HL Deb 25 October 1979 vol 402 cc204-13

3.13 p.m.

The Earl of HALSBURY

My Lords, I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time. In rising to put the Motion which stands in my name to your Lordships, and commending the Bill to your Lordships' good favour, I should like to start by thanking all those whose names appear on the long and distinguished list of speakers this afternoon. I am particularly gratified to see the name of my noble friend Lord Adrian, who has selected it for the subject of his maiden speech. His profession particularly well qualifies him to speak on this subject, and I am sure he will win his spurs to your Lordships' entire satisfaction. I shall listen to what he has to say with the greatest interest.

I have stated in earlier debates on other Bills in this field that it is not a field for Private Members' Bills, and my reasons for going into reverse and acting contrary to my previously stated opinions are multifold. Last year, at the season of the party conferences, legislation was discussed based on the slogan of bringing animals into politics. I then decided in my own mind that if this meant bringing them into party politics I was against it. I could imagine no more unedifying spectacle than the parties bidding for the anti-vivisectionist vote in marginal constituencies.

Secondly, I was increasingly exasperated by delays, of which every party and Government were guilty—although I shall acquit the present Government who have not been in office long enough—in bringing legislation up to date and implementing those recommendations of the Littlewood Committee which required legislation, with the result that laboratories of men of science are being vandalised and men of science are being threatened over the telephone, though their only guilt is in doing experiments to try to benefit mankind. These threats, of course, come from what I call the protestational neurotics who infiltrate, soil and sully every reform movement, however worthy. They do not have the support of the genuine animal welfare societies.

Thirdly, it seemed essential to provide the working party of the Council of Europe, which is seeking to produce a convention standardising animal welfare legislation throughout the European continent, with a lead based on a new model Act incorporating the one factor that we can contribute to Europe in this field—100 years of experience; the experience of the pioneer which no one else except we has had.

Lastly, I found myself able to recruit an exceptionally able team of helpers, all of whom knew the present Act, all of whom were aware of the ground which it did not cover. These were the recently retired Chief Inspector from the Home Office under the 1876 Act; the then immediate past President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the Professor of Nutritional Science at the medical school, the Royal Free Hospital; the late chairman of the Council of the Physiological Society and the chairman of the legal committee of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry. Between them and others who helped, they covered the whole field necessary to contribute to this Bill. We have put in collectively a very hard year's team work and if, for the purposes of this Motion, I speak as I must in the first person singular, I would ask your Lordships to treat it as a colloquialism in so far as I am a kind of"we".

By the end of last year, I had the Bill in advanced draft form and have spent the greater part of this year in polishing it up and convincing my friends in the scientific and medical worlds of its merits as a successor to the present Act. I may say that this has not always been easy, but I nevertheless have gained their support for my introduction of it here this afternoon.

I am not going to take up time in arguing the pros and cons of using animals in the laboratory, 5 million a year, as opposed to killing them and eating them for food, 400 million a year; harvesting their wool and dairy products, putting them to the plough in days gone by, employing them as draught animals generally or entering them for steeple-chases culminating in the Grand National, where an expectable number of them get damaged and killed every year. I also leave aside our relationship with the animals based on their pestilential quality, which requires us to exterminate them quite ruthlessly when their activities are incompatible with human activities. I can say only that I think it wrong to inflict more pain than is avoidable in any of these contexts.

I accept that for an indefinite time to come there will be no universal alternative to the use of whole animals in all contexts, and the emphasis here is on my usage of "universal" and "all". I believe that nearly all sensible folk will go along with this view, albeit with variable degrees of personal reluctance. It would be quite wrong to suppose that men of science are strangers to this reluctance. They, too, are animal lovers. Working with animals fosters care for them, due to the need to keep them in good health during the course of an experiment. It does not breed indifference. I shall leave others to make these points in detail and will concentrate my own contribution to the debate on leading your Lordships through the Bill, starting with some very general considerations which we ought, all of us, to have in mind.

