Lords Sitting of 9 March 2001

Preamble
The House met at eleven of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Bristol.

Wild Mammals (Protection) (Amendment) Bill [H.L.]
11.5 a.m.
Lord DonoughueMy Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.
The present arrangements for protecting animals from abuse are complex and incomplete. They reflect nearly a century of sporadic legislation, especially the Protection of Animals Act 1911, which absorbed earlier legislation dating as far back as the 18th century and which has itself since been amended nine times. That was concerned primarily with captive and domestic animals where humans have responsibility, not with wild animals, and hunting and coursing were exempt. Cruelty was defined as "unnecessary suffering".
Since then, Parliament has passed, as examples, the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, which I noted created some problems for my former colleagues at MAFF, and particularly the Wild Mammals Act 1996, to which my Bill today is an amendment. The 1996 Act also began as a Private Member's Bill under John McFall. It had two objectives: to prevent cruelty to non-captive wild animals; and to ban hunting. That second part fell so it remained as an anti-cruelty Act.
It had, I believe, two disadvantages. It contained a long list of specified cruel acts, which left grey areas around and between the list; for example, nailing a fox was an offence but shooting it to wound and be left in agony was not. It also contained a list of exemptions. It may help the House if I read out the offence created in the 1996 Act, although it is long and horrifying:
"If, save as permitted by this Act, any person mutilates, kicks, beats, nails or otherwise impales, stabs, burns, stones, crushes, drowns, drags or asphyxiates any wild mammal with intent to inflict unnecessary suffering he shall be guilty of an offence".
It seemed fairly comprehensive but there were many exemptions, including hunting and coursing.
My Bill today is deliberately simpler than that 1996 Act. It aims at one stroke to protect wild animals from suffering. There will be no exemptions. The existing exemptions for hunting, shooting and coursing are removed, as are exemptions relating to snaring and trapping. So is the use of poison to kill wild mammals, although it is not intended to protect local rats. Simply, if a wild mammal is deliberately made to suffer unnecessary suffering, that is an offence.
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The Bill is firmly rooted in the excellent Burns report. Chapter 9, page 152, paragraph 9.38 states:
"One other possible legislative approach would be to remove the present exemptions for hunting in the Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996. This would give an important signal that hunting should be subject to the same standards as apply to other organisations and individuals. And it would give a clearer opportunity to test views about cruelty in the courts".
We take up that Burns suggestion.
The one reservation expressed in the Burns report was that most of those acts on the list in the 1996 Bill do not apply in hunting; exactly. That is why I replace that list with a single, simple, comprehensive offence. Clause 1 of my Bill states that,
"any person who intentionally inflicts, or causes or procures, unnecessary suffering on or to any wild mammal shall be guilty of an offence".
That replaces the 1996 list and so, I trust, meets the Burns reservation and overall, it is in line with the Burns report.
The Bill then goes on to remove the exemptions for hunting and so on as stated in paragraphs (b),(d) and (e) of Clause 2 of the 1996 Act.
The advantages of my Bill are clear. It creates consistent and universal minimum standards to protect all wild mammals. It provides certainty and clarity, with no exceptions or grey areas. There is no list of barbarous acts, as in the previous legislation, with scope to create new cruelties outside the list. It is simply intentionally inflicting, causing or procuring unnecessary suffering which is criminal.
Because it is simple, policing should be easier. The Bill would modernise and pull together nearly a century of piecemeal legislation. Of course, I recognise and accept that nature—those who live in Tower Hamlets may not be aware of this—unavoidably involves some suffering. It is not possible to eliminate all suffering from rural life and that suffering will appear to be cruel. The Bill enshrines in legislation that it is suffering which is deliberate, intentional, excessive and unnecessary which is unacceptable and will be prosecuted.
The Bill does not assume or establish that the simple pursuit of properly organised hunting, without specific acts of cruelty, such as digging out and so on, set out in Burns, is committing an act of cruelty. However, it would be for the courts to decide, as Burns suggests, with which I would be happy. I do not believe that that is a disadvantage in the Bill. It is quite normal for legislation to be tested in the courts and we should all be happy with that.
I turn to the sub-theme of the concerto, the Bill's relationship to hunting and to the Bill that will come before the House next week. First, I declare some interests or potential interests. I am involved with two racehorses that run under National Hunt rules. If God is kind, one will run tomorrow at Sandown. Racing will be damaged by a total ban, so I have a position on that.
I also have a shotgun, although it is not used greatly, and a licence. It is mainly reserved for pests, such as rats, magpies and intrusive journalists! I was also a

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Minister for agriculture and I am deeply concerned with the countryside in which I grew up. I have been a member of the Countryside Alliance, although I take no part in the direction of its affairs, I disagree with some of its political activities and I shall not vote for its option on the Hunting Bill next week. I have never hunted; nor will I ever hunt. As we appear to be expected to say where we come from, I tell the House that I come from rural Northamptonshire. I dislike cruelty to animals. My dog, Honey, is very close to me—I dare not say "the closest" because others may hear. I support the countryside and I am deeply concerned about the future of National Hunt racing.
On the Hunting Bill, I believe that my Bill forbidding unnecessary cruelty will be of interest to many noble Lords involved in Monday's debate, although it does not stem from that Bill. There are those who will consider voting to ban hunting because they deplore individual acts of cruelty in hunting, as I and many in hunting do, yet quite rightly they have doubts on libertarian grounds because they are reluctant to interfere in the traditional sports and life of the countryside.
This Bill will forbid and punish deliberate and excessive cruelty in hunting—it removes its exemption—but it will leave that sport to continue in the proper and legitimate way, without unnecessary cruelty, if the courts so conclude. After all, some solicitors—I say "some", unwilling to offend friends—regularly defraud their clients, but that is not a justification for a ban on practising the law, although many may sympathise with that approach for other reasons.
This Bill could link naturally to the middle-way option on the Hunting Bill for a licensing authority in a way that would strengthen that approach, give it teeth and reinforce that option by providing a basis on which licences may be withheld or withdrawn; for example, if a master, a member or an employee of a hunt were found guilty of inflicting deliberate and unnecessary cruelty under the Bill, the licensing authority would consider that when issuing a licence.
I admit that this Bill would make the middle-way option more credible and practical, although I should like to insist that the Bill is desirable in itself, without any reference to the hunting issue, because it criminalises unnecessary cruelty. With that in mind, the Bill has been drafted so that it could, if the House wanted, be moved and adopted later as an amendment to the Hunting Bill.
I need not point out in detail to my noble friend the Minister the political advantages to the present Government of this Bill—although I shall. Currently they are under pressure from a militant minority to impose an illiberal ban on countryside people pursuing their traditional sports at a time when the countryside is already suffering quite enough. We know that only a small minority cares strongly either way on this issue, although a significant number reluctantly are inclined to support an illiberal ban, not because they want a total ban, but because they want to stop incidents of unnecessary cruelty in hunting.
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This Bill offers a compromise way forward. It bans unnecessary and intentional cruelty in hunting, but it leaves the properly regulated pursuit of the sport to continue if the courts so choose. It will do nothing to satisfy the extremists on one side, who basically hate country people who hunt. I am not sure whether they hate cruelty because they are willing to hit country people over the head with baseball bats. It will do nothing for that side. In my view, nothing will influence that minority. Nor will it satisfy some traditional extremists who want hunting to be exempt from all constraints on cruelty.
I make no appeal to either militant sect and I hope that the Minister is not of either tendency. However, I believe that this Bill will satisfy the large majority in the middle ground. Taken together with the licensing option, it would enable the Government to move forward with greater protection for wild animals, without falling into the hands of an illiberal, extreme minority.
The main purpose of the Bill is much wider than hunting. It is justified regardless of what happens to the Hunting Bill. I believe that it will provide a significant improvement and modernisation to our legislation to protect mammals and to regulate relations between man and mammals in the wild. As such I ask the House, the Minister and the Government to view this Bill positively. I am confident that as an intelligent man my noble friend the Minister will not come forward with a hoary old Whitehall spectre, with which all Ministers and former Ministers are familiar. I refer to that of "opening Pandora's Box". Like "the slippery slope", it has been used throughout Whitehall history and throughout the "Yes Minister" series as an obstacle to any desirable reform where rational arguments are lacking. I confess that I was a regular and, I believe, chief adviser to the "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister" series. We found that whenever Sir Humphrey lacked an argument to resist the Minister or Prime Minister, he could refer to "opening Pandora's Box" or "going down the slippery slope".
The Bill is not a Pandora's Box. It is a limited Bill, opening up a new horizon but a limited and desirable one. It does not apply to farm animals; pets; domestic animals; birds; fish; and laboratory experiments. It applies only to wild mammals and only to the unnecessary excesses in the method of killing—that is, "how"—and not to the intention—that is, "why". The only Pandora's Box concerns whether there is proof of deliberate and unnecessary cruelty.
My Bill might also raise further questions; for example, why Britain lacks the desirable legislation on wild animal management, which many other countries have. But that is beyond the scope of today's discussion. The Bill aims, simply and effectively, to ban deliberate and unnecessary cruelty to wild animals. I trust everybody who deplores such cruelty will support the Bill. I commend the Bill to the House.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Donoughue.)
11.22 a.m.
Lord Mancroft: My Lords, the House should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for promoting this Bill today in such a clear and concise manner. I certainly extend a cautious welcome to the Bill.
As a board member of the Countryside Alliance, I am pleased to declare my interest. The Countryside Alliance has a particular interest in animal welfare, both in terms of domestic and farm animals and in respect of wildlife, and our policy handbook makes that clear.
I, too, have taken a special interest in the subject and I have been involved in most of the relevant debates in this House during the past decade. In particular, I was involved in the passage of the 1996 Act, originally a Private Member's Bill introduced into the other place by Mr Alan Meale, and its forerunner in the previous year, in the shape of another Private Member's Bill sponsored by Mr John McFall. I was also involved in the passage of the Protection of Badger Setts Bill, which was later consolidated into the Protection of Badgers Act 1992.
The debate comes at a very interesting time. On Monday we shall be having the Second Reading of the Hunting Bill, and many of the issues raised here today will be relevant to that debate. Bearing in mind the strong opposition that I voiced in respect of some parts of the original 1996 Act, it may surprise your Lordships to know that the Countryside Alliance broadly welcomes this Bill. It may, therefore be instructive to look for a moment at the history of the original Act.
As the noble Lord. Lord Donoughue, told us, the original Act began life as a Private Member's Bill in the other place. It was primarily a Bill to ban hunting but with other welfare measures tacked on it. It was deemed to be unacceptable to your Lordships in its original form and the anti-hunting measures were removed to allow its safe passage through this House. It was therefore somewhat of a lopsided Bill. At the same time the general offence of deliberately inflicting unnecessary cruelty was taken from the Protection of Animals Act 1911, which is still the principle piece of animal welfare legislation in Britain.
However, that primary offence of intentionally causing unnecessary suffering was deemed too wide to be included in the 1996 Act without qualification and therefore the list referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, added to it. Exemptions were included in the Act at Section 2(b). Looking at this again with the benefit of hindsight it seems, not to put too fine a point on it, a little bizarre. The idea that anyone would commit any of the acts listed in Section 1 during the course of the sporting or pest control activities listed in Section 2(b) is not credible. But the reason the exception was thought to be desirable is part of the recent history of animal welfare legislation. The constant battle over hunting has meant that for years we have been unable to make improvements to the law relating to animal welfare. And the ridiculous thing is that even the anti-hunting lobby now admits that hunting is, in welfare terms, an insignificant issue.
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The Home Secretary set up the Burns inquiry to inform the debate on hunting. Apart from achieving that, it has also helped those of us who were already fairly well informed to clarify our thinking. Certainly those of us who are involved in the hunting debate have benefited from the process. And it is important to remember that the Countryside Alliance is not a single-issue group, as some of our opponents seek to suggest. The Countryside Alliance is a democratic organisation with almost 500,000 members. Not only do they hunt, shoot and fish, but they also own more dogs and horses than any other group in the UK. They also include large numbers of livestock farmers, and many are responsible for the management of most of Britain's wildlife, which task they perform with unrivalled skill and dedication.
As many of your Lordships will be aware, the Countryside Alliance was responsible for contributing one of the options to the hunting Bill that we shall be debating next week. What some of your Lordships will not be aware of is that the option which we produced was not our preferred course of action. We made our position clear to the Home Secretary and he was generous enough to make that point in his speech at Second Reading of the Hunting Bill, in another place. Mr Straw said:
"I should make one thing clear immediately. The Countryside Alliance does not accept that those who undertake properly organised hunting are committing an act of cruelty that would he liable to prosecution under the two Acts to which I have referred [the Protection of Animals Act 1911: Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996]… The second point that I should make, in fairness to the Countryside Alliance, is that while the alliance has been most helpful in presenting that option, it is quick to emphasise that it does not reflect the entirety of its position. The alliance does not believe it is right to deal with hunting in isolation. It would prefer a complete overhaul of our animal welfare legislation, making it unlawful to inflict, by any means, unnecessary suffering on any mammal".—[Official Report, Commons, 20/12/00; col. 384.]
That is my position today. I believe that there is a substantial gap in our welfare law in respect particularly of wild mammals. I believe that no one should be able intentionally to inflict unnecessary suffering on a wild mammal, and I do not believe that the courts would conclude that properly conducted field sports, including hunting, involve the intentional infliction of unnecessary suffering. The noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, made the same point and I greatly look forward to hearing the views of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, on that issue.
I believe that for two reasons, apart from my own experience. First, case law in the English courts has developed the concept that cruelty should be defined in terms of unnecessary suffering. Previous laws have always recognised that traditional rural activities and management practises do not involve unnecessary suffering and have made that clear by including them among the exceptions. However, because they do not involve unnecessary suffering these exceptions may well now be obsolete. Certainly this view was supported by the 1951 Scott Henderson report. I believe that the same conclusion is clear in the report of the Burns inquiry.

