend feel that he is being a little harsh? Tonight, for the first time, we have the opportunity and the realistic prospect of banning hunting for good. We have the Labour Government to thank for that. They have taken too long over it, but we have got there.

§ Mr. Steinberg
That is one way of looking at it. No, I do not think I am being too harsh. We have had an opportunity since 1997. We have had a majority of more than 100 in the House for the past six years, we made a commitment, and we have not carried it out. I am delighted with the situation tonight but no, I do not think I have been too harsh. I have raised the matter many a time with my hon. Friend the Minister for the Environment. In fact, I have stopped buying him drinks because of his attitude towards it.

§ Dr. Stoate
Given the overwhelming majority of hon. Members who have expressed a clear opinion on what they want—a total ban on such a cruel and barbaric sport—would it not have been better if the Bill had been constructed in Committee to allow that to happen with the minimum fuss and bother, so that we could all have got what we wanted with far less trouble than we have had this evening?

§ Mr. Steinberg
Absolutely right. That is the point that I was trying to make. If the Committee had done its job properly—I do not mean that disrespectfully towards the Committee—if it had not been brainwashed and bullied, we would not be in the situation that we are in tonight. The debate could have been over quickly and we could all have been home now.
There have been several approaches since 1997, which have frustrated my constituents, me and the general public because of the lack of commitment by the Government to the promise that they made many years ago. The issue may be of low priority, but its political significance is very great. However, being an optimistic chap, I was delighted when I heard that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality, the newly promoted DEFRA Minister, was to introduce yet another hunting Bill. I was delighted and very confident, because he had served on the previous hunting Bill and had made a good defence of the abolition of hunting, so I was certain that he would find a way forward and resolve the issue cleanly and clearly.
However, I was to be bitterly disappointed. In December 2002, DEFRA introduced a Bill that turned around the objectives of previous Bills on hunting with dogs and offered a ban on hunting, with provision for licensed and humane pest control. No one wanted to take away the rights of farmers to protect their stock.
122 The Bill introduced for the first time proposals to license fox hunting. I was bemused. If I recollect correctly, the House clearly rejected a licensing system in 2001 when the then Home Secretary, now the Foreign Secretary, proposed his options Bill, which was defeated heavily in the House.

I pay tribute to colleagues who served on the Committee, who attempted to reverse the objectives back to a focus on pest control. They succeeded to a degree, but we are left with a Bill that allows the licensing of the chasing of foxes and of mink. Many constituents cannot and will not understand how the House of Commons can justify introducing different welfare standards for different wild animals, especially as we have spent more than 120 hours debating the issue each time with the same result. Hunting serves no useful purpose, is cruel and should be banned.

As we can see this evening, the Bill has come out of Committee pleasing no one. It is a typical liberal fudge, hoping to appease the fox hunters and those who support abolition. In essence, the Bill will do the opposite of what it intends. As we see this evening, it has alienated everyone in all parties. One cannot please everyone and be sincere, unless of course one is a Liberal when attempting to do that. I should not be nasty; some of them will be supporting us tonight.

There is no middle way of licensing. A document posted to me recently from a Reverend Professor Linzey from Oxford university—I had never heard of him—contained an interesting quote. He said: Licensing does not resolve the issue. It devolves it from Parliament (where the decision should be taken) to a three-member tribunal who will decide on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, licensing by definition authorises what was not authorised before. It therefore legitimises hunting, gives it authority and legal standing. Licensing is a step backwards—not a step forwards.

