§ 4.18 p.m.
§ Lord GlenarthurMy Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.
This nation is proudly one of animal lovers. Our history of care for animals in second to none. It was that care which led to the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 to control animal experiments for medical, physiological or other scientific purposes calculated to inflict pain. This Act has adapted to the huge advances in biomedical research since then more easily than its authors could conceivably have imagined. But its relevance could not last for ever, and it is now high time to replace it with an up-to-date statute and modern guidance.
Although the number of experiments has fallen sharply, from 5½ million in 1976 to 3½ million in 1984, it remains essential to use animals in biomedical research. Much of the reduction has been because of the increasing use of alternative methods. But for many projects there is no foreseeable prospect of any alternative. The need exists both in fundamental and in applied research. Physiologists must find out more about how the healthy body functions. The causes of disease and the effectiveness of different ways of curing it must be explored further. The safety testing of medicines, vaccines and other products must continue. I wonder how many of us in this Chamber are alive as a result of discoveries from experiments on animals. What we must not allow are unnecessary experiments or unnecessarily painful experiments, or experiments that use unnecessarily large numbers of animals.
The Bill before your Lordships has had a long gestation. The Littlewood Committee, which reported in 1965, recommended new legislation. Your Lordships' Select Committee on the Laboratory Animals Protection Bill of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, reported in 1980 that all its witnesses considered the present law in some ways unsatisfactory. The Council of Europe has prepared a convention, which is about to be opened for signature, which the United Kingdom played a leading part in drafting. It will set a common minimum standard. But our proposals go further than that.
In 1981 the Home Secretary's Advisory Committee on Animal Experiments reported on the framework of new legislation, and we have largely followed their proposals. In March 1983 the British Veterinary Association, the Campaign for the Reform of Animal Experimentation and the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments put forward their own proposals. They, too, have greatly influenced our proposals. In May 1983 the Government published the White Paper Scientific Procedures on Living Animals. We consulted very widely and received many 992 comments on the proposals, which we developed further in the supplementary White Paper, also called Scientific Procedures on Living Animals, which we published in May of this year. After further consultation we drew up this Bill, which closely reflects the proposals in those two White Papers.
The new controls we now propose are contained in the Bill and are amplified in the draft guidance on the operation of the new legislation. Copies of the draft guidance have been made available to your Lordships. The key principle in the proposals is the dual system of licensing. The personal licence will be issued to people competent to carry out particular procedures on animals. The project licence will be issued if the Home Secretary considers the programme of work it describes is justified. Both kinds of licence must have been obtained before any work can be done on the animal. All applicants for project licences will be required to assess the severity that their work will involve and the licence will put a limit on how far they can go. There will be new provisions for the care of animals in laboratories and, for the first time, the breeding and supplying of the commonest laboratory animals will be controlled. And the new controls will cover not only experiments but also other scientific procedure such as the passage of tumours, the production of antisera, and the breeding of laboratory animals with physical defects.
I should like to pay tribute to the great contributions we have had from so many quarters in drawing up our proposals. I have already mentioned the veterinary profession and the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments. Under the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, the Campaign for the Reform of Animal Experimentation has given unstinted co-operation. Sir Andrew Huxley, as president of the Royal Society, has taken a close interest in our work, and the Royal Society, together with the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, is preparing recommendations on the care of laboratory animals and their use in scientific procedures. I have already mentioned the interest taken by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury. We have consulted widely and deeply, both on points of principle and on the details of our proposals, all the major organisations of science and industry. The Home Secretary's Advisory Committee has been, and is, a key source of advice to my right honourable friend, and the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, chairman until earlier this year, and the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, a member of the committee until earlier this year, have played a great part in its work.
I am bound to recognise that the Bill does not and cannot satisfy those who believe that all scientific procedures using animals must be stopped at once. We may all respect the sincerity of those who think that. But I must say this. Their cause, and the cause of animal welfare generally, is not helped in any way by the outrageous behaviour of the extremists——
§ Lord Glenarthur——who commit violent assaults on laboratories and scientists:
the animal hooligans"—as Sir William Paton has described them, 993mostly of the healthiest generation this country has ever seen because of past medical research".This behaviour is a menace which the Government take very seriously, and I am glad to say that the Metropolitan Police are co-ordinating police efforts throughout the country to ensure that the perpetrators of these crimes are brought to book. This small minority of extremists must not deter us from our aim of bringing into being effective new controls which satisfy the needs of the community both for the maintenance and advancement of biomedical research and development and for the maximum possible protection and welfare of the animals which need to be used.The Bill before us is not as terse as the 1876 Act; but much of the detail of the new controls will depend on its administration, and our proposals on the details of the administration arrangements are described in the draft note of guidance. The guidance is still in the form of a draft. We have sent copies of it to many people who helped us in preparing it, and would welcome further comments on it from them and, of course, from your Lordships and anybody else who would like to make them.
The Bill will apply throughout the United Kingdom, like the 1876 Act. In England, Wales and Scotland the regulatory authority will be the Home Secretary, in Northern Ireland their Department of Health and Social Services. I do not intend at this stage to explain each of the 30 clauses and four schedules at length. But it all hinges on Clause 3, for which Clauses 1 and 2 make preliminary provision. Clause 3 prohibits anybody from carrying out a regulated procedure on a protected animal unless authorised under the legislation. He must hold a personal licence. The procedure must be part of a programme of work authorised by a project licence. And the procedure must be carried out at a place authorised both in the personal licence and in the project licence. Normally this will be an approved laboratory, but other places will be allowed for some experiments by naturalists which necessarily have to be conducted in the wild.