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It is particularly interesting to note that this issue was discussed at length during one of the oral evidence sessions that the noble Lord, Lord Burns, chaired as part of his inquiry on 15th May 2000. I would not want to detain your Lordships by quoting long passages of the transcript of that session, although I have them here. The view expressed during that seminar by Rachel Newman, the head of the RSPCA's legal prosecutions department, seems to reveal that the RSPCA does not believe that it could prove in court that hunting per se involves the intentional infliction of unnecessary suffering.
The seminar also touched on the exemptions that hunting has from certain provisions within the Protection of Badgers Act, but reading the transcript leads me to the conclusion that none of the participants understood the original reasoning behind that exception. It may, therefore, be helpful to your Lordships to look at it for just a moment.
The purpose of the original Bill relating to badger setts was to increase the protection not only of the animal but also its sett. Hunts were not exempted from the new crime of interfering with a sett on welfare grounds but purely as a practical matter. If setts are not stopped during hunting foxes will use them, and consequently hounds will be more likely to disturb them.
In terms of extending protection and the purpose of the exemption the legislation is successful. But the important point is that in providing that level of protection it became virtually impossible to cull badgers in order to regulate their numbers. Consequently, there is now a strong body of opinion that there are too many badgers, and there is evidence that that leads to disease within the badger population. I know that that causes concern within MAFF, as the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, said; and it certainly causes concern within the farming community. This is a classic example of the law of unintended consequences. That is more likely to occur when legislation is too complex, unclear in its purpose or too widely drawn.
There is no doubt that the Bill before us today simplifies an area of the law that is currently over-complicated and impractical to operate, and as such it is a welcome improvement. However, I should like to see the whole subject taken further. Clearly, although today's debate is immensely useful, there is virtually no chance of the Bill making much progress. I hope, however, that the Government do not reject it out of hand and take the opportunity to move the whole issue forward in the next Parliament.
The whole relationship between man and animals has changed and we need to take account of that. At the outset of my remarks I said that I welcomed this measure, but I must sound a note of caution. This is a difficult area which we should enter with care. In this short debate we have not had time to look at all the difficult areas into which we need to go. But there are two areas that I believe we should explore further. First, I believe that there is a case for giving some
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guidance to the courts to assist them in differentiating between what is necessary and what is not in terms of the activity, be it pest control, sport or killing for food. The word "necessary" that is currently in the Act refers to the method of killing, not the motive. I believe that that is where courts may need assistance, although I have an open mind as to whether that guidance should be on the face of the Bill.
Secondly, I am concerned that legitimate activities may face malicious prosecution by private individuals and organisations which are completely undesirable. There is evidence that that was what happened following the passage of the 1994 legislation, and we need to ensure that that is not repeated. But I believe that there are solutions to these problems. At the same time, if we consider welfare we must also examine the wider issues of wildlife management. The Burns inquiry looks at these issues and identifies the problems. There is a conflict between animal welfare—the needs of an individual animal—and the wellbeing of populations and species. What suits the individual animal may not suit the population of animals, and vice versa. When we look at this in future we need to take that into account as one of a whole series of issues relating to man's relationship with animals. Huntingdon Life Sciences, the hunting debate, wild animal welfare and wildlife management are all issues in need of resolution.
The current foot and mouth outbreak following BSE and swine fever has again raised the issue of livestock farming and how we look after farm animals. These issues will not go away. I share with the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, the hope that the Minister will not use Pandora's Box as a reason for walking away from this. The box is wide open, and it is up to government to give a lead in dealing with these very complex and difficult issues. If we do not deal with them in that way we shall be pressured into it by extremists in future. That is not a route down which we should like to go.
The Countryside Alliance believes that one way forward is for the Government to take the same approach to these problems that they take in relation to hunting. I believe that an independent inquiry by way of a Royal Commission to inform the discussion rather than resolve the issues would be acceptable to all sides and take the heat out of the debate. I believe that that would command widespread support.
I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for bringing this matter to our attention. This is a very valuable opportunity. I hope that we can return to the debate early in the next Parliament. I assure the noble Lord and the House of the support of the Countryside Alliance, although I cannot promise that that support will be unqualified.
11.35 a.m.
Lord Burns: My Lords, I support the Bill. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for giving us the opportunity to debate this issue. In taking that view, however, I should like to make two points by way of introduction. First, I shall limit my remarks

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to the relevance of this Bill to hunting with dogs, because I am afraid that I have even fewer qualifications to speak about anything else. Secondly, from my perspective my remarks are of relevance only if Parliament decides against a ban on hunting with dogs. If there is a ban, clearly they have rather less relevance.
I appreciate the scope for misunderstanding, but I also stress that my support for the Bill is not an attempt to predict the outcome of the debate; nor does it indicate a preference for Parliament to decide against a ban on hunting. I shall make that clear when we debate the hunting Bill on Monday. I took on the job of chairing the Committee of Inquiry into Hunting with Dogs on the basis that the committee did not have to come to a view on whether hunting should be banned. We were asked only to inform the debate on various aspects of hunting. Our report stuck to that remit, and I hope to do likewise today.
I believe, however, that even without coming to a view on that issue it is possible to support both elements of this Bill: first, the proposal to widen and generalise the definition of the offence; and, secondly, to remove some of the exemptions, including those for hunting. My reason for speaking today is that both issues were dealt with in chapter 9 of the report of the hunting inquiry, as the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, explained. The context of that discussion was consideration of some practical aspects of hunting and coursing where the committee had a number of concerns. We set out suggestions as to how some of those concerns might be dealt with if a ban on hunting was not introduced, and my remarks today should be seen in the same light.
It is important also to stress that today's Bill is not a substitute for a ban in the sense that it would achieve the same result. I doubt that it would achieve the same result as a ban, and that was one of the issues to emerge from the seminar which we held during the course of the inquiry. Instead, I see this Bill as a step towards helping to resolve some of the concerns about aspects of hunting if Parliament decides, for one reason or another, not to introduce a ban.
As the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, explained, the hunting inquiry report looked at this question and noted that one possible legislative approach would be to remove the present exemption of hunting from the Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996. The noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, quoted part of the report. Basically, the argument was that it would give an important signal that hunting should be subject to the same standards as apply to other organisations and individuals, and it would give a greater opportunity to test in the courts views about cruelty.
The main point here is that some hunting practices are claimed by opponents of hunting to be cruel. I believe that there were a number of concerns raised about some aspects of hunting across the range of people who gave evidence to us. At the same time, supporters of hunting claimed that what they did was necessary and that it involved no more suffering than other ways of managing the population of the animals
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in question. As we shall see on Monday when we debate the Hunting Bill, much of the debate centres on the welfare of the hunted species; indeed, it is probably the most complicated aspect of that debate, and not one that I want to go into today. But if the present debate does not lead to a ban on hunting, it is important that the courts should have a greater say in the types of practices that do not meet the test for "unnecessary suffering".
As the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, explained this morning, at the moment the Wild Mammals (Protection) Act contains exemptions for,
"lawful shooting, hunting, coursing or pest control activity".
I listened carefully to what was said by the noble Lords, Lord Donoughue and Lord Mancroft, about why there were pressures to include those exemptions in 1996 so that the Bill did not become a method to abolish hunting by the back door. However, if the supporters of hunting are right about the welfare implications of hunting, those exemptions are unnecessary. I continue to take the view that to subject hunting to the same standards as apply to other organisations and individuals would be an important signal. It would demonstrate that hunting does not enjoy special favours and that it should be called upon to justify itself, as any other group of people. For that reason, I am in favour of removing the exemptions.
The second issue is the nature of the offence. The noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, explained that in the report on hunting we note that removing the exemptions might have only a limited effect, since the principal offence in the Act relates to certain activities only and few of them appear to apply to hunting.
Therefore, the second welcome feature of the Bill is to drop that list of activities and to replace it with a general clause covering anyone who intentionally inflicts or causes or procures unnecessary suffering on or to any wild animal. That strengthens the Bill. It means that it will cover a wider range of matters relating to hunting and other activities. Both aspects of that are important— the removal of the exemptions and the widening of the offence.
The noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, mentioned that during the course of the inquiry into hunting we had a seminar which actually looked at this question. We debated the effect of removing the exemptions. The discussion is available on the CD-ROM at the back of the report. Although I recognise that not everyone will be able to find their way to the issue immediately, help is available if anyone really wants to look at it. There one finds that lawyers acting for the anti-hunting organisations argue that, even if the exemptions were removed, cruelty would have to be proved in each and every case. Therefore, it would be unworkable. They expressed concern that it was very unlikely that sufficient precedent would be set up to outlaw hunting activities as a result of this change.
However, having since contemplated and considered the issue, it is possible to see, as the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue pointed out, that a combination of a licensing authority, as set out in one

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of the options to the Bill, and the changes that we are debating today could substantially reduce some of these concerns.
Removing the exemptions in the Wild Mammals (Protection) Act and redefining the offence gives the option to test in the courts some of the practices involved. If successful prosecutions are brought against certain practices, surely the licensing authority would have to take that into account in granting new licences, even if it did not establish a firm legal precedent.
I come to the conclusion that the Bill would strengthen the hand of any licensing authority as it provides the opportunity for the law to play a bigger part in defining what does and what does not constitute unnecessary suffering to wild animals. It would enable successful prosecutions to be generalised beyond the case in question; and it would raise the issue of animal welfare and the role of the courts more clearly in the debate.
Once again I stress as strongly as I can that I am not advocating this combination as a better option than a ban. I wish to keep out of that debate. I do not want to argue that it would give the same effect as a ban, which some people might be encouraged to argue. My remarks are based entirely on the possibility, and not the prediction, that Parliament will decide not to introduce a ban on hunting. This gives us the opportunity to focus on how to take the issue forward; how to raise the question of some of the activities and practices, about which no doubt there is quite a lot of concern; how it will be possible to meet those concerns; and how to take the matter forward with the help of the courts. For those reasons I wish to support the Bill.
11.44 a.m.
Lord Tomlinson: My Lords, right at the outset I should like to join with my noble friend Lord Donoughue in his condemnation of the militant tendency that surrounds some of the activities which have been peripheral to the argument. The examples that my noble friend gave are condemned by everyone, whether it is people being attacked by baseball bats or some of the more reprehensible activities that we have seen in the context of Huntingdon Life Sciences. I join with him absolutely, as strongly as I did in the 1970s when we were combating a militant tendency in our own party.
The facility with which the Bill has been claimed to have a potential linkage with the so-called "middle way" is perhaps dangerous. That was partly shown up in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, who referred to the facility that this would give to the licensing authority were the Bill to be enacted. But the noble Lord went on to say quite clearly that that was not to argue in favour of the licensing road; we had to make the fundamental decision first. That is where I differ from my noble friend Lord Donoughue.
I have no doubt that my noble friend has produced his Bill with the best of intentions, particularly concerning the welfare of animals. His record on that
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matter is quite exemplary. However, the argument is beginning to become a diversion, because the Bill never can be, nor should be, seen in isolation from the debate which is to take place in your Lordships' House next Monday. It cannot be an alternative to the choices that must be made. It cannot be a substitute for them. The one matter that it points out very clearly is the rather false nature of the choices between three options that we shall have to make in your Lordships' House.
It would have been far better if we were faced with making a choice of principle between abolition of the process of hunting with dogs or a continuation of it, and, first and foremost, have that choice clearly made. If the choice were for a continuation of the practice of hunting with dogs, then the combination of licensing and the contribution of my noble friend's Bill would be entirely pertinent. But I believe that his well-intentioned measure at this time and in this way and in this juxtaposition to the debate that takes place next Monday, is flawed.
I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Burns, that this measure would not achieve the same result as a ban. That makes this a premature decision to be making. The first and foremost decision should be whether or not this House supports the view of another place on the merits of a ban, rather than the fundamental—some would argue moral—question, "Should the hunting of wild mammals with dogs for sport be banned?" The effect of the Bill, if passed, would be to allow instances of hunting to be brought before a magistrate if there was evidence— that evidence would necessarily be post-mortem evidence— of unnecessary suffering. The report of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, referred to the difficulty of getting such post-mortem evidence.
It could take years for case law properly to emerge. It would remain inconclusive on the matter of principles. It would nullify what I believe is a central conclusion of the report of the noble Lord, Lord Burns—I join with other noble Lords in expressing thanks and gratitude to him for all the work that went into it—that hunting with dogs would seriously compromise the welfare of hunted animals.
The noble Lord's report produced evidence beyond all reasonable doubt that hunting with dogs includes the element of suffering. It is my belief that that suffering is unnecessary. In those circumstances, to have to prove each and every individual case of unnecessary suffering before a magistrates' court makes as little sense as having to wait for a drunken driver to commit an offence before you take him to court, rather than to say that the offence is being in the position to cause damage to someone else.
The effect of the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, would be to turn every allegation of cruelty taken to a magistrates' court into a repeat at that court of the process of gathering evidence which the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his inquiry have already done for us.
The Bill has a simple approach. Its simplicity appears attractive, but I believe that it does not produce a positive answer to an equally simple