Legislation ought never to be conceived in a vindictive spirit. It is not an opportunity to get even with people who do not share our views. A law is not good in proportion to the number of convictions it secures but, rather, in the degree of law-abidingness and co-operation which it promotes. Almost all the ethical considerations inspiring animal welfare are situational ones involving acts of judgment. If a man's judgment leads him in unacceptable directions, that may be a good reason for correcting it or restraining it, but not for treating the individual at fault as a criminal to be imprisoned with murderers, thieves, prostitutes and others. For that reason, this Bill does not constitute a new branch of criminal law.

To give effect to this spirit, I have endeavoured to structure the Bill so as to strike as nice a balance as I can between what is done directly by statute, explicitly in the Bill, what is done indirectly by subordinate legislation and the machinery of regulations based upon statutory instruments and what is to be done by incentives to conform with an official code of good conduct which Clause 8 of the Bill requires the Home Secretary to publish under the title A Guide to Good Laboratory Animal Practice. The Bill is evolutionary, not revolutionary, in scope. It builds on the present Act, incorporates those recommendations of the Littlewood Report needing legislation—now, as I have said, over 15 years out of date—and seals off some grey areas which have inevitably developed since 1876, the date of the present Act. I should perhaps remind your Lordships that the whole—I repeat the whole—of immunology, hormone-based therapy, vitamin-based dietetics, chemotherapy, antibiotics, anthelmintics—modern medicine, in fact—has been developed since the present Act came into force, and that the consumer protection movement of recent years has added many animals to the list of those that are required every year.

In terms of modern biomedical technology, the relation between our exploitation of animals, in the general sense, in the laboratory and any reasonable definition of the word "experimental" is tenuous and very difficult to draw. The Bill is therefore based upon the more comprehensive term "procedure", the effect of which is to bring a rather wider range of animals under the protection which the Bill provides than is the case at present. This is reflected in its short title, "The Laboratory Animals Protection Bill."

To qualify for protection under the Bill, an animal has to have two conditions fulfilled. First, it must be the subject of a procedure which, in the absence of an anaesthetic or other means of pain relief, could be expected to cause distress, pain, ill-health—those three. Whether or not an anaesthetic is actually employed is irrelevant to the determination of whether an animal is a protected animal but, if a protected animal, it is entitled to the same degree of pain relief as would be the case if the procedure were carried out in the course of ordinary veterinary care and therapy.

Secondly, the procedure must have certain stated objectives which are listed in the Bill, and I shall come to them later. These do not include slaughter for food, shearing for wool or the production of milk or other dairy products—eggs and so on. These contexts are the province of other statutes. The ringing of birds and the implantation of radio-locatable bugs in wild animals in order to follow their movements for the purposes of field natural history and observations are excluded from the Bill.

This brings me to Clause 1 which provides that any procedure carried out on a protected animal is an offence, unless it falls within the restrictions imposed by the Act. This is the basis of the whole Bill, the rest of which is concerned with the power of the Home Secretary to control and relax this overall embargo in cases enfranchised by the Bill. Throughout the Bill the Home Secretary is made the keeper of our consciences in the context of animal experimentation. He is to be our watchdog. May I remind your Lordships of an old, homely proverb: Do not keep a dog and bark yourself". The Bill does not tell the Home Secretary what to embargo. It contains no specific prohibition on particular experiments or procedures. Cosmetics are not picked out for special mention. There is no prohibition on inducing smoking habits in dogs. It will be up to the Home Secretary of the day, as it is now, to single them out and prohibit them if he thinks the circumstances warrant. The only constraint on him is that of public opinion, as expressed in Parliament.

This brings me to Clause 2 where the restrictions begin to be relaxed, under control. It is a long clause and one of the key clauses in the Bill. It lays down the need for a licence in respect of the person by whom and the place at which a procedure bringing an animal under the protection of the Act is carried out. In addition, it lays down the purposes of the procedures which may be licensed and requires a veterinary degree of pain relief. It also covers the special cases where procedures are carried out as demonstrations for teaching purposes. It protects the offspring of pregnant animals. It requires the painless killing of animals in pain. It embargoes the use of curare and curaro-mimetic drugs as an anaesthetic and requires all animals to be treated with compassion.