§ Lembit Öpik
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Steinberg
I will not. The hon. Gentleman has had a good say today. I want to get on because others want to get in.
Licensing has done nothing to abolish fox hunting, which clearly the Bill set out to do. The Bill has banned hare coursing and hunting and deer hunting, but not fox hunting, which was the prime aim in the first place. Fox hunting was the core issue and it has been ignored. If it is wrong to hunt hare and deer, I cannot for the life of me understand why it is not wrong to hunt foxes and mink. It is not logical to me.
A while ago I watched the Prime Minister promise on television to ban fox hunting. It is now all a matter of trust and those who put their trust in the Government to ban fox hunting must not be let down. Not to deliver would be a further nail in the coffin of this Government. The right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) used the word "ratted". That will be an apt word if the Bill does not go through this evening with a total ban.
The Government and the Prime Minister promised that the decision made by this House would be respected and accepted and that, if necessary, the Parliament Act would be used if the Bill failed to pass through the House 123 of Lords. If this promise is not kept, we on this side of the House will suffer the consequences at the ballot box, and rightly so. The Government must not try to wriggle out of the commitment that they have given to pacify a loud but tiny minority.
Many questions need to be asked. Why did the Bill not provide the fox with the same protection as deer and hare? Why could not the Bill have been drafted so as to give protection to these wild mammals while providing pest control measures? What evidence do we have that a ban with sensible measures would not be passed or supported by the Government? Why do we read or hear that any move to tighten the Bill might result in the Parliament Act not being used? I am delighted to say that my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton has wheedled out of the Government this evening that, regardless of how the Bill leaves the House this evening, it will qualify for the Parliament Act. That is a step forward.
The Committee significantly strengthened the Bill, but it still allows the registrar to issue a licence for hunters to chase and kill mink and foxes. How can I go back to my constituents and party workers and state that hunting is banned, when we know that very soon—if the Bill stays as the Committee left it—we will see television footage of the first successful applicant hunt going out in its normal way?
That will not help build the trust that the Government are so keen to restore. If I were standing at the next election, I would be very anxious about the number of votes that I would lose on this issue. I, and many of my colleagues, have signed countless pledges and early-day motions, not to mention voting for a ban on at least three other occasions. No doubt many colleagues have also written letter after letter expressing support for and commitment to an outright ban on hunting with dogs.
Indeed, I remind the House—[Interruption.] I am coming to an end now. I have sat here for five hours, and now I am going to have my say. I remind the House of the Minister's speech in the Commons, before his return to the Government, in which he stated: It is entirely wrong to think that a licensing system, giving rise to all sorts of bureaucracy and complications, would resolve the problems relating to animal welfare and caused by animal cruelty."—[Official Report, 27 February 2001; Vol. 363, c. 836.] That is why I support new clause 11, which was tabled by the majority of the Committee on the Hunting Bill and supported by more than 140 of my colleagues. I support both the Minister's statement then and the new clause now, and call on the Government to give Back Benchers of all parties, party workers and the general public what they want: a complete ban on hunting with dogs, to resolve this issue once and for all. Then we can start to build good relations with the general public once again.