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question. Will its passage lay a divisive debate to rest? I fear not. In my view, it will not prevent cruelty; it provides a very limited redress to allegations of cruelty; and that redress would be significant for its capacity to engender protracted legal argument, indecision, confusion and, as between one magistrates' court and another, inconsistency. If the Bill is passed, the only certainty is that hunting with dogs would continue with almost no visible difference. If hunting with dogs is inherently cruel—on the balance of evidence, I believe it to be so—there should not be any requirement to prove each individual case of unnecessary suffering.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Donoughue for his efforts to find a mutually acceptable solution. However, in an argument such as this, my noble friend is trying to bridge an almost unbridgeable gap. There are views that can never co-exist. The fundamental decision on allowing hunting to continue legally or abolishing it must be taken first. It is that fundamental conflict which should be resolved and I fear that the Bill, if carried, would divert us from that task.
11.52 a.m.
Baroness; Mallalieu: My Lords, I should, first, declare my personal interests. I am president of the Countryside Alliance, I am chairman of the Labour Leave Country Sports Alone campaign and I am a member of the RSPCA. I am also fortunate enough to live in close contact with animals of many different types: farm animals— sheep and cattle; pet animals— horses, cats, dogs and even guinea-pigs; and wild animals, which live on our small farm in the Chilterns—roe deer, muntjac, foxes, badgers, rabbits, hedgehogs and a range of small mammals, some of which are more desirable to have as close neighbours than others.
The relationship between man and animals is full of contradictions and the laws which govern those relationships are at present both complex and, in some respects, plainly inadequate. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, on introducing the Bill. Whatever is said by others, it is both timely, in the light of the debate we shall be having at great length on Monday, and it also provides a much needed opportunity for a short public debate on the duties and obligations we owe to animals and the limits which the law should impose on what we do with them.
I support the Bill. It is limited in its scope because it applies only to wild mammals. I do not believe that the law should afford protection to anyone who deliberately causes unnecessary suffering to any wild mammal or, for that matter, to any animal. We have in recent years, as other noble Lords have said, seen the rise of the animal rights movement and with it a dangerous, intolerant extremism, which is now manifesting itself in acts of intimidation, violence and terrorism. I do not subscribe to the concept of animal rights. If animals have rights, it is surely wrong for us to eat them and it is wrong for us to keep them as pets; and I do both. But I strongly support the concept of trying to do our best to improve animal welfare and to show respect for animals in all our dealings with them.
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There are many aspects of our present treatment of animals—it is right to say that the animal rights movement has highlighted them—that need proper examination and need to be changed. Many pet animals in this country, both large and small, are kept in wholly unsuitable conditions that cause unnecessary suffering. Many farm animals are treated in ways that require to be changed, as the current crisis is showing us. There is an urgent need for public concerns about experiments on animals to be examined and allayed if we are not to jeopardise progress in research developments which could benefit both people and animals alike. There is a need for proper examination of the way in which man can live together with the wild animals in our increasingly urban and suburban country and how their populations can best be managed and balanced against competing interests.
Unfortunately, the national debate is not addressing those issues and we are becoming a nation of sentimentalists. It may make the nation feel better to see television programmes night after night in which deer have plaster casts fitted to their legs before they are returned to the wild. But it does not begin to address the real and growing problem that the national deer herd has exploded to a level which in some places means that there is serious damage to crops and trees and a major road accident problem. A steady diet of unrestrained sentimentality on television, where every wild animal is given a name and attributed with quasi-human emotions, means that we are failing to face up to the realities and the hard decisions which we are going to have to make. Wild animals have, for a variety of reasons, to be killed. Those reasons include the protection of crops and of livestock and the protection of human health or animal health; and they may need to be killed because they are sick, diseased or injured, or are simply too numerous for their habitats to accommodate them. A lack of contact with wild animals, other than through these television programmes, means that too many people fail to make a distinction—it is an important one—between wild animals and domestic animals such as pets. They have different needs.
Wild animals and domestic or pet animals are very different. The latter usually cannot manage without our assistance. What is acceptable in the treatment of a pet may be positively harmful to a wild animal, and vice versa. A pet may be put in a cage or a kennel. A fox is deeply distressed by the experience, as are most wild animals when trapped, even when the trap inflicts no physical pain. Nor can many people in today's climate, divorced, as most of us are, from the production of our food, understand that a farmer who rears animals for food and sends them off to the abattoir may still care greatly for them.
How these problems should be handled, and how all these aspects of our relationship with animals should be managed, should not be determined or led by people wearing the Balaclava helmet and wielding the baseball bat, to which my noble friend referred. Nor should they be determined or dictated by animal rights lobbying groups with bottomless bank accounts. What is needed is a measured and responsible lead from

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government; not a defensive or a piecemeal response to this campaign or that campaign, to this pressure group or that extremist demonstration. An inquiry is needed in the very near future into all aspects of our relations with domestic animals, farm animals, animals used for experiments and wild animals, and there should then follow, as part of that inquiry, a proper comprehensive review of the law—not just piecemeal reform of the law—in relation to them. That is why I say that this is an excellent Bill, but it is limited and modest in its scope.
As other noble Lords have pointed out, the proposal for the reform of the Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996 was raised initially by the Countryside Alliance in its evidence to the inquiry chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, back in April last year. Other speakers have referred in detail to what took place. I think that it was unfortunate that those who represented Deadline 2000, which campaigned for a ban, did not welcome that proposed change.
I am also disturbed by some of the arguments proposed so eloquently to the House by my noble friend Lord Tomlinson. He believes that hunting is cruel. I believe that it is not. The inquiry of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, made no finding that hunting was cruel. I hope that that will be spelt out in language that we can all understand during the course of the debate on Monday. There is a dispute between my noble friend and myself. We disagree on this matter. Surely it is right that a disagreement of this kind should be tested by the courts. Surely it is not right that Parliament should adopt the view that perhaps it is difficult to provide the evidence and therefore we should simply legislate to outlaw the whole of the activity without ever trying to see whether an individual charged with an offence has or has not committed the offence.
If hunting is cruel, as the noble Lord believes, then it must be right that the courts should be required to produce evidence of that cruelty before a conviction is passed for a crime. If, during the course of hunting, anyone breaks the rules and intentionally causes unnecessary suffering in the way that this Bill provides, then not for one second would I argue that the criminal law should apply. As an essential principle it must be right that no one, under any circumstances—hunting, pest control or any other activity—is entitled deliberately to cause unnecessary suffering to a wild mammal.
As it stands, this Bill may need some amendments to provide further clarification. Other noble Lords have pointed this out. But that basic principle is surely sound. In reality, there is no nice way of killing a wild mammal. It is not easy to do in a manner that alleviates suffering. Those who bear the direct responsibility for controlling wild mammals must still be able to do so within the law, provided that they adhere to that principle; namely, that unnecessary suffering must not be caused deliberately.
The present law is illogical. As the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, said when introducing the Bill, it cannot be right that someone who kicks a fox to death is a
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criminal, but someone who deliberately shoots it, intending only to wound, is not. I warmly welcome this modest and sensible measure.
12.3 p.m.
Lord Hardy of Wath: My Lords, I should like to join my noble friend Lady Mallalieu in commending the Bill and congratulating my noble friend Lord Donoughue. I believe that the speech we have just heard, along with the speeches before it, need to be considered carefully.
Perhaps I may declare a non-interest. I do not practise or support field sports. What I am concerned with is animal conservation and animal welfare. I have been involved in those matters for a long time. On this occasion I shall not refer in detail to my views on the Hunting Bill because I wish to speak in the debate on Monday. However, I will say this: the test should be whether the Hunting Bill will reduce or add to cruelty. In my view, the Bill before your Lordships' House today would reduce cruelty, but the Hunting Bill will increase it. No doubt the reasons for that will be spelt out on many occasions during the long hours of the Second Reading of the Hunting Bill, but the fact remains that, if I were a fox, I would vote against the Hunting Bill. I would rather die quickly by the hounds than in up to a fortnight in agony as a result of septicaemia. I shall not say any more on that subject.
However, I am concerned about the need to improve, clarify and strengthen the existing law in regard to cruelty to animals. Around a year ago, I was fortunate enough to hold a debate on this matter and I remain convinced of the need for stronger legislation. Perhaps I may take the House back to 1973 when I steered the Badgers Act through Parliament. I did so because at the time I was studying badgers. Indeed, shortly afterwards I wrote a book about them. I found out that, in South Yorkshire, badger setts were being assailed during the breeding season when the cubs were below ground. They were being attacked by people who were trapping the badgers and taking them for the purposes of baiting. Those people were pretty ruthless. They even put gin traps at the side of badger setts close to a nature trail being used by the children of local schools. The House passed the Badgers Bill.
Far fewer prosecutions were brought under the Act than there ought to have been because the law allowed that fairly unreasonable defences could be accepted. People who knew very well what they were doing got off because they would say, "We didn't know it was a badger. We thought it was a fox". It was all right for them to be cruel to a fox, but it would have been wrong to be cruel to a badger.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, along with other Members of both Houses, I took part in several visits to Forestry Commission land. I spoke to the people responsible for the management of deer in those areas. In one case, the chap in charge of culling the deer told me that every single deer culled that year in his territory had been injured or wounded, usually quite deliberately. An air gun pellet had blinded one deer; a bolt from a crossbow was embedded in the side

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of another. After consultation, I presented the Deer Bill to the House. It did not attempt to stop the culling of deer because, as my noble friend pointed out, the deer population rises and there are no natural predators—unless we take into account motor vehicles, although one could not class them as "natural".
The Deer Bill received all-party support. Then a colleague of mine, who meant well because he was a decent man with good motives, said, "I shall block your Bill". I asked him why, to which he responded, "Because it allows deer to be killed. Deer are beautiful animals which should not be killed at all". I pointed out the arguments and how the Bill provided for a close season for roe deer which, at the time, did not have a close season. That permitted brutality to carry on throughout the year. But the Bill was blocked.
Three or four years later, another measure was passed, which was somewhat ameliorated. Certainly it was better than nothing because it did apply a close season to roe deer, which they sorely needed, but there was a refusal to accept the notion that any control needed to be applied to the deer population. Some controls are needed, but they must be exercised with humanity and competence.
I am experiencing some considerable irritation at the present time because I am deeply fond of swans. My noble friend remarked that wild animals should not be given names. Although I accept the general argument, I should say that, if I step out of my back door and shout, "Charlie!", a cob comes along for some corn. Over the past few months in South Yorkshire, several swans have been shot with air guns, for no good reason at all.
People still go out and shoot what they consider to be rats, but which are in reality water rats, of which there are few in Britain today, largely because of the mink. Mink entered the wild in Britain as a result of the lunatic activities of some of the animal liberation activists that a number of us heard Mr Cass of Huntingdon Life Sciences talk about in this building on Tuesday of this week. They have no regard for the fact that, if they were to succeed in their aim, the research would be moved out of Britain and taken to countries where there is no animal protection legislation, no inspection and no proper safeguards to guarantee some sort of decency in the treatment of those animals. These people are as unwise and irresponsible as my honourable friend who blocked the Deer Bill and ensured that many deer suffered for a long time before we finally got the measure through.
The test has to be one of good sense and wisdom, but with an understanding that what we do should add to the protection of nature and to the fulfilment of our humane responsibilities. I do not believe that the Hunting Bill does that; I believe that this Bill could. I hope that we will see this measure—with perhaps some of the amendments to which my noble friend referred embodied in it—reach the statute book. It is the kind of approach that we desperately need in this country. Frivolous and irrelevant measures which dominate debate do not take us far forward; this Bill could certainly remedy that situation.
12.11 p.m.
The Duke of Montrose: My Lords, perhaps I may declare an interest. My title perhaps gives sufficient explanation as to where my interest lies; my family are still landowners after hundreds of years. I should also add that I shall not be speaking on Monday. Having seen the list of speakers, I feel that I should not burden your Lordships with anything that I may have to say because it will have been said already by a great many other noble Lords. However, many of the arguments brought forward today will overlap with those which will come forward on Monday.
Whether we see it as a fortunate or unfortunate attribute, human beings have evolved throughout a major part of our time on earth in order to hunt or to avoid being hunted. We have bifocal vision, we have carnivore-type teeth, and we have never developed the multiple stomachs that would enable us to live off grass and to chew the cud. The one area in which this side of our nature is now considered totally acceptable is in what my rather chauvinistic part of the country calls "wenching", where our judgment of movement, form, speed, distance and opportunity are brought into play, along with various other biological urges. The rules are mostly unwritten, but time-honoured.
In the hunting of game, many of the same areas of judgment are used, although the biological urge is different and encompasses many aspects. It encompasses the pleasures of exercise and exploration and the sense that we are participating in an activity that has its origins in the skills which have ensured the survival of our species, down to the pleasure that one can see in the face of a young boy who brings home a fish for his mother to cook.
Your Lordships are, no doubt, fully aware that to say that we are going to make many aspects of this activity illegal is not going to put an end to it. It merely means that those who take part in it will not have as a main motivation that they should minimise the suffering of the quarry species; their overriding motivation will be to see that they do not get caught. That element exists at the moment and, depending on one's background, is known as "claimants of ancient people's rights" or as "poachers".
I have had similar experiences to those outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Hardy of Wath. I have frequently come across roe deer that have been left to die in the woods; geese and wildfowl that have been peppered with shot when they were so high that they were out of proper killing range; and red deer limping around because of their wounds. We even had a ewe running around with a crossbow bolt lodged through its head and sticking out the other side.
The countryside has a fairly active cadre of people who put a lot of time and effort into preventing the activity of poachers. These are people who presently exercise their legal and sporting rights. Perhaps the most effective in this regard are the groups of ordinary working men who form syndicates to police areas themselves. I should like to see any poacher trying to operate in that kind of situation. If we make these