I will skip two clauses in order to come to the system of licensing persons and premises, taking them in that order. Clause 6 requires a licence application to be sponsored, but the system is quite different from sponsorship under the present Act, which is in the hands of very distinguished presidents of learned societies and colleges. Everyone knows that these distinguished persons are swamped by applications from strangers, of whom they know very little and who may be working in specialised fields, of which they know no more. The late Lord Platt used to tell your Lordships on many occasions what he thought of the bogus character of the protection which this system provided under certificates which he signed, more or less blind.

The Bill replaces the old system by a system of double certification. There must be two sponsors to every licence application. The first must sponsor the applicant personally, must know him and must state that he has the requisite qualifications to carry out procedures on animals. The second must be a recognised expert in the field of the proposed procedures, who must certify that they fall within the purposes enfranchised by the Bill and that there is no reasonable alternative to the use of animals for that purpose.

This removes from the limited number of inspectors the invidious task which would he imposed upon them if they were to be responsible for monitoring a virtually unlimited number of fields, from the standpoint of determining whether there was an alternative to the use of animals in those fields. The experts requisite for this category will be listed at the Home Office on the recommendation of the presidents of the learned societies and colleges. So these distinguished persons will continue to play a part in the system, but it will be the right part for them to play, and a real one.

If the licensee changes course or enlarges the scope of his work, then the licence will need to be amended correspondingly, so that it will come to appear over the course of a career rather like a passport with visas. This being so, the special certificates requisite under the present Act will cease to serve any useful purpose and they are dropped accordingly. The protection they gave to horses, dogs, cats and other domesticated animals and pets was largely spurious since the same authority issued them all. What they did was to ensure that the Home Office knew that these animals were either being used or that their use was in contemplation. But this will be automatic and a routine matter under the present Bill, where there will be no "blank cheques". Therefore they can be taken for granted and the system of alphabetically labelled certificates dropped.

I come next to the licensing of the premises under Clause 5. At present premises are not licensed; they are simply registered to tell the inspector where he can call to carry out his inspection. By licensing, as opposed to registering, a great deal can be accomplished indirectly. The licence to an experimenter is to a single individual who conducts a single procedure. The licence of the premises can be to the chief executive of an industrial organisation or to the vice-chancellor of a university or anybody representative of the owner of the premises where many experimenters may be carrying out their work in parallel. The occasion of granting this licence can be the opportunity to draw his attention to the guide and to express the hope that its provisions will be treated as practices to be aimed at on the premises. This will put everyone's work at hazard if anyone on the premises disregards the guide's provisions and risks the chief executive's or vice-chancellor's loss of the licence by revocation if representations from the inspectors go unheeded. Thus the vice-chancellor or chief executive and everybody on the premises will be in league to see that the provisions of the guide are kept on the premises. Thus in my view men should be governed, naturally and without effort, by providing them with incentives to the good behaviour which one wants them to exhibit.

The three clauses which I have recited, Nos. 2, 5 and 6, form the heart of the Bill. In order to present them sequentially, I skipped Clauses 3 and 4. Clause 3 carries the species protected to Schedule 1, which I shall deal with later, and Clause 4 repeats the embargo in the present Act against public exhibitions. Clause 7 is an enabling clause by means of which the Minister can make regulations which a later clause specifies as by statutory instrument. Clause 8 is the one requiring the publication of the guide to good laboratory animal practice. It is not, of course, in the Bill. It is the Home Secretary's responsibility to draft and circulate the guide, so the Bill does not tell him how to do his job. Clause 9 requires licence holders to submit annual returns and of course the Home Secretary's annual report is based on those returns.

The provisions of the Bill would be ineffective without some teeth in the form of an inspectorate which is set up in Clauses 10, 11 and 12. These very largely follow the present Act but the powers of individual inspectors are significantly increased. They can order the killing of an animal which is felt to be in undue pain without regard to whether or not the purposes of an experiment have been fulfilled. So far as practice is concerned, this is somewhat of a distinction without a difference because the inspectorate possesses this power in effect now, not in virtue of what is in the 1876 Act but in virtue of powers that they take to themselves under the conditions for issuing a licence. But the public do not know this and they believe that the inspectorate has no such power. Therefore I think it desirable that it should be in the Bill.