§ Mr. Soames
That was as depressing and ignorant a speech as I have heard in the past 20 years—a turgid, ignorant recital of prejudice of the worst sort.
I want to cover three points relating to new clause 13. First, I want to quote from a letter from Dr. Lewis Thomas, a vet, who is the secretary of a group of vets, numbering 520 members of the Royal College of 124 Veterinary Surgeons. I hope that the Minister will listen to the quotation, considering his sham interest in animal welfare. The letter says: Be assured therefore that any legislation that bans or seriously restricts hunting the four quarry species cannot be regarded as having the welfare of wild animals as its primary objective. In fact, such legislation will cause unnecessary suffering, albeit largely unseen by a sensitive public, for which these legislators will be responsible. I hope that the House will remember that when we come to vote.
Many of my colleagues and I, along with hundreds of thousands of people in this country, support hunting. I join the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) in paying tribute to the many women of all ages in Parliament square who have come to demonstrate and show their feelings under the banner of Families for Hunting, in some frightful weather, about the terrible thing that the House is about to do.
I feel a terrible sense of betrayal. The six-month consultation undertaken by DEFRA, which was meant to be so fair and even-handed, with a Minister who was prepared to listen, has turned out to be nothing but a cynical sham and a fraud. Personally, I always believed that it would be so, and I said so at the time, but it was right to enter into it in a wholehearted way because of the assurances that we were given by the Minister. It has turned out to be a most disgraceful sham.
The new clause merely consolidates the Committee stage bans on hare hunting and the use of dogs below ground, as well as the original ban on deer hunting. It seems extraordinary to impose a closed season on fox hunting from 1 August to the end of October, which is precisely the time when the hunts can do the maximum pest control. It is when the greatest amount of good is done—when the cubs are dispersed more widely across the countryside, when the farmers can be assured that some of the cubs will be killed, and when the end result is a much better ordered and better balanced countryside.
This restriction is wholly unjustified and absolutely unnecessary. It is quite contrary to anything in the Burns report, and it is clear that there is no apparent reason, other than political expediency, for the Minister to introduce such a measure. As I said, we are talking about a time when the Masters of Foxhounds Association's packs account for about 40 per cent. of its annual cull. This measure is blatantly discriminatory. Why is fox hunting banned during these months, and not other methods of control? All the major land management organisations in England and Wales recognise the need for fox control and support the status quo.
One of the most shameful aspects of the lengthy deliberations in Committee was the Government's persistent refusal to accept, or to pay attention to, any of the amendments that were tabled in completely good faith. At a time when it is important to improve the agri-environmental systems in this country, it was particularly astonishing that all the proposals that were made on environmental grounds were dispatched as if they stood for naught. I hope that the Minister can assure me that the Government paid attention to the excellent independent study on field sports and conservation produced by the Durrell institute of 125 conservation and ecology at the university of Kent. The study concludes:
We found that landowners participating in field sports maintained the most established woodland and planted more new woodland and hedgerows than those who did not, despite the equal availability of subsidies. Therefore voluntary habitat management appears to be important for biodiversity conservation in Britain. Current debates on the future of field sports in Britain, and similar activities globally, may benefit from considering their utility as incentives to conserve additional habitat on private land". I should also like to say something about deer hunting. The response of the Exmoor national park authority has been mentioned. I want the Minister to understand—[Interruption.] He does not understand, and neither does the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality—[Interruption.] The right hon. Gentleman laughs in a cavalier way, but he has not got a clue what he is going to do. He is going to be party to a cultural and ecological tragedy in the management of the red deer on Exmoor. I shall read to him again, so that he may be ashamed when he hears it, what the Exmoor national park authority had to say about the management of red deer:

§ Mr. Morley
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Soames
No, I will not. It seems extraordinary that the Government should wish to inflict this on Exmoor: that they should wish wilfully to destroy, in such an astonishingly prejudiced and ignorant manner, the extraordinarily intricate tapestry that binds a remote and remarkable part of the United Kingdom together.
As was said earlier, it is a fact that conservation and hunting go very much hand in hand, and with that in mind I shall conclude by saying something about the use of terriers. We had an extremely important debate in Committee about the use of terriers by keepers. I understand and accept what the Minister said: that he intends to introduce an amendment in another place—because he dare not do it in this House. But the fact of the matter is that if keepers are denied the use of terriers, in many areas of the uplands the environmental consequences will be very serious indeed.
9.30 pm
Few Government Members—one or two, but very few—care at all about what exists in the uplands, but ground-nesting game and birds are extremely vulnerable to the attacks of foxes. If keepers are not allowed to use their terriers in the rightful pursuit of their employment to maintain a healthy and proper balance between the numbers of predators and ground-nesting game, there will be an ecological disaster in the uplands with extremely serious employment consequences. Nobody bothers to consider that, but it is every bit as important to those people as it is to the people on Exmoor who are 126 going to see not only an important and much loved part of their cultural heritage and their life swept away by a piece of astonishingly foolish legislation, but an ecological disaster.
All Conservative Members who set their hearts on producing a reasonable and fair result and on finding a sensible way forward feel betrayed by the wicked actions of an unprincipled Government.