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activities too difficult, these people will cease to act as guardians and we will be left looking for more official policing and so on to try to control matters.
To achieve mammal and other wildlife protection—which is a very proper and laudable aim—the system we produce must be capable of providing it. Unfortunately, merely passing a law is not the main line of defence that is needed; it is merely the underpinning. We have to be sure that we have thought through what it is underpinning and that it will be effective.
My main misgiving about the Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, is that it will leave the final determination of what constitutes unnecessary suffering to the courts. They will also be left to determine in each case whether the person accused of causing the suffering did so intentionally. I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, who I see coming back into the Chamber—
Lord Donoughue: I have never left it, my Lords.
The Duke of Montrose: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, continually used the word "deliberately" rather than "intentionally". I should be interested to know whether that word better conveys his intention and will be the subject of an amendment at later stages of the Bill.
A considerable amount of time was spent in this House and in another place, both in 1992 and in 1995, in trying to determine a satisfactory definition of what constitutes cruelty. If we continue to pursue this new approach, it seems to me that we may need to introduce amendments and spend a considerable amount of time trying to define certain acceptable methods of wildlife management and control so that these cannot be challenged by some novel interpretation under this legislation at a future date. It is not beyond speculation that shooting with a shotgun might be ruled as capable of inflicting suffering, and then we are back into the old area of intention.
One part of the Bill leaves me completely perplexed. Clause 1(2) states that paragraph (e) of Section 2 of the original Act should be omitted. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, would argue that the legal use of poisons does not cause unnecessary suffering. However, the current legal use is not confined to the control of rats and mice—which, after all, are mammals, whatever their other status in law may be—but may be used for the control of squirrels and moles, and perhaps for other mammals of which I am not aware. The Government have to reserve the right to use strychnine to control foxes in the event of an outbreak of rabies. We cannot leave it that the Government should require primary legislation to carry out this activity. Unless the noble Lord can reassure me on this matter, I feel that an amendment will need to be introduced into the Bill to ensure that that paragraph is retained.
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The Bill has many aspects to commend it—I certainly support the idea that it merits further consideration—but I feel that we should proceed cautiously.
12.17 p.m.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, like every noble Lord who has spoken, I appreciate the opportunity provided by the Bill to discuss an issue of great importance to the House. There is no question but that during the debate on Monday—and, who knows, for a long time afterwards—we will be carrying out a most important task on behalf of the people of this country; that is, we will be giving our minds to an issue about which a great many people are concerned.
I am heartened by my knowledge that over the years when a Member of the House introduces a Private Member's Bill it has been customary for that Bill not to be opposed; it is given a Second Reading. That does not happen automatically—sadly, I have been in the House when a Second Reading has been opposed—but I subscribe to the convention that such a Bill should be given a Second Reading. It should then be sent to the other place, where I hope that it will be dealt with in the normal way, and I can imagine exactly what that will be.
Other noble Lords have declared interests. I have no interest to declare as a member of any organisation; I simply declare a lifelong belief, or commitment, or feeling, that hunting foxes and wild animals is wrong. It is either right or it is wrong; I believe that it is wrong. I do not disrespect those who believe that it is right. This is not a political issue. It goes across both sides of the House, as we shall see on Monday, and is an issue among all parties. We all have to make our decisions.
Not only am I very much concerned with what the Bill seeks to do; I should also certainly subscribe to the view that we have heard from many that its purpose is to be helpful to those who take my point of view. However, I do not believe that it will be. With respect, the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, have said so many times that, ultimately, this will be dealt with in the courts where determinations will have to be made. I am mindful of the fact that the magistrates' courts vary; that they are numerous; and that they come to different decisions.
I can understand a situation where, for example, a criminal act is committed in the eyes of individuals and they need to proceed with the evidence. That evidence will undoubtedly need to be a carcass. There will need to be a post mortem, as well as an assessment, a judgment and a finding, all of which will then be produced as the evidence in the case. It will then be tested; it needs to be. A magistrates' court will have to determine whether an offence has been committed and then apply, in its judgment, the punishment to suit that alleged crime. I can envisage time being wasted and much money being spent. We not only have this House as the nexus of appeals; we also have the European Court. Quite frankly, I just wonder whether the desire to do something that I accept is designed to be helpful will be fulfilled.

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I turn to the definition of "cruelty". I have considered the evidence, but, quite frankly, I do not have a jot of experience in the matter. Indeed, I adopt the same stance as that of the former Prime Minister, Mr John Major, who stood up during the debate in another place and said, "I've never hunted; I have never seen a hunt. But I have my views on the matter". That is where I stand. My view on the matter is that it is cruel and barbaric. I have seen pictures of the barbarism and the obscenity and it has been conveyed to me through correspondence. I am interested only in moving towards a situation where such practices are obliterated.
When we examine the possible effect of this Bill, the test for me is whether or not it answers the fundamental question: should the hunting of wild mammals with dogs for sport be banned? Many Members of this House attended a well-attended meeting yesterday and heard the speech made by the chairman of the Countryside Alliance. I listened to him and was grateful for his presence at the meeting. But when it came to the question of the motives in the minds of different people for hunting, I believe, with great respect, that he ran into trouble. He said that, for many people, the premise upon which hunting takes place is watching the way that the dogs "work". They do not see the kill; they do not feel the cruelty. It is the social ambience of the hunt that attracts them. Yet, once the chairman had said that, it was challenged from more than one side.
Quite honestly, the great difficulty here is trying to persuade people like me that hunting with dogs is a benign exercise. In my view, it is not accidental. It is organised for, and culminates in, a sequence of events that the people who go along for social purposes know will happen I do not believe that it is right; I believe that it is wrong. Indeed, it will be difficult to go through a process—as this Bill proposes—whereby the suffering must be proved in every case.
Remarks have been made about the activities of saboteurs and others. As a law-abiding citizen and a reasonable person, I am repelled, like most decent people, by the activities of extremists. On Monday, I shall attempt in the limited time available to me to comment on what was said by my noble friend Lady Mallalieu about the intimidation, violence and terrorism connected with the issue. I say that it is not all on the side of the hunters: some of it is perpetrated by those who oppose hunting. In other words, it is not right to categorise people. I believe that my noble friend Lord Donoughue talked in terms of extremists and people who hate country folk. There will be some like that, but the vast majority of people who share my views on the matter are reasonable people who just cannot stomach the idea that wild animals are hunted to their death by people for sport, and cruelty.
Therefore. I shall not oppose the Motion when the Question is put at the end of the debate. However, I very much hope that colleagues in another place will give it the treatment that I believe it deserves.
12.27 p.m.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: My Lords, perhaps I may begin by adding my congratulations to those offered by other noble Lords to the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, on this valuable piece of proposed legislation and for thus giving us the chance to discuss such an important matter. I find myself very much in sympathy with what the noble Lord said, especially as regards the exemptions and grey areas in existing legislation. I am glad to be able to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, that I do not support this proposed legislation for sentimental reasons. There is a truth—it may be a brutal truth, but it is, none the less, a truth—namely, that there is a food chain. The human species is at one place on it and mammals are at another. Nor do I support the Bill for anthropomorphic reasons. Again, a brutal reality is that there is a need for pest control in the last resort in order to safeguard the position of our species.
Surely the mark of a civilised society must be that those processes are carried out with the minimum of suffering. Therefore, I particularly support the wording of the Bill and the reference in Clause 1 to "any person" intentionally inflicting "unnecessary suffering". Along with many other noble Lords, I believe that this issue will no doubt be raised again on Monday. However, I do not wish to dwell upon it today.
I should like to raise quite another issue. I wonder whether the noble Lord considers that this is indeed an issue which could be brought in under the provisions of his Bill. I should also like to hear from the Minister what view the Government take on it. The process to which I refer is that of genetic implantation. In simple terms, plans are now well advanced to breed animals with a disease implanted in them; for example, cystic fibrosis. I am talking about the deliberate breeding of faulty animals—that is to say, deliberately to breed maimed animals, deliberately to cause suffering—and then experimenting on them to see whether cures can be found.
I should like to make it clear that this is not about Huntingdon Life Sciences. I doubt whether anyone likes the proposal to experiment on live, healthy animals but it is a necessity to ensure that medicines are safe for human use. The experiments by Huntingdon Life Sciences, and those conducted elsewhere, are carried out in a controlled way at minimum levels and, most importantly, within a statutory framework. Therefore, within the evolutionary chain, I see these experiments as a regrettable necessity but a necessity none the less. I submit, however, that gene implantation is different because its objective is to breed diseased animals, intentionally to cause suffering. At the very least in my view, there is an issue of public policy which deserves wide discussion.
A number of scientific articles on gene implementation have been published recently. The one I wish to quote from appeared in the Financial Times of the weekend issue of 24th/25th February. As a nonscientist and a banker I feel more at home with the

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Financial Times. The article refers to work being undertaken by Professor Schatten at the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, USA. He is attempting to insert a fluorescent gene from a jellyfish into a monkey. The article states that Schatten,
"tried again to insert the gene, this time using a slightly different method. Six months later, twin monkeys were born. Schatten was more cautious, but became excited again when he saw them in the black light.
These monkeys glowed brightly, and genetic tests soon confirmed that the fluorescent gene was, indeed, present. The trouble was"—
this is some trouble—
"that the twins were still-born. 'We don't think it was the fluorescent gene that killed the monkeys but we are still investigating that possibility', says Schatten … Why would anyone want to create glowing monkeys? Fluorescence was simply a convenient way to prove an important concept: that scientists may use gene therapy to alter monkeys' DNA. The technique paves the way to breed transgenic primates with human-like illnesses",
and then use them to experiment on and test drugs.
I understand that transgenic experimentation on mice has taken place for some years. However, the DNA of a mouse is very different from that of a human being. Monkeys are much closer to human beings in that regard—hence, this new work. Fluorescence, however, is only the beginning. The article further states that Schatten is now working,
"on better ways to transfer the DNA. 'We really need to be able to place the gene on a specific part of the chromosome, so we can for instance remove the healthy gene for breast cancer and replace it with a defective one' says Schatten";
that is, to breed monkeys who are bound to get breast cancer or some equally unpleasant disease.
The noble Lord, Lord Graham, used the word "obscenity" in reference to hunting. I believe that we are getting close to obscenity when we talk about deliberately breeding maimed animals. I hope that I am not alone in finding this a difficult and challenging moral issue. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, said that his Bill does not, and will not, cover animal laboratory experimentation. He will understand that I am concerned about that gap. As I hope I have made clear to your Lordships, the processes I have described inherently and intentionally cause suffering to animals. I therefore very much hope that the noble Lord may consider introducing amendments to strengthen his Bill in that respect.
I also hope that the Minister may find just a moment when he replies to the debate to outline the Government's approach on this issue which I believe is coming upon us by stealth. I end as I began by congratulating the noble Lord on his Bill. I wish him success with its broad approach.
12.34 p.m.
Lord Weatherill: My Lords, I rise in the gap to express my warm support for the Bill so ably moved by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue. He said that it might be of interest to some of your Lordships who wish to speak in the debate on Monday. I certainly had intended to speak on Monday in order to support the middle way and in doing so to declare two interests
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which I suppose I should declare today. First, my family firm might be said to be the regimental tailors to many of the hunts in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. However, I was somewhat distressed to discover in Horse and Hound advertisements for second-hand Bernard Weatherill hunt coats. That is not much good to us.
My second interest is a much more personal one. As some of your Lordships may know, for many, many years I have refrained from eating meat. I am a passionate vegetarian. I became a vegetarian on the ground of cruelty. I have seen too much cruelty and too much cruel death in my lifetime, not least between 1940 and 1946, gratuitously to cause cruelty to humans or to animals. Having listened to the debate, it seems to me that the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, seeks to outlaw gratuitous cruelty to wild mammals. That, of course, includes foxes. He mentioned that it might be incorporated as an amendment in the Hunting Bill. I hope that it will be because it constitutes the middle way which I would wish to support if I were to speak on Monday. As I say, I hope that it will be incorporated and that it will attract wide support not only inside but also outside your Lordships' House.
12.36 p.m.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for bringing the Bill before your Lordships' House and for enabling us to have a particularly interesting debate this morning.
I was struck by the fact that three noble Lords referred to evolution in one way or another. The noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, suggested that we were rather further back on the scale in evolutionary terms than we might wish. The noble Lord, Lord Weatherill, is obviously further advanced in evolutionary terms with regard to what I concede are animal rights. Speaking as a carnivore, I find it difficult to accept that animals have rights when we eat them. However, we have initiated an important debate this morning. We are somewhere along the evolutionary route as regards our treatment of animals.
The Bill has a useful part to play in that debate. I do not believe that, standing alone, it will constitute the debate on hunting that needs to take place. However, it will be useful as a part of that debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Weatherill, has just said, if the middle way were to be adopted incorporating a body to regulate hunting, that would be an effective way forward.
I consider that the disadvantage of the Bill as it stands stems not from the words "intentional" or "cruelty" but, rather, "unnecessary". We still have forms of hunting which I believe fall outside anyone's definition of what is necessary. An example is hare coursing. I accept that foxes need to be managed. I have read extremely carefully the report of the noble Lord, Lord Burns. I note that the methods of managing foxes, deer, mink and hares vary widely. It is interesting to compare the cruelty inflicted by shooting them ineptly with a shotgun, shooting them more