Clause 1 explains that for the purposes of the legislation "a protected animal" is a vertebrate other than man. Under the Bill, unlike the 1876 Act, the protection covers animals in their immature forms once they have reached a specified stage in their development. What is "a regulated procedure" is explained in Clause 2. It is any experimental or scientific procedure which may cause the animal pain, distress or lasting harm. There are some exceptions; humane tagging; veterinary, agricultural and animal husbandry practice; and humane killing by a method described in Schedule 1 to the Bill. Schedule 1 is not, and is not meant to be, a complete list of all the humane ways of killing animals. It is only a list of the commonest methods of killing experimental animals; and the Home Secretary would be ready, in suitable circumstances, to allow other methods—but they would need to be licensed. There is, of course, a power to amend Schedule 1.
Clauses 4 and 5 contain further provisions on personal licences and project licences; and in Clause 10 there are requirements on the conditions to be included on the licence. It is of course essential to pay great attention to the qualifications, training and 994 experience of every applicant for a personal licence. This we shall do. Each personal licence must, as a result of Clause 10, contain conditions about the limits on the pain that may be suffered by an animal The conditions themselves are not included in the Bill, but in the guidance note. Control by the Home Office inspector is a much more effective means of enforcement than control by the criminal courts, and it is impossible to define concepts such as pain and severity with the precision necessary in an Act of Parliament.
To enable the Home Secretary to decide where to draw the balance, each project licence applicant will (as the guidance note explains) be expected to make the best assessment he can of the likely outcome of his work, including the severity of its effect on the animal in three categories: "mild", "moderate" and "substantial". The applicant's assessment of the severitv that his work will involve will, in turn, be assessed by the inspector and possibly by an independent assessor. No prediction about the results of scientific research can be completely reliable but the best estimate we can get will be of great help to us in considering whether to grant licences and, if so, under what conditions.
Clauses 6 and 7 allow the Home Secretary to control laboratories and breeding and supplying establishments for the commonest laboratory animals. Each of these establishments must be designated in a certificate issued by the Home Secretary, and each must have a named person responsible for the day to day care of the animals, and a veterinary surgeon.
Under Clauses 11 to 13 we allow somebody aggrieved at not obtaining the authority he wants, or at the prospect of losing it, to make representations to an independent, legally qualified, adviser, whose views the Home Secretary will take into account before reaching a final decision.
It is only right that the Bill should limit the circumstances in which an animal which has been used once in one set of procedures can be used again in a different set of procedures, as did the 1876 Act. But Clause 15 supplements existing limitations by requiring animals to be humanely killed when the work on them has been done only if they are then suffering or likely to suffer adverse effects. If not, the animal could be kept alive, for example as a pet.
No legislation of this kind can be any better than the people who make it work, and Clauses 18 to 20. which are about the inspectors and the Animal Procedures Committee, are therefore especially important. Clause 18 requires the Home Secretary to appoint inspectors with either medical or veterinary qualifications, and describes the duties of inspectors. In practice, the inspectorate visit the places where the work is done, nearly always without notice. The success of the 1876 Act has depended very largely on the relations between the inspectorate and the scientists, and for the new legislation a strengthened inspectorate will be just as essential.
Clauses 19 and 20 establish the Animal Procedures Committee. This committee will replace the present non-statutory advisory committee, and its duties are set out in the Bill. Two-thirds of the members must be scientists but not more than half the numbers can be current or recent licence holders. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary has much to be grateful for 995 in the present advisory committee. I am very glad to say that Sir Andrew Huxley has just become a member of it.
The remainder of the Bill contains a number of supplementary provisions. Under Clause 21, the Home Secretary will publish, and will lay before Parliament, the guidance to which in its draft form I have referred earlier; advice on the care and use of animals, probably in the form of adopting the advice which the Royal Society is currently working on; and annual statistics. Clauses 22 to 26 provide for the punishment and enforcement of criminal offences under the Bill and Clause 29 for its application to Northern Ireland. The most serious offences under the Bill are triable either summarily or on indictment and, if they are tried on indictment, carry penalties of up to two years' imprisonment, or a fine, or both. It is right to have the capacity to deal firmly with the most flagrant infringements of the law.
I am confident that the new dual licensing system, stringent controls on pain and on places where procedures are carried out and animals held will give us a flexible but demanding framework of control to meet today's needs and those of tomorrow. We shall confidently rely, as we have done for over a century, on willing co-operation between scientists and the Home Office. Scientists have made it clear to the Home Office that they enthusiastically support the modernisation and strengthening of the law.
And may I add that I have been profoundly struck by the sense of responsibility and ethics displayed by all those who care for animals in science at every stage; those responsible for their husbandry, and those who undertake the detailed, painstaking and very advanced work on them. In visits I have made, their commitment, not only to their research but to the well-being of the animals under research, stands out a mile. They are surely all lovers of animals.
Without the tireless support and encouragement of the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, we might never have arrived at what I hope will be, as our 1985 White Paper said:
a workable and progressive Act of Parliament in this difficult and sensitive area of public policyIf, as I most sincerely hope, Parliament passes this Bill, we shall be well equipped to ensure the protection of live animals used in science for years to come: all the more important at a time when there are many serious, unsolved problems for researchers to conquer: cancer, multiple sclerosis; heart disease and the latest menace of AIDS.Many of your Lordships are to take part in this debate, and of course we look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Allenby of Megiddo. The challenges which I have just described are challenges that an advanced society like ours must take up, using every technique at its disposal. This Bill is not designed to hinder that work; rather, it is to put it on a sounder footing so that all animals, including man, can ultimately benefit. That is the basis on which I commend it to your Lordships. I beg to move.
§ Moved, that the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Glenarthur.)