§ Mr. Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire)
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) because, whatever one says, it is bound to sound reasonable by comparison.
I shall be brief because there is little point in rehearsing the arguments for and against hunting in its various forms. The arguments that go on here seldom change anyone's mind. To pick up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey)—that we were remiss in not going to talk to the ladies demonstrating over the road—she should know that I, along with my hon. Friends the Members for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) and for Falmouth and Camborne (Ms Atherton) and many others represent large rural areas. Part of our professional life is therefore devoted to talking to the local people of those areas.
I signed new clause 13 and came with the intention of speaking in favour of it and probably of abstaining on new clause 11. I believed that my right hon. Friend the Minister was absolutely correct to say that the difference between the Bill that went before the Committee and the amended Bill was very narrow; that we were on course to achieve 90 to 95 per cent. of what most Government Members wanted; and that new clause 13 and other relevant provisions would further strengthen the Bill.
I served on the Standing Committee, which I believe did a brilliant job of strengthening the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg) rather parodies the process in saying that we were conned, but I do not think that we were. I was not the only member of the Committee who believed that it was important for the whole House to pass the ban on hunting, in whatever form, with a majority of 200 plus, in preference to gaining a majority of 10 or so in Committee and passing the measure on to the House for simple ratification. The intervention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, though tough and outspoken, was not wholly necessary.
What changed my mind was the straightforward clarification offered earlier in today's debate by my right hon. Friend and Mr. Speaker—I fully support what my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster) said about that—that the Bill, as amended, had time to go to the House of Lords during this Session, therefore achieving everything that we wanted.
Previously, I admit, I was frightened that we were taking a terrible risk, that if the whole Bill were kicked into the long grass, the plug were pulled, or exercise of the Parliament Acts was deemed not to be suitable, we could lose a very good Bill, and that we would have enormous difficulties explaining that to our constituents, to whom we had promised action on the matter. I had no problem in explaining to people to whom I had promised that I would support a total ban, why the Alun Michael Bill, if I may refer to it like that 127 was a perfectly reasonable alternative, which avoided the risk of our losing the Bill. However, what we were told this afternoon made it clear that there was the possibility, the likelihood, the probability and, I hope, the certainty of us getting a total ban, and a relatively simple Bill in comparison to what we were discussing, through this House, through its recommittal, through into the House of Lords before the end of the Session. I have campaigned against hunting all my adult life, so I and all my colleagues on the Labour Benches could not but seize that opportunity.
My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham described himself as an optimistic chap. If he is an optimistic chap, I am an Olympic athlete, but, like him, I am optimistic as from today about what can be achieved. I have supported my right hon. Friend the Minister and still support him through thick and thin on the Bill. He has done a magnificent job in very difficult circumstances. He should take note of the concerns that have been expressed mainly on the Labour Benches that new clause 13 and new clause 11 are in the wrong order. It has been improper for us to be faced with that particular alternative, however it came about. I plead with him to think about the possibility that new clause 13 should not be put to the vote, so that we can first have a serious, crucially important vote on new clause 11, because virtually every Labour Member, as well as a huge majority in the Labour party generally and people out there in the country are in favour of it.

§ Mr. Cameron
I rise to speak against new clause 13. I put my cards on the table. I ride; I have been hunting; and I shoot. On occasions I have been asked to shoot foxes and I know what a hit and miss affair it can be—not in my case, but I know that it can be.
I was not a member of the Committee, but I believe that I do know something about which I am going to speak. Mr. Speaker, you asked us to be calm, but I find it very hard to be calm on this issue. I do not just disapprove of the Bill. I heartily dislike it. What I believe about this debate—and we have heard a lot of it today—is that it is born out of prejudice and misunderstanding.
Many hon. Members have talked about what has happened over the past five years. In many ways, it has been Back Benchers on both sides of the House who have put huge pressure on the Government to introduce a Bill against hunting because those Members so dislike the ritual, the chase, the redcoats. Then, those on the Front Bench are left with the difficult problem of how to ban the hunting of mammals by dogs. In some circumstances, and we have it in the Bill, if one is chasing rabbits, it is okay, but if one is chasing hares it is not. We go through all these twists and turns to prove it.
We have had a fascinating debate today about terrier work. The Minister is telling us that it is all right for a gamekeeper to use terriers underground but it is not all right for a farmer to use terriers underground. How can that be justified? We have had months of tergiversation: the Minister moves one way, then another and no one can make sense of it. Here is our countryside Minister, who should be thinking about post office closures, the crisis in agriculture, broadband and a hundred other things, having to spend all his time thinking about how to try to ban hunting with dogs.
128 The other reason why I find it hard to be calm is that I think about my constituents who are employed by the hunts. I think of Anthony Adams, the huntsman with the Heythrop who wrote to me to say that he had had 27 seasons of animal welfare. That is how he saw his job. He simply does not know what he will do when the hounds and the horses are gone. I give way to my neighbour.