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accurately with a rifle or hunting them. In upland areas there seems to be considerable doubt as to whether shooting could provide a reasonable alternative for hunting foxes that would cause less suffering.
If we were to take the Bill as a stand-alone measure, thereby placing the onus on the courts to decide whether unnecessary suffering was caused, there would be inconsistency of judgments, as has been pointed out this morning. Although the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, regarded that as a bad thing, one could argue that magistrates in different areas had every right to make different decisions on unnecessary suffering. Hunting in an upland area might be considered the most efficacious control of foxes in that area. The courts may take different views for valid reasons.
Even if this Bill were to proceed in this House, it will be overtaken by the Hunting Bill. I believe that that is right because the Hunting Bill is the forum for debate. The public expectation is that there will be a legislative decision on the correct way forward. As an evolutionist, I believe that the middle way is right. The Government have not considered in sufficient detail the issues around fallen stock. I must declare an interest: my husband is chairman of the Exmoor National Park Authority. A large number of issues about the management of the national deer herd remains to be resolved. None of those issues has been addressed, and if the Government were to support an outright ban sufficiently the deer herd would face rapid and extreme culling, as occurred in the Quantocks when the Foster Bill was first introduced. A ban on hunting should not place our national deer herd under the threat of less adequate management than we would all wish.
I hope that we shall return to this measure, perhaps as an addition to the Hunting Bill. Today's debate has been useful. However, I do not believe that as a standalone Bill the measure will be sufficient.
12.42 p.m.
Viscount Astor: My Lords, this Bill is an important addition to the debate on animal welfare and hunting. Neither this Bill, nor the Hunting Bill which we shall debate on Monday, will achieve passage through both Houses in time for the general election which we hear will come in May—but, of course, the Government Chief Whip looks perplexed and knows nothing about that, as we would expect. Discussion on both Bills will add to the public and parliamentary understanding of the issues. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, for introducing the Bill. The timing is helpful. It will add to our understanding in the debate on Monday.
My noble friend Lord Mancroft said that the Countryside Alliance welcomes this Bill. I, too, welcome it. I am delighted that the Countryside Alliance is able to support it. The noble Lord, Lord Burns, supports the Bill. Indeed, the Bill is referred to in Chapter 9, paragraph 38, of the noble Lord's report if no ban on hunting is introduced. As the noble Lord
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said, if such a ban is introduced, the measure might be unnecessary. But if there is no ban, this Bill could be helpful.
I agree with the noble Lord that the courts could have a greater say. That would demonstrate clearly that hunting would not enjoy special favours. I would be in favour of hunting coming under the remit of this Bill. However, I agree with my noble friend Lord Mancroft; we would have to consider further the details of the Bill.
The noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, addressed the subject from another angle. He attempted to persuade your Lordships that the three choices offered to another place during debate on the Hunting Bill should not be offered to this House. I find that argument extraordinary. I cannot agree with any attempt to curb debate in this House and remove its proper role as a revising Chamber. Like another place, this House must be able to debate all three issues. I believe that the Government have given that commitment and will give it again at Second Reading of the Hunting Bill on Monday.
The noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, spoke with her usual clarity on the Bill, animals in general and hunting. I agree with her concerns about how we treat pets and experiments on animals, to which my noble friend Lord Hodgson referred. Although the Bill does not cover such issues, they must be addressed by Parliament. The Government must consider the best way in which to address them.
The noble Lord, Lord Hardy of Wath, said that if he were a fox he would vote against the Bill in its current form. I understood him to mean that he would vote against the ban. His speech reflected his strong interest and experience over many years in dealing with animal protection and animal welfare issues. His contribution was helpful.
At first, the speech of my noble friend the Duke of Montrose seemed more to do with sport conducted in Scotland on a Saturday night rather than any afternoon sport. (I am not sure whether such activity is cruel—that is a different issue!) My noble friend was concerned about control of wildlife, particularly in relation to deer.
The noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, has always been against hunting. He believes that hunting wild animals is wrong. He is, therefore, against the Bill. The noble Lord said that he has never seen a hunt.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: My Lords, I apologise for intervening. I have just remembered that I once saw the Quorn Hunt. It met at Stanford Hall which was owned by the Co-operative Movement. In 1950, as a student, I went along to remonstrate but received short shrift. I have never seen a hunt in action.
Viscount Astor: My Lords, I am delighted to hear that explanation. I wish that the noble Lord could see a hunt in action. If he did, his views might change. The noble Lord might understand the motives of those who hunt. It must be clear that the only hunters of the fox are the hounds. The hounds hunt the fox guided by the

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huntsmen. Those who hunt follow the hounds; they do not hunt the fox. They do not hunt for cruelty. Nor would any of them hunt if they considered it cruel. I believe that he is wrong on that issue. However, I was glad that he and other noble Lords condemned those extremists who break the law, on whichever side of the issue they stand.
My noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts was concerned about genetic breeding, cloning and the swapping of genes. I share his concerns. I have always been concerned about animal testing on primates. I am never happy about animal testing on other mammals.
The noble Lord, Lord Weatherill, who spoke in the gap, declared his interest in his family firm that tailors hunting clothing. I declare my interest as a client and customer of the noble Lord's family firm. They do a fine job and I hope that I shall continue to go along to Saville Row as one of their customers.
The noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, showed clearly how the courts could rule on the different issues involved. She gave the example of hunting in upland areas, which could be shown as the best and most effective way of controlling foxes. Her remarks on what would happen to the deer herd on Exmoor were very interesting. We must consider whether the animals would be better off if hunting did not happen. There is a strong argument for saying that that has not been shown to be the case and that they would be worse off.
The courts rule on many issues. Case law is constantly evolving. The 1911 Act and subsequent Acts and case law clearly show how cruelty or justification for cruelty can be proved or not. I would be disappointed if the Minister said that the Bill was too wide in that regard and that it would be difficult to rule on what would be cruel. That is an unacceptable argument and I hope that the Minister will not use it, because the premise behind it is disingenuous. The courts have clearly shown since 1911 that they are able to decide what is cruel and what is not. The Government must come clean on that. In Standing Committee on the Hunting Bill in another place, the Minister resisted that idea. That was more to do with not wanting to involve the courts in that Bill. The Government should admit that the courts could have a role, because they deal with the point on many other issues.
The Bill would amend the 1996 Act. It would ensure protection for wild mammals from unnecessary suffering. There would be no exceptions for the previously exempt activities. I am happy for hunting to be included, as is the Countryside Alliance. The Bill would make the intentional infliction or causing of unnecessary suffering a criminal offence. The Bill is a model of clarity, certainty and brevity. I hope that the Minister will take those words back to the Home Office draftsmen next time he is considering a Home Office Bill.
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The Bill would go a long way towards raising welfare standards for our wild mammals. I hope that the Minister will welcome it as a contribution to the debate. However, we all recognise the limited timetable that it is up against.
12.54 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Bassam of Brighton): My Lords, before I get to the heart of the issue, I join the general congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, on introducing this important Bill. I also congratulate him on his diligence in and out of government, in championing the welfare of animals. He has focused particularly on striking a balance between the demands of modern agriculture and the needs of the environment, including the welfare of wildlife.
The Government will not oppose the Second Reading of the Bill. That is in accordance with tradition and it is particularly important in this case, because we recognise that the Bill has an important part to play in a wider debate. As the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, said, this is a prelude—and a very well-intentioned one, I think—to our debate on Monday, which will have broader considerations.
There have been too many contributions this morning for me to refer to all of them, but I listened with great interest to the noble Lord, Lord Burns, not least because of his report. He set out some important pointers and guides for our other debates. The noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, gave a clear exposition of her position. The noble Lords, Lord Graham and Lord Tomlinson, and others also gave clear and well made arguments. Both Opposition Front Benches have also made important contributions. I am grateful to all those who have taken part in this well-informed debate, which has been underpinned by a genuine desire on all sides of the House to promote the protection and welfare of wild animals. That does your Lordships' House great credit.
The Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996 is an important Act that has made it easier than ever before for the police to act to protect wild mammals in the countryside. It gives officers more power to prosecute those causing unnecessary and unlawful suffering to wild animals such as hedgehogs, squirrels and foxes. Section 1 of that Act makes it an offence to mutilate, kick, beat, nail or otherwise impale, stab, burn, stone, crush, drown, drag or asphyxiate any wild mammal with intent to inflict unnecessary suffering. Those convicted can be fined up to £5,000 or sent to prison for a period not exceeding six months.
Section 2 contains a number of exceptions to this general provision so that a person is not guilty of an offence if an attempted killing of any such wild mammal is an act of mercy; if the killing is done in a reasonably swift and humane manner and it can be shown that the wild mammal had been injured or taken in the course of lawful shooting, hunting, coursing, or pest control activity; if any act made unlawful under Section 1 of the Act is done by means of any snare, trap, dog or bird lawfully used for the

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purpose of killing or taking any wild mammals; or if they have lawfully used any poisonous or noxious substance on any wild mammal.
The Act addresses cases of, for example, hedgehogs being kicked to death or live squirrels being thrown on a bonfire. The Act is not intended to threaten those who, in the course of carrying out their lawful pursuits in the countryside, may cause death or injury to wild mammals.
So much for the present position. Perhaps I may now turn to the effects of the amendments proposed to it by the Bill put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue. The noble Lord's amendments to Section 1 would delete all the explicit references to specific acts, such as mutilation, beating or kicking. The effect of this would be that the provision would bite on anyone who unnecessarily caused suffering to a wild mammal.
The changes to Section 2 are equally significant. Three of the exceptions would be removed. Protection would no longer automatically be afforded to those who kill wild mammals as part of hunting, coursing or pest control. Nor would those who lawfully use snares, traps or poisons have the benefit of an exception.
I shall say more about pest control in a moment, but first I shall deal briefly with hunting. We are going to have a lengthy deliberation on the subject on Monday and it would not be right to get into a detailed discourse in advance of that. As I have already explained, the 1996 Act contains exceptions for hunting from the offence in Section 1 of cruelty to wild mammals. Section 2(b) provides an exception in respect of the killing in a reasonably swift and humane manner of any such wild mammal injured or taken in the course of, among other activities, lawful hunting or coursing. Section 2(d) provides a further exception in respect of any act made unlawful by Section 1 if carried out by a dog used lawfully for the killing or taking of a wild mammal.
The Bill before us would remove those exemptions. The effect would be that hunting with dogs would constitute an offence where unnecessary suffering was caused to the mammal being hunted. I can see the attraction of that suggestion as most, although perhaps not all, people who oppose hunting object to it because they believe that it is cruel. If they could be reassured that any unnecessary suffering would be punished in the courts, they might feel more comfortable about the matter.
However, I could present the other side of the coin and suggest that that may not, as some supporters of the Bill would argue, help to resolve the difficult issues of hunting. From the meetings that I and my colleagues in the Home Office have held with various campaign groups involved in the hunting issue, I am well aware that very different views exist. Some, such as Deadline 2000, support a ban and believe that, by its very nature, hunting with dogs inflicts suffering on the quarry. Others, such as the Countryside Alliance, take the contrary position and argue that, in properly organised hunting, no unnecessary suffering is caused.
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Both sets of views have been heard in the House during the course of this debate. Both sides choose to interpret in different ways the scientific evidence and, indeed, the report produced so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, so as to support their point of view. This Bill does not seek to resolve the question of whether hunting with dogs causes unnecessary suffering; rather, I believe that it would hand the courts a difficult and, no doubt from time to time, highly controversial problem.
However much some of us would prefer to avoid the issue, I believe that it must be for Parliament to take a view on whether or not hunting is an unnecessarily cruel activity and, therefore, whether it should be permitted to continue in its present form or be regulated. Some will argue that we should not abdicate our responsibilities by placing this essentially political question in the hands of the courts. They may be right, but your Lordships have heard arguments to the contrary. The noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, spoke in favour of variable sentencing as a potential strength, and I can understand that argument.
As your Lordships well know, on Monday we shall discuss the Bill on hunting. That will give Parliament the opportunity to form a view on what it wishes to do in relation to what we all accept to be a contentious question. I believe that that is the right way to proceed.
Perhaps I may now turn to the pest control aspects of the Bill. Again, I have every confidence that the intentions of those who proposed and support the Bill are entirely honourable. Their motives are to protect wild mammals from unnecessary suffering. I believe that we all applaud that sentiment; I certainly do. On the face of it, it appears that the Bill would have precisely that effect in that it would simply ensure that those who inflicted unnecessary suffering as part of pest control would be liable to prosecution.
However, again, I venture to suggest that the degree of imprecision that that creates may cause problems. I do not believe that anyone could argue seriously that there is not a need to control various pests. It is an important and valuable aspect of the work of gamekeepers and others involved in the management of the countryside. However, there may be disagreement about the best way to do it, and perhaps a concrete example would illustrate the matter.
Mink is a vicious and voracious predator which does great damage to riverbanks and attacks indigenous wildlife, such as water voles. Clearly, mink numbers need to be controlled. There is no argument about that. One way in which to do so is to use traps and snares. We can all form a view as to whether such devices cause unnecessary suffering. The Government's view is that where traps and snares are used properly, they may prove to be more humane than other methods. Of course, strict rules apply to the use of snares, including a requirement for them to be checked every 24 hours. I am conscious that others take a contrary view and regard such devices as little short of barbaric.