In addition to the inspectorate, the Bill gives statutory expression to an advisory council in Clause 14 and lays down its constitution in Schedule 3. What I have in mind is a critical, collective opinion-forming body on questions which may be vexing the Home Secretary or the public or even the inspectors themselves. It is not conceived primarily as an ethical committee laying down standards of right and wrong but more as a body of advisers to whom the inspectors can turn if they, for example, do not agree about something among themselves, and to which they can refer matters on which they all of them feel unsure. They are, of course, experts. They are the normal advisers to the Minister; but even the most expert adviser sometimes finds himself in need of a commonsense lay opinion. That is how the constitution of the advisory council has been expressed.

My Lords, I have again skipped a clause to facilitate exposition. Clause 13 requires the Home Secretary to publish an annual report and Clause 15 provides for an agreed licensee to have recourse to the advisory council. I think this is important. The present Act can inflict injustice on a licensee and there is absolutely no redress or means of making representations.

These are the principal features of the Bill to which I would draw the attention of your Lordships in this opening speech. I do not want to prolong it unduly as I am sure that I shall have my attention drawn to other features of the Bill in the course of the debate. Those I will deal with when winding up the debate. Many of the remaining clauses are formal or legalistic and what one would expect to find in an Act of this kind, and of course some are consequential on the three main clauses that I have dealt with. The "guts" of the Bill are in Clauses 2, 5 and 6 and I would recommend a study of them.

Before coming to an end, I should like to say a few words about the definitions in Clause 28. A "laboratory" is whatever premises are licensed for the conduct of licensed procedures on protected animals, so that in a veterinary or an agricultural context a meadow or a dairy could be a laboratory for the purposes of the Act. Then a "procedure" on a protected animal is defined by its purposes and it might be as well to recite these explicitly for the record. There are five of them, namely, testing a hypothesis, collecting information, testing or producing a substance, registering an effect of a substance on an animal or use for educational purposes.

The species of animals protected under the Bill are not listed in the Bill but carried into Schedule 1, to which the Minister has power of addition or deletion by regulation. In this way practice can be made to conform with what we learn over the years about life forms which might need more protection in the minds of our successors than they do in our own minds today.

So much for the Bill itself. If your Lordships approve it and approve the Motion for Second Reading, I shall then ask you to approve a second Motion committing the Bill to a Select Committee of the House. This was originally the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, and I owe the idea to him. I thought it a good one and I am happy to give him the credit for a good idea. The field is a controversial one, where conflicting feelings run high. I think it right and proper that an experimentalist who may feel that I have been too restrictive, or an animal welfare devotee who may feel that I have not gone far enough, should have the satisfaction of feeling that he or she has been listened to with that patience and attention which only a Select Committee can provide. It also gives the House, through its Select Committee, an opportunity to collect evidence over and above that which may be volunteered. I am quite sure that the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, will enlarge on these arguments and I do not intend to say more on that matter as I believe that T can leave the rest of it in his very capable hands.

My Lords, I very much hope that the Bill will commend itself to your good favour. It has been a labour of love by a dedicated team. Men of science played a distinguished and honourable role in helping to achieve the Act of 1876, which was a more or less corporate expression of British affection for animals and a determination that the rather horrible physiological experiments which were carried out in France in the middle of the last century should not be repeated in this country. So the men of science played an honourable role in putting the Act of 1876 on the Statute Book. During the century of their co-operation with it since, they have been continually traduced and blackguarded as monsters by the militant anti-vivisectionist Press—as total a stranger to the truth as can well be imagined. I want to see them, as a member of their community, play the same honourable role today in whatever measure proves the successor to the present Act. For that reason, my Lords, as well as for the protection of laboratory animals, on the Motion that this Bill be now read a second time, I beg to move.

Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Earl of Halsbury.)