§ Mr. Clifton-Brown
Does my neighbour accept that the countryside Minister to whom he has referred has presided over 65,000 job losses in agriculture over the past four years? If the Bill goes through tonight and introduces a ban, 8,500 direct jobs will be lost and at least treble that number of indirect jobs.

§ Mr. Cameron
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Minister should come to the Heythrop hunt kennels in Chipping Norton to explain to those people why they will lose their jobs and homes. It is all for prejudice and misunderstanding.
New clause 13 will make a bad Bill much worse. I say that because the Minister used to talk about his golden thread of cruelty and utility. That golden thread has completely gone, as the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) said. Where is the test for cruelty and utility with autumn hunting? It does not exist. Where is the test for cruelty and utility with hare hunting or deer hunting? The Government have thrown the golden thread out the window.
I take a straightforward view: the fox population has to be controlled and hunting plays a role in that.

§ Lembit Öpik
Despite what has been said, it is absolutely clear from the research that the middle way group has conducted—anyone who looks at the facts can see this for themselves, and the research is not secret—that banning hunting with dogs increases the suffering. Hunting with dogs means zero per cent. wounding; shooting means a substantial wounding rate. If people think that they are improving the welfare of foxes in the countryside by voting for new clause 13 or new clause 11, they are wrong.

§ Mr. Cameron
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I pay tribute to the middle way group for trying to introduce some science and thought into the process. The fact is that if we ban hunting, the number of foxes killed will not go down but will rise. The amount of suffering and cruelty will go up. I go back to Burns, who said that we have to consider the welfare effects of the alternatives. None of them is entirely comfortable. Snaring and shooting with shotguns can have serious welfare effects.
People on both sides of the House decided to trust the Government in the Portcullis House process. I am afraid to say that that trust was entirely misplaced. I do not believe that the Government have acted in good faith. New clause 13 is the latest proof of that. Why should there be a ban on all autumn hunting? Why not test it against the principles of cruelty and utility? If the Minister went autumn hunting, he would see that it is the time of greatest utility, when 40 per cent. of foxes are dispatched. It is not a time at which hunts go chasing across the field; it is the time when the hounds do the 129 maximum amount of dealing with foxes, and a great many are dispatched. Closed seasons should be about species, not activities. If the Minister is so concerned, where is the cruelty test in the autumn for shooting or snaring? It is not there. There is no balance or logic in the Bill.
Why is there an outright ban on hare hunting and deer hunting? The Minister said that those would not pass the cruelty or utility tests. How can he know that? If he is setting up a tribunal, why not let it decide? The Government said, and the hon. Member for Vauxhall mentioned it, that they were looking for principle and evidence. I say that they have blown those things apart. Clause 10 of the Bill, to which new clause 13 is linked, says that hunting must pass a test of causing significantly less pain, suffering or distress to the wild mammals than any alternative. Why must it be "significantly"? Why not have an even test between the different methods of dispatching a fox? That underlines the hypocrisy in what Labour Members are saying: they are prepared for foxes to suffer more, even if hunting involves less suffering.