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There is a danger that if we remove the exemptions for pest control, as the Bill seeks to do, those who quite legitimately and properly use snares and traps in order to control mink numbers could find themselves the subject of private prosecutions and brought before the courts—perhaps even convicted. I could cite similar examples involving other species and other means of control, including poisons, but I hope that the point is made clear to your Lordships.
It would be unacceptable to remove the exemptions for pest control without defining clearly what such control is and is not. There would be a risk that those who undertake proper and necessary pest control activities would be exposed to private prosecution by those who may take a less reasonable attitude in relation to animal welfare. I believe that we are all aware of people, particularly on the extreme wing of the argument, who can be quite unreasonable in that regard.
I want to make a further point. If farmers and gamekeepers consider that they are at risk from the threat of prosecution, there is a possibility that that could encourage the use of more dangerous and illegal alternatives, such as uncontrolled poisoning. Clearly, the cause of animal welfare would not be served if that were to happen.
The 1996 Act is aimed at preventing mindless cruelty against wild mammals. I believe that it has been an important tool in preventing such activity. My fear is that the Bill before the House may confuse such mindless cruelty with the proper and legitimate work undertaken by farmers and landowners to control pests in the countryside. I am also concerned that the proposed amendments, if passed, may make the 1996 Act more difficult to enforce because they would remove the clear tests as to what does or does not constitute cruelty. My noble friend Lady Mallalieu was right to suggest that, even with the Bill as it is—she suggested a measure of support for it—there would need to be important clarification. I believe that that comes close to the heart of our concerns about the Bill.
I would not want anyone to imply that the existing tests are inadequate or that areas of cruelty to wild mammals are not being tackled. I do not accept that that would be a valid view of the tremendous amount of work carried out in recent years by animal welfare experts and legislators to improve the welfare of our wildlife.
One or two important points were made, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, in relation to scientific experiments. It may be worth placing on the record that such experiments are regulated by the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. They fall outside the scope of this Bill. All animals used in experiments are captive and not wild, and the Bill will have no effect on animal experimentation. It may be worth reminding the noble Lord that a Motion to be moved, I believe, next Tuesday will seek to establish a committee of the House to report on the working of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. Perhaps that will
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provide a better opportunity for a more scientific debate in considering the issues that the noble Lord raised.
In conclusion, again, I want to express my gratitude to my noble friend Lord Donoughue for having introduced the Bill. I believe that we all agree that it has provided us with an all too rare opportunity to discuss important questions. Questions in relation to pest control, in particular, are rarely debated in your Lordships' House. I hope that my noble friend has not found my remarks too discouraging, not least because, having discussed the Bill with him privately and also publicly, I am in absolutely no doubt about his genuine desire to improve animal welfare.
Although I could not suggest that the Bill in its present form should be passed into law, I hope that, by highlighting what I consider to be some of the areas of concern, I have given my noble friend and other noble Lords food for thought. My noble friend may wish to reflect on that as the Bill progresses.
This has been a most valuable debate. I am sure that it will be seen as an important contribution to the debates that follow. I certainly recognise the validity and importance of all the contributions made by noble Lords during the course of the debate.
1.9 p.m.
Lord Donoughue: My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who contributed to what I considered to be an excellent discussion. I welcome the support which the Bill received. That support was not universal but came from all sides of the House: from my own, from the Cross Benches and from the Front Benches of the Liberal Democrat and Conservative sides. I particularly appreciated the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and the weighty support that he gave. I also thank my noble friend Lord Hardy, who has a deep knowledge of and commitment to wildlife and rural affairs.
I say to my noble friends Lord Tomlinson and Lord Graham that although I respect their views, of which I was already aware, we continue to differ. I do not accept what my noble friend said about there being an unbridgeable gap on the broader hunting issue. There is an unbridgeable gap with regard to the two minority positions but I believe that a bridge can be found with regard to the majority position. My noble friend Lord Graham made a fine speech, which would be more appropriate for next Monday's debate than today's debate. If only he had consulted his diary! I have difficulties with my noble friend's statement that my Bill will not reduce cruelty. It is clear that regardless of one's views on hunting, the Bill will reduce cruelty. I stress that. I should be puzzled if any individuals or, especially, institutions that claim to be committed to the reduction of cruelty tried to oppose the Bill. I would not know whether they had other agendas.
The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, made an impressive contribution but I believe that his concerns are covered by the 1986 Act, to which my Bill does not relate.

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I thank my noble friend the Minister for not opposing the Bill's Second Reading and for his friendly words, which were warmer than I was expecting in view of the stable from which he comes. I really appreciated that. I was a little disappointed but not surprised by one of his reservations— predictably, the "Pandora's box" of court decisions was wheeled out. I welcome that aspect of the Bill, as have some other noble Lords. I support the role of the courts in clarifying what cruelty is. I support the courts in this country and I was surprised that the Home Office does not; it may know things that I do not. In fact, it already lies with the courts to interpret existing legislation. Case law does establish positions; that is normal in our polity. However, that does not mean that there is a permanent ratchet of court cases endlessly going on. Case law would be established, and I should accept whatever was decided.
I hope that the Minister will press his department to adopt an open approach on this issue. He and other noble Lords— in particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, who made a very good contribution—raised genuine points that I hope to address as the Bill progresses through the House. I am aware of the question of test controls. I am confident that we can get more clarity on that, which will be done as the Bill progresses through the House. I commend the Bill to the House.
On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Deregulation (Sunday Licensing) Order 2000
1.14 p.m.
Lord Bassam of Brighton Lord Bassam of Brighton rose to move, that the draft deregulation order laid before the House on 12th December 2000 be approved [First Report from the Deregulation Committee].
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the order supplements the Sunday Dancing Order, which was made on 21st December—amid much jollity, I might add, and it led to much jollity—and which became law on 28th December. It permitted commercial dancing on Sundays for the first time in more than 200 years.
The order is designed to provide for special hours certificates and extended hours orders to be available to casinos, nightclubs, discotheques and restaurants on Sundays. It is a complex document and it may be helpful if I provide a little explanation.
On other clays of the week, special hours certificates, which are authorised by magistrates, allow casinos and nightclubs to supply alcohol to customers up to 2 a.m. or, in the West End of London, up to 3 a.m. Extended hours orders allow restaurants providing food and entertainment to serve alcohol up to 1 a.m. The legislative intention has always been that the supply of alcohol after the end of permitted hours should be ancillary to activities such as dancing, eating or gaming.
Special hours certificates and extended hours orders cannot currently be granted for Sundays, and permitted hours end at 10.30 p.m. So, for example, the situation is that a discotheque can obtain a licence for music and dancing on Sundays, but may serve alcohol at the dance until only 10.30 p.m. The restriction also applies to charities holding fund-raising balls.
The draft order would allow magistrates in certain circumstances to grant such certificates and orders on Sundays but only until 12.30 a.m. However, where a Sunday falls on a day before a bank holiday—other than Easter Monday—extensions up to 2 a.m. would normally be permitted, or up to 3 a.m. in the West End of London.
The draft order also provides for special consideration, which would apply to applications in respect of Sundays. Before granting such a certificate or order, the magistrates must: have regard to the special nature of Sunday, and to guidance issued by the Secretary of State on that subject; and consider objections that are made by the local authority and that are based on the residential character of the area in which the premises are situated, and they must give reasons.
I should mention that the guidance on the special nature of Sunday has been compiled after considering comments that were submitted by the Delegated Powers and Deregulation Committee of this House. If the order is agreed to, the guidance will be sent shortly after that to all licensing benches and magistrates' courts in England and Wales.
Furthermore, where a special hours certificate has been granted and includes Sundays, the police, local residents, local business or the local authority may seek to exclude Sundays on the grounds that the premises are causing disturbance or annoyance or because people frequenting the premises are exhibiting disorderly behaviour in the vicinity.
In the interests of maintaining public protection, it also remains the case that those nightclubs and discotheques applying for special hours certificates for Sunday nights must as a starting point have a music and dancing licence issued by the local authority which relates to Sunday.
The order has a long history. The previous government brought forward a similar proposal in 1995. Unfortunately, they were unable to win the support of the Delegated Powers and Deregulation Committee of this House. It was then strongly of the opinion that Sunday dancing and drinking was too controversial to be the subject of a deregulation proposal. Happily, times have moved on, as the House showed by approving the Sunday Dancing Order in December.
The draft order represents a significant move by the Government from our original proposals, which were laid before Parliament in January 2000, and it contains a positive response to the concerns that the committee expressed in its reports last year and before then.
The time of 12.30 a.m. is a compromise over later opening. It is the earliest closing time that the industry considers to be economically viable when running a

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discotheque. Acknowledging a special nature for Sunday is a compromise. Those noble Lords who have read the licensing White Paper will know that in a multi-faith society we do not consider it right to treat any day of worship specially or differently from days that are of similar importance to other faiths. Strengthening the influence of the local authority and of local residents are compromises because we felt that our original proposals already balanced the needs of business with necessary public protection.
The draft order is therefore not as deregulatory as some within the leisure industry would have wished. However, we have compromised because we believe that the order can still significantly help consumers and the hospitality, leisure and tourism industries. We are grateful to the committee because it, too, has shown a willingness to compromise. It has moved from a position that we believed was impossible to implement lawfully. We are delighted that it has been able to recommend the draft order in its present form for your Lordships' approval. That shows that the Government and the committee can work together successfully to achieve a satisfactory outcome that is acceptable to us all. The draft order was approved in another place on 18th January.
Moved, That the draft deregulation order laid before the House on 12th December 2000 be approved [First Report from the Deregulation Committee].— (Lord Bassam of Brighton.)
1.20 p.m.
Lord Goodhart: My Lords, this order started life as the draft Deregulation (Sunday Dancing and Licensing) Order. The two parts, dancing and licensing, were then decoupled and the dancing order was approved by your Lordships' House a few weeks ago. However, the two remain linked in practice: the extension of hours for dancing in clubs and discos is largely meaningless unless drink is on sale at the same time.
The licensing issue, as the Minister said, led to long proceedings in the Delegated Powers and Deregulation Committee, which were discussed in the 9th Report of our last Session and published in March last year. There is no doubt that attitudes towards Sundays have changed quite radically in recent years. Since 1994 football and other sporting events for which admission is charged now take place on Sundays. The Sunday opening of shops is widespread: indeed in parts of London there seems to be more traffic then than on weekdays as people come into London to shop.
Since 1995, as the Minister has said, the Delegated Powers and Deregulation Committee has rejected the proposal for the extension of dancing hours on Sundays on the ground that it was too controversial. Last year the committee took the view that the provision of entertainment on Sundays—or, in practice, in the early hours of Monday—was no longer seriously controversial on Sabbatarian grounds.
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Although 22 individual churches, mainly Baptist churches, objected, none of the main church bodies consulted by the Home Office chose to respond.
There were, however, a considerable number of objections on the grounds of noise and disturbance. The point was made by a number of objectors that restaurants and clubs cause noise and that, even if soundproofed to prevent internal noise getting outside, noise is inevitably caused by people arriving and leaving. Monday, for most people, is the first day of the working week and a restriction on the hours of Sunday licensing has meant that up to now they have been able to get a slightly earlier and quieter night.
The committee paid particular attention to the views of local authorities. The consultation process resulted in 68 responses from local authorities, of which 58 were in support of easing licensing restrictions. Five were basically sitting on the fence and five were against. On the face of it, therefore, there was a very clear majority in favour of relaxation of the licensing law, but it is not quite as straightforward as that. A high proportion of local authorities which supported the easing of restrictions were those of resort towns or districts where those towns were situated.
It is very understandable that in towns of that kind the local authority should want extended hours, and the Delegated Powers and Deregulation Committee saw no reason to deprive them of that wish. However, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in particular argued very strongly against the relaxation, on the ground that many areas containing both leisure and residential premises can be found in the borough. That is something I can vouch for, having lived there for a long time and having been the candidate for Kensington in three parliamentary elections.
The Delegated Powers and Deregulation Committee invited the Royal Borough to give evidence, and it sent a team which was led by the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham. The committee was very impressed by that evidence and took the view that the best answer to the problem was to allow local authorities to decide for themselves whether or not to opt into the changes contained in the order. They would be best placed to decide whether commercial benefits to local traders outweighed the disturbance to local residents.
Unfortunately, the Government received legal advice that it was to ultra vires to delegate to local authorities the power to decide whether or not to opt in to the order. The committee was not convinced that the advice was correct, but recognised that there was a serious legal issue. As a result, a compromise was reached: anyone applying for a special hours certificate for Sunday must notify the local authority and the local authority may make representations to the licensing justices. If the justices override those objections they must give reasons for doing so.
There is also a power for the local authority, the police or residents to apply for the revocation of a special hours certificate applying to Sunday. As has been mentioned, the order also contains powers for the

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Home Secretary to issue guidelines which have been published in draft to guide justices in taking their decisions.
I have gone into this background at a certain length because I believe it is useful to place it on record. Of course, I am speaking here on behalf of my party and not on behalf of the Delegated Powers and Deregulation Committee, of which I have been a member since 1998. We believe that decisions on special hours certificates should be taken by local authorities rather than by justices. Local authorities are in the best position to know the views of the inhabitants, and they are accountable to them. We in my party therefore regret that the legal advice which was received by the Government made it impossible to accept the committee's proposals.
However, we believe there are good grounds for deregulation, and accept that the present order is the best that can be done to ensure local control. We look forward, in the event of the Government being returned to office, to the implementation of their proposals on a fundamental reform of the licensing system, which will transfer the control of licensing matters from the licensing justices to local authorities.
1.27 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Bristol: My Lords, the Deregulation (Sunday Licensing) Order 2000 is a sensitive issue for many Christians, as has already been indicated, and those of your Lordships who have been at the receiving end of the "Keep Sunday Special" campaign will know that the arguments are strongly made.
I wish to assure your Lordships that I do not seek to oppose this order. I would like to make one comment and also to seek reassurance. I welcome the Government's recognition of the special nature of Sunday. As has already been indicated, this is dealt with in the appendix to the Second Report of the Select Committee on Deregulation. It is interesting to note that it takes one paragraph to argue for the special nature of Sunday—which gives—and two paragraphs to take away the special nature of Sunday.
We recognise that this is a special area for those who live in a society which is both multi-faith and multicultural, but I would like to remind your Lordships' House that the inherited structure of the week and of the year which we live by has its base in the Christian tradition. I am grateful for the fact that Easter Sunday is to be given a special status. I therefore welcome the way in which this matter has been dealt with, even if some people believe that it has not achieved quite the right balance.
Secondly, I seek reassurance from the Minister that, if residents make objections to the granting of a late licence on Sundays, those objections will be given due consideration and not just treated as "window dressing" in this order. Will the First and Second Reports of the Select Committee on Deregulation play an important role in the opportunities given to local authorities and local residents to make their objections clear?
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In thanking the Government for the sensitivity with which they have listened to and dealt with the views we have raised, may I say that we are grateful indeed and I shall support this order.
1.29 p.m.
Viscount Astor: My Lords, the first Sunday dancing order came to us in December, just before Christmas—just in time to save an event the Government had planned for New Year's Eve, which of course fell on a Sunday. Sadly, it could not save the Dome, which collapsed soon afterwards.
We welcome this order. There is widespread public support for this reform, and the reform will be balanced by the responsibilities. The special nature of Sunday will be preserved. Clubs will need to apply specifically for a Sunday, and employees' rights will be protected.
There are many beneficiaries other than nightclubs. That will include charities and other organisations which wish to hold events on a Sunday. Indeed, I believe that it will help save many businesses in seaside resorts, something about which the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, coming from Brighton, knows more than I do. I should declare an interest. I am a director of a company which may derive some benefit from being able to open on a Sunday.
The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said that this is a compromise, and indeed, it is. I believe that it takes account of the special nature of Sunday. The licensing authorities must take account of that and, specifically, the issue of disturbance to local residents which was raised by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol.
I believe that Sunday will still be special, just as it is still special north of the Border in Scotland, where, of course, they have been able to dance on Sundays for many years. I welcome the order.
1.30 p.m.
Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, your Lordships' House has been witness to a great historic compromise. All noble Lords who have entered into this short discussion appear to have willingly embraced that compromise. The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, has an interest in dancing. No doubt that is a vigorous interest. I share that interest but not in quite the same way. I should like to encourage him to invest in Brighton, but there we are. The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, explained some of the difficulties, but, again, he spoke in favour of the compromise and urged us to bring forward new measures on licensing which will deal with the whole package and, in a sense, will overtake the order at which we are looking today. It is a compromise welcomed also by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol.
I am more than happy to give the right reverend Prelate the reassurance which he seeks about residents' concerns. Of course they must be adequately addressed and considered. Indeed, the mechanism used to take on board residents' concerns with regard to early Sunday morning deliveries during the passage