§ Rob Marris
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

§ Mr. Cameron
I will not. I have little time in which to make my final points.
More foxes will probably be killed. There can be no guarantee about animal welfare. The National Farmers Union is very clear about that. It wrote to every hon. Member, and I quote from its letter: We believe that the greater reliance on shooting that would follow a de facto ban on most hunting would increase animal suffering and have adverse effects on public safety in the countryside That is an absolutely clear statement from people who know what they are talking about.
9.45 pm
Hunting is part of the balance of the countryside, which is why banning it would mean more foxes being killed. Hunting foxes is not about eradicating the fox population but about controlling it. One of my Oxfordshire neighbours keeps chickens. He was fed up with foxes taking them so he started shooting foxes. A conversation—quite a lively one—ensued between him and the secretary of the local hunt, after which my neighbour told me: "I understand the nature of the bargain; the hunt is saying that if it controls the number of foxes and I stop shooting them, we shall have a healthy fox population but livestock will be maintained". It is that point most of all to which I wish that hon. Members who are anti-hunting would listen. It is not about eradicating the fox population but about controlling it. Once hunting has been banned, or nearly banned under new clause 13, it will lead to the eradication of the fox population, because foxes will be shot in ever-larger numbers.
When we consider what the Bill has become, with no golden thread of cruelty and utility running through it, we have to ask: why are we registering only fox hunting? Why not register rat catching? If one wants to dispatch a rat, one can shoot it, one can use a terrier or a ferret. There is no control, yet under the Bill we have to have registered regulation of fox hunting.
130 A huntsman from my local hunt asked me whether, if he had worn a Rentokil jacket instead of a red jacket—or in the case of the Heythrop hunt, a green jacket—people might not have minded him hunting. I had to reply that that was possible. Tonight, the Government are doing what I thought would be impossible; they are making a bad Bill worse. I hope that my hon. Friends will join me in the Lobby and vote it down.

§ Alun Michael
Earlier in the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks) accused me of trying to be objective on a matter where people do not want objectivity. He is right. I have tried to be objective throughout the period for which I have been responsible for this area of policy. I have tried to be objective but to remain passionate about banning cruelty and eradicating the cruelty associated with hunting. I have tried to be clinical and effective in getting a good piece of legislation that can be properly enforced and which would be successful. That is what I have tried to do and my hon. Friend was kind enough to acknowledge that.
However, my hon. Friend and others expressed concern that there was an impression that new clause 13 would stand in the way of a vote on new clause 11, and that it was some sort of clever wheeze. I have assured him that that is not the case. In the light of what has been said. I have spoken to my hon. Friend and to my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster), because new clause 13 contains the fulfilment of an undertaking that I gave Members in Committee, especially my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester. It is with his understanding, therefore, that, to make it clear that there is no clever wheeze—"You see what you're offered; you see what you get"—it is not my intention to put new clause 13 to a vote—[HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."] That means that new clause 11 can be voted on; I believe that new clause 6 may come first, but I would say—

§ Lembit Öpik
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. If the Minister is not moving new clause 13, will it be in order for us to request a separate vote on new clause 6, as the Minister indicated?

§ Mr. Speaker
That will be perfectly in order.

§ Mr. Garnier
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I do not know what deals go on between Labour Members of Parliament, but the central thrust of the Minister's case to the House and, therefore, to the public was that he was determined that new clause 13 should be put to the vote. It now appears that he has done some back-street deal with the hon. Member for West Ham (Mr. Banks), so is it in order for the right hon. Gentleman to advance a case on one basis and then to appear at 10 minutes to 10 to present another one?

§ Mr. Speaker
I do not want to get drawn into the argument, but sometimes Members, including Ministers, listen to the debate.

§ Alun Michael
I have listened to the debate, and in the spirit in which we have debated such things I wish to urge colleagues not to pass new clause 11. I understand entirely the temptation to do so and the attraction for many of my colleagues, but I tell them that the Bill, 131 without new clause 11, will be powerful legislation. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham acknowledged that in his speech, and animal welfare organisations have acknowledged the extent to which the Bill will eradicate cruelty.
Opposition Members have not helped in the debate because they have not really contributed to it; they have merely rerun the arguments made in Committee about why they do not want any eradication of cruelty. I urge my colleagues to unite today in getting good, strong legislation through the House. I hope that we can do so in the form in which I have introduced the Bill, with the amendments that fulfil the promises that I made in Committee. If that is not the case, of course, there will be recommittal to ensure that whatever Bill goes forward to the House of Lords does so in an effective manner that carries through the intentions of the House.
I understand how passionately my colleagues feel about this issue, as do those on the opposite side of the argument, but I ask everyone to respect the fact that we have designed a Bill that is intended to be good law, to be enforceable and to eradicate all the cruelty associated with hunting with dogs, and I invite my colleagues to join me in the way that I shall vote in the Divisions.
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.