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of the Sunday trading legislation was not a million miles away from having part of its authorship in myself. I take a particular interest in those issues, coming, as I do, from a local authority background and having heard many of the arguments about protecting the interests of local residents close to areas where there is intense leisure activity. So we do take those points very seriously indeed.
I am grateful for the support that this order has received. I am sure that your Lordships will endorse the order. All of those who enjoy Sunday dancing, whether for business, profit or pleasure, will support this too. I commend the order to the House.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Regulation of Investigatory Powers (British Broadcasting Corporation) Order 2001
1.34 p.m.
Lord Bassam of Brighton Lord Bassam of Brighton rose to move, That the draft order laid before the House on 26th February be approved [8th Report from the Joint Committee].
The noble Lord said: My Lords, it is my intention to address both the orders which relate to the regulation of investigatory powers. The second order is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Designation of Public Authorities for the Purposes of Intrusive Surveillance) Order. The two draft orders before us today are made under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. I shall deal with each instrument in turn.
The BBC order is made under Section 47(1) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act—RIPA—and applies Part H of the Act, with modifications, to the carrying out of surveillance to detect whether a television receiver is being used in any residential or other premises. This order provides an express legal basis for this activity, which is not one of the kinds of surveillance currently regulated by Part II of the Act. We signalled our intention to bring forward this order when this House considered the RIP Bill last year. Let me say a little more about that.
Your Lordships may recall that last summer we discussed the issue of surveillance for TV licence detection purposes undertaken on behalf of the BBC. The RIP Bill was amended in Committee specifically to exclude such activity from the definitions of intrusive and directed surveillance in Part II since it was considered that that particular surveillance activity did not properly fit under either definition. The resulting provision is to be found in Section 26(6) of RIPA.
But in deciding to exclude the specific activity of surveillance for TV licence detection purposes from the definitions of intrusive and directed surveillance, my noble friend Lord Bach said in Committee on 28 June, that,
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"this does not mean to say that we do not believe this activity does not constitute some invasion of privacy or that it should not be put on a statutory basis".
He went on to say that:
"Bringing forward an order specifying it [i.e. TV licence detection] as a new type of surveillance would be a way of making it subject to statutory controls".—[Official Report, 28/6/00; cols. 903–04.]
That is what the order before the House today is all about—providing specific statutory control for a specific type of surveillance.
The BBC's view, which the Government share, is that if TV licensing's detection activities interfere with the rights protected by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, such interference could be justified in terms of Article 8(2)—that is to say, for example, for the prevention of crime—since licence evasion constitutes a criminal offence. However, Article 8(2) of the ECHR also requires an activity to be "in accordance with law"; that is, having an express legal basis. This order provides that basis.
The order will modify Part II of RIPA so as to provide for authorisations to be granted, only in relation to the detection of television receivers, by persons holding certain senior positions within the BBC's licence fee unit. They must be satisfied that an authorisation is necessary for preventing or detecting certain offences under Section 1 or 1A of the Wireless Telegraphy Act; for example, having a TV with no valid licence, or for assessing or collecting sums payable in respect of television licences. Those are the only grounds on which authorisations may be given.
The proposed surveillance must also be proportionate to what is sought to be achieved by carrying it out. I should stress that we are talking here about surveillance carried out from outside a premises. And authorisations will be time limited: an authorisation can last for a maximum of eight weeks.
Responsibility for overseeing surveillance in relation to licence detection on behalf of the BBC falls to the Chief Surveillance Commissioner by virtue of Section 62(1)(a) of RIPA. And the Act provides for a right of redress for the individual. An individual can complain about this activity to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal by virtue of Section 65(5)(d) of the Act.
I now turn to the second draft order before your Lordships today, made under Section 41(3) and (4) of RIPA, and which designates the Home Office as a public authority which may make an application to carry out intrusive surveillance under the Act.
Perhaps I may explain our reasons for bringing forward this order. The Prison Service has come to the view that it requires statutory cover under RIPA for intrusive surveillance operations. Your Lordships will recall that under Part II of the Act intrusive surveillance is covert surveillance carried out in relation to residential premises or private vehicles. The definition of "residential premises" in Section 48(1) of the Act includes prison cells. There may be occasions when such surveillance by the Prison Service is considered necessary. We are thinking here of cases

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such as prison hostage situations. The use of covert surveillance techniques may be necessary in such cases in order to provide an accurate assessment of the situation arid safeguard the life of the hostage.
The order before your Lordships will enable the Prison Service in England and Wales to apply for authorisations under RIPA to conduct intrusive surveillance operations. Your Lordships will note that the order designates the Home Office as a public authority whose activities may require the use of intrusive surveillance. It then specifies that within the Home Office it is only Prison Service staff that may make an application to use that power. The order is constructed in this way since the Prison Service does not have a separate legal status.
I shall explain briefly how the authorisation process will operate. The way that Part II of RIPA works means that authorisations permitting the Prison Service to conduct intrusive surveillance are to be given personally by the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State must be satisfied that such action is, first, necessary on one of the grounds listed in Section 32(3) of the Act; and, secondly, that it is proportionate to what is sought to be achieved by carrying out the surveillance.
In considering the circumstances of the individual case, the Secretary of State must consider whether the information which it is thought necessary to be obtained could reasonably be obtained by any other, less intrusive, means. Those are important tests. We believe that the intrusive surveillance power in Part II of RIPA is, rightly, narrowly drawn.
Authorisations granted by the Secretary of State to the Prison Service for intrusive surveillance will last for a period of three months unless granted orally, in which case they will last for a period of 72 hours, unless renewed.
As with the BBC's licence detection activities, responsibility for overseeing the use of intrusive surveillance by the Prison Service falls to the Chief Surveillance Commissioner by virtue of Section 62(1)(a) of RIPA; and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal is the appropriate forum to address complaints about this activity by virtue of Section 65(5)(d) of the Act.
To conclude, in my view, both orders before your Lordships today are compatible with the rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights and I commend them to the House.
Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 26th February be approved [8th Report from the Joint Committee].—[Lord Bassam of Brighton.]
Viscount Astor: My Lords, we welcome these two orders. With regard to the first order, relating to the BBC, I was going to ask whether anyone who felt that he had been unfairly intercepted could go to the tribunal, but the Minister has answered that he can.
With regard to the second order, I have some questions as I am unclear about it. The Minister says that it covers surveillance, which is a rather broad term. Does that cover, for example, the tapping of
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telephone lines into a prison, or is that covered by a separate power or authority? Would the word "surveillance" cover the interception of mobile phone calls or e-mails via a computer system into a prison? What, in fact, does it cover?
Can the Minister give the House an assurance that surveillance will not be used to cover either meetings or discussions of people in prison when they are with their legal advisers? That is an important issue. Under the second order, is there an appeals system to the tribunal? I believe the Minister said that there was, but perhaps he could confirm that. Perhaps he could also confirm that this order is, in his view, consistent. with the Data Protection Act.
1.45 p.m.
Lord Goodhart: My Lords, like the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, we are entirely happy with the order relating to the BBC. That kind of surveillance has been going on for many years. It has been accepted as a reasonable way of finding out who is not paying a licence fee that they should be paying and it is accepted as not being unduly intrusive. I believe it is fair to say that we welcome the fact that this is being brought under a modified version of Part II of the Act rather than being left outside that part. We have no problems in relation to that.
However, we find some problem with the order relating to intrusive surveillance by the Prison Service. I have no problem in seeing why the order is needed; there are situations—the taking of hostages is not the only one—where the bugging of a prison cell may be necessary in order to prevent crime or to assist in the clearing up of crime. Indeed, one could say that it is such an obvious point that it is surprising that it was not dealt with when the Bill was before your Lordships' House and it was subsequently left to be dealt with by an order.
I am struck by the enormous difference between the control over applications for intrusive surveillance authorisation by the police and by the Prison Service. So far as the police are concerned, they are subject to detailed rules under Sections 32 to 40 of the Act as to how authorisation is given. One starts with the grant of authority by the authorising officer—there is a list of who they are—and that is followed by approval by the surveillance commissioner.
However, there is nothing of that kind in the case of the Prison Service. All ranks—that is anybody in the Prison Service—can apply for authorisation. No such authorising officer is interposed between the person making the application and the Home Secretary. Apart from anything else, the Minister said that the Home Secretary will have to approve such orders personally, which may be perfectly correct, but it does not necessarily appear to be an appropriate use of the time of the Home Secretary. I find it unsatisfactory that there is no intermediate provision for authorisation, with all the safeguards that would be covered by such a procedure in the case of applications from the Prison Service. What sort of investigation will the Secretary of State be able to carry out?

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I believe it is unsatisfactory that the provisions for the applications by the Prison Service are so extraordinarily open-ended as compared with those for the police. There is, for example, no attempt to limit the number of officers who can apply. One would have thought that if an application goes direct to the Secretary of State it should come from someone at governor or deputy governor level. Again, there is no attempt to use the power to impose restrictions that the Home Office could have used under Section 41(5), which could have been incorporated into the order. While we do not oppose the order, we believe that its form is pretty unsatisfactory.
My final question is: what is the position of employees of private organisations that run prisons under contracts? Are they, or are they not, holders of office, rank and position in Her Majesty's Prison Service? If they are not, clearly there is a major lacuna in the order.
Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I am grateful for the support offered from both Opposition Benches, although there was qualified support from the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, who has addressed the issues in the orders with his customary knowledge and precision. As he has raised some important points of qualification, to which it may be beyond me to respond directly today, I shall endeavour to study his comments. I want to take careful note of those.
The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, asked some specific questions relating to powers of authorisation and I shall try to answer those points during my concluding comments. The orders do not cover telephone tapping, e-mails and so on. They are covered explicitly in Part I, Chapter I of RIPA. A definition of "surveillance" is contained in Section 48(2) to (4), which makes it clear that the interception of communications is not treated as surveillance under the Act, except in the limited circumstances where one party to a conversation has consented to it being monitored.
What safeguards are there for prisoners and lawyers? Surveillance in prisons will be subject to a code of practice that will provide safeguards on the use of the power under Section 72(1) with which the Prison Service will be under a duty to comply. I hope that that answers the noble Viscount's questions.
The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, queried the use of the Secretary of State's time and asked whether there had been an oversight. Applications will not go directly from the Prison Service to the Secretary of State; they will go through a dedicated unit within the Home Office which will provide back-up, insight, support and advice on which the Secretary of State will need to rely. I am sure that that expertise will be most welcome.
The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, also asked about the position of private prisons and their employees. I recognise that that is an important matter. I want to ensure that I am clear about it and for that reason I want to write to the noble Lord about it. In order that
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there can be no confusion, I shall express clearly what their position is. I shall share the letter with noble Lords who have contributed to the discussion and listened to the debate and I shall also place a copy in the Library of the House.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Designation of Public Authorities for the Purposes of Intrusive Surveillance) Order 2001
Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I have spoken to this order. I beg to move.
Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 26th February be approved [8th Report from the Joint Committee].—(Lord Bassam of Brighton.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls: EUC Report
1.52 p.m.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Lord Wallace of Saltaire rose to move, That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee on Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls (17th Report, Session 1999–2000, HL Paper 110).
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I am pleased to be introducing a short debate on one of the final reports under my chairmanship of Sub-Committee F of the House of Lords EU Committee. It is a very important, delicate and novel area in which the UK is engaged. As in many other areas, the gap between public understanding of what the UK is involved in and the depth of official engagement seemed to us to be wide.
The report is one of a succession which the committee has undertaken on the UK opt-out of the Schengen agreement and the then UK partial opt-in to the Schengen agreement. The committee, under the chairmanship of my successor, my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond, is undertaking a study of the Commission's recent proposals on common immigration policy. That is a new area for EU integration. Until 1989, there was no particular problem with the EU's eastern frontier. It was maintained as a solid fortress frontier by the Soviet Union on our "unintended behalf".
This is the first enlargement that has taken place since justice and home affairs became such an important part of European integration, with the agreement to loosen or end internal border controls and compensatory measures to strengthen external frontier controls. The UK is closely involved in that. As we discovered in our study, the opt-in to much of the Schengen agreement makes Britain's borders those of the European Union. That was made explicitly clear by the joint statement from the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Giuliano Amato on 4th February. It was

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also published in the Observer. I then thought that the attack made by the Opposition spokesperson, Miss Widdecombe, on that statement showed that even the Official Opposition do not fully understand how deeply the British Government and our law enforcement agencies are now engaged in this whole area of activity.
The Blair/Amato statement proposed a number of further measures for co-operation, on which the Minister may want to comment briefly in his concluding remarks. One was the proposed creation of an EU liaison officer network in the western Balkans. The statement reads:
"We want the network to be up and running by the middle of 2001",
with joint UK and Italian teams of national immigration and police officers circulating around the Balkans. That is another step further towards internationalising the British police and immigration services.
Despite the fact that we are maintaining frontier checks, the UK clearly understands that frontier controls are not enough and that no frontiers can be made watertight, short of re-imposing an iron curtain. That is part of a world-wide surge of legal and illegal immigration, with a great expansion of trafficking in human beings—or "people smuggling", as it is sadly and more popularly known. It comes across the eastern frontiers of the EU into the United Kingdom. Indeed, we read in today's newspapers stories of Nigerian girls coming here as asylum seekers and then being smuggled on to work as prostitutes in Italy. They come into the United Kingdom and then go on into other parts of the EU.
The efficiency and scale of criminal organisation came across to us during the course of the inquiry. We were told by the Polish officials whom we interviewed that, after German complaints, they had managed to tighten their measures against "people smuggling" through Poland, only to discover that the number of people apprehended on the German/Czech border had shot up as the number apprehended on the German/ Polish border went down. I am sure that our Czech friends would have told us that as they tightened their controls, so the use of the southern land and sea routes went up by contrast.
Our inquiry drew a number of key conclusions, which I hope contribute at least to a certain level of public information and, we hope in time, debate. First, frontier controls cannot be taken in isolation. There must be broader co-operation among law enforcement agencies and prosecution authorities of the kind which the British Government fully opted into under the Schengen arrangement. There must also be extensive help with training and equipment across the wider justice and home affairs process as a whole.
Secondly, as we say in paragraph 83 of our report, external frontiers need to be half open as well as half closed. They need to be secure against criminals but open to legitimate trade and human contacts—the movement of people. Forty per cent of Russian external trade comes out through the ports of the
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Baltic states. That means that after enlargement a substantial amount of Russian external trade will come through the EU. We were given strong evidence that eastern Poland and western Ukraine now hang together economically. We want to ensure as a matter of good relations with the western Ukraine that as Poland joins the EU useful cross-border economic activity is not choked off.
When I was in Estonia for other reasons in May, I was told with a smile by an Estonian official that Estonia intended to issue multiple-entry visas to the drivers of the Russian shunters who moved goods trains backwards and forwards across the border several times a day. Such activity must continue. The Transylvanian issue between Hungary and Romania is also important and I understand that my noble friend Lord Watson of Richmond will address it later.
Kaliningrad, which during the study we covered only at the margins, will become an enclave after enlargement within the EU. Two weeks ago when I was at a conference in Moscow the Kaliningrad issue came up sharply as being important and sensitive in Russian/EU relations. In some ways it is like the Cyprus problem; everyone knows that it is going to be a problem—and perhaps an awkward problem—once the enlargement negotiations are finished, but no one wishes to address it at the moment.
Our third conclusion is that effective controls require good co-operation with those on the other side. We had impressive evidence from Finnish officials about the way in which the Finns already manage their border with Russia. Effective frontier management requires you to have excellent relations with those on the other side, in order to assist those on the other side to understand how you are managing cross-border relations. The Finns told us that they have done their best to export their expertise to Estonia and Latvia as part of a training programme.
Clearly, this means that in relation to Russia and Ukraine and, in time, Moldova and—with even greater difficulty—Belarus, there must be an extensive shared EU programme to assist in maintaining a worthwhile relationship. This is not just a Third Pillar issue but an aspect of European Union foreign policy.
The conference that I attended in Moscow was about the northern dimension of EU foreign policy and the whole Russia-EU relationship. I was struck by the extent to which the Russia-EU relationship ran all the way from questions of arms control and status to sewage management in Kaliningrad and St Petersburg. All of these issues matter a great deal to all of us in the EU and, particularly in terms of waste water treatment, to our friends in the Baltic states, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Poland and Germany.
Fourthly, there is no reason why this dossier should delay enlargement. One of the reasons why we undertook this inquiry was the real danger that anxiety among the public in Germany and Austria about opening of the border would become an obstacle to enlargement in the course of the next year. For that reason, I was extremely happy to note that in his report to the Bundestag on the Nice Summit on 19th January

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the German Chancellor spent a good deal of time on the question of freedom of movement. He said that Germany was prepared to allow the matter to go ahead subject to a transitional period before frontier controls were entirely lifted within the European Union. He spoke about "sensible transitional arrangements" and a four to seven-year interim period in moving towards complete open frontiers within an enlarged European Union.
Some of those who attended the British-Austria seminar yesterday tell me that the Austrian representatives were also much concerned about the transitional arrangements. One trade unionist suggested that it would be fine to open the frontier once wages on the other side were the same as those in Austria, provided that emergency measures were allowed to close the frontier again if too many people came in. Clearly, there are many sensitivities here which concern the British less than those on the EU's front line, as it were.
A further major point made in the report, about which I hope the Government will say something, is the need for much more generous financial assistance to the new applicants. Dr Lehnguth of the German Ministry of the Interior said, bluntly, that "the costs are enormous". By and large, the scale of the costs has not been matched either by the bilateral assistance or the multilateral EU PHARE programme. I was interested in the Government's response from Barbara Roche. We were told that,
"A number of options are currently under discussion in EU fora, which seek to establish a strategy for financial burden-sharing in managing the EU's external frontier … It would however be the first occasion on which external assistance had been provided for a state's responsibilities for controlling its own frontiers. The Government would want to examine the implications of this for its own frontier control as well as any precedents for other areas of EU competence before adopting this solution".
I hope that the Minister will say a little more about that in his closing remarks.
That tells us that the British Government have an ambivalent attitude towards shared Community financing and that discussions are under way about which, so far as I am aware, this House—or its relevant committees—have not been informed. After all, we are talking about the rebuilding of physical frontier posts, substantial investment in information technology and training, decent salaries for those who are members of these national border controls and, if we follow the Finnish example, electronic measures to ensure that the border remains secure in between those frontier posts. Once these countries become full members of the Schengen system, Germany, Austria and, earlier, the Netherlands and Belgium will save a great deal of money on their own national frontier controls. Many of us believe it is entirely appropriate that that should be a matter for common EU funding.
We also noted the lack of co-ordination among different bilateral programmes. The United Kingdom is, happily, engaged in a number of areas: the development of liaison officers, about which I know my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond will say
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more; and twinning programmes with ministries of the interior and judicial systems. However, we were told by witnesses that different countries had different bilateral programmes, and that on occasions they simply did not fit together. We were also told that the United States was involved in a certain amount of bilateral training programmes and those also failed to fit in with EU measures. That is another area in which we believe the British Government should act with others to ensure that there is proper provision, fully co-ordinated
As someone who has worked on matters to do with NATO, there are some comparisons to be drawn with the Partnership for Peace programme under which NATO has provided all those countries with very extensive retraining of their armed forces. When I was in the Baltic states I met several British military officers who were members of training teams in Latvia and Estonia—a substantial number of people of excellent quality who were doing first-class work. That is the kind of thing that we should now be doing in relation to the police, judicial and border services in these various countries.
We recognise that the United Kingdom faces particular problems in this regard. We have a national organisation for our Armed Forces but a local organisation for our police forces. One of the matters that I suspect my noble friend Lady Harris will want to raise is the particular budgets from which these things are paid. We were informed by the National Criminal Intelligence Service that the liaison officer network was currently paid for through a precept on police authority budgets. This seems to us as we become very much more international a great deal less appropriate than a new budget line for this very important extension of national involvement in multinational co-operation.
We welcome the British contribution. To quote the report, we were told by Inspector Borek of the Polish Police Force that,
"there are two countries to which Poland was particularly indebted: Germany and the United Kingdom, in that order".
If he was asked to name a third country it would be the United States. Therefore, Britain has been a great deal more helpful and active in this area than many others.
We were particularly impressed by the quality of the liaison officer we met in Warsaw and what we learnt about British involvement in expanding the network of liaison officers. We would very much like to hear more about further plans for that expanding network; how that fits in with existing police practice; and how the Government intend to report to Parliament on its further development.
Lastly, therefore, we ask for more open reporting on liaison officers, on the depth of British involvement in Schengen, on the evaluation missions in which British police are engaged and so on.
One of the most interesting exchanges in the inquiry was the exchange between the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, and a number of policemen about precisely how closely Britain is now involved in the Schengen system, with the noble Baroness following the official

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line that we are by and large out and the policemen operating as if we were by and large in. That may be the impression that the Government wish to give the Daily Mail and the Sun, but it would be rather more sensible if we were prepared to be a little more honest about how deeply involved we are.
There are a number of other issues that follow from this. For example, in one of our previous reports we talked about the need for the Government to consider the relationship of British airport controls, since we are part of the external frontier, and the way in which the Schengen system operates. We have border checks, but, as the recent stories about Nigerian girls coming in show, we are very much part of the EU's external frontier. The idea that we should not think about redesigning our own frontier controls so as to distinguish between the huge numbers of people who come into Britain from other parts of the EU and the smaller numbers of people who come in from outside the EU, is outdated.
British immigration policies are clearly part now of a European set of immigration problems and policies. There are wider issues here which were raised in the Government response. The Minister welcomed the Commission's paper as
"a contribution to the growing debate on the benefits and challenges of managed migration which must respond to the changes in the world and to national, economic and social interests".
Having now retired as chairman of that committee, I welcome the sub-committee now discussing and examining the current Commission proposals on a community immigration policy. I beg to move.
Moved, That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee on Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls [17th Report, Session 1999–2000, HL Paper 110].—(Lord Wallace of Saltaire.)
Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, perhaps I may put a brief question to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, who chaired the committee. During your Lordships' previous debate on enlargement I pointed out that there is a strong and growing strand of opinion which says that enlargement is not a good thing at all and is not in the interests of the applicant countries. I mentioned this 1998 publication from the Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies, A coming Home— or poisoned chalice? After that debate I handed the publication to the noble Lord. I subsequently received a letter from the Clerk to the Committee assuring me that the next time enlargement was discussed in your Lordships' Select Committee that this publication would be considered by it. I want to ask the noble Lord whether or not that consideration took place?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, it did not fall within the bounds of my own sub-committee to discuss the broader issues. Several sub-committees of the European Committee have discussed enlargement. It is a strategic matter which this House might like to take on board. Personally, I disagreed with the
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argument in the pamphlet. That is only a personal opinion. The noble Lord may wish to press for a debate to take the matter further.
2.12 p.m.
Baroness Harris of Richmond: My Lords, I begin with an apology. I must be in Richmond this evening and have to travel on the East Coast Main Line which is still not fully opened following the Selby rail crash. I may have to leave your Lordships' House before the end of the debate. I apologise in advance should that happen and assure noble Lords that I shall read very closely in Hansard the rest of the debate.
My contribution to the debate will focus mainly on the area of international organised crime and the challenges of combating it which will be faced by the new member states. I do so from a perspective I gained as a former member of the National Crime Squad Service Authority and from some of the impact I know we might suffer more locally—I chair the North Yorkshire Police Authority—should the policing of the new borders not be rigorous enough.
As the background to the report states:
"One of the fundamental elements of the Convention is the principle that the open internal borders of the Schengen zone require in compensation strictly controlled external frontiers".
Indeed, on page 10 of the minutes of evidence, Mrs Lesley Pallett, Head of the EU and International Unit, Organised and International Crime Directorate, Home Office, said:
"It is essential, for the effective fight against organised crime and illegal drugs, as well as immigration controls, that the new enlarged EU has effective frontier controls".
Police, drug control and judicial co-operation are only those elements of the acquis in which the UK wishes to participate. But the applicant states, we were told, must comply with all the requirements of the Schengen acquis. No "opt out" will be possible for them.
In his Working Document W112 for the WWR Scientific Council for Government Policy, Professor Jörg Monar, who was our specialist adviser on the inquiry, recognised the difficulties with which the applicant countries would be faced because of the need for them to integrate into the AFSJ with the incorporation of Schengen. He said:
"Because of the advanced state of development of the Schengen acquis, and its provisions on matters of justice and home affairs, where the applicant countries have particular deficits (such as external border controls) the incorporation of Schengen has added a particularly high new hurdle for the applicant countries. The second consequence, now that Schengen countries can develop their acquis further within the legal and institutional context of the EU, is that any measures they adopt, building on the incorporated Schengen acquis, become automatically part of the EU acquis. The applicant countries have to accept this extended acquis. This 'addition' to Schengen is likely to grow considerably over the next few years as the new EC and EU instruments and the ambitious objectives within the context of the ASJ, provide the Schengen countries with additional incentives to deepen their system. This, too, will add to the demands of the applicant countries".
During our inquiry, we were told that much had been achieved by the applicant countries and much help had been given to them. For example, Mrs Pallett told us of a project in Poland that is dealing with the

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teaching of community policing and which the Dutch and British are overseeing. As we heard from my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire, the European Commission's PHARE programme has given over 100 million euros to improve and upgrade the Polish eastern border. The Commission's Twinning programme, which focuses on training the police services and border management, has also made a significant contribution to the applicant countries. But it is to the areas of police work and resources that I now wish to turn.
In his evidence to us, Mr Neil Bailey, Director of the International Policy Unit of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, spoke of the vital role played by liaison officers, both on a bilateral and multinational front, in helping the applicant countries reach the required levels of Schengen. He referred to them as "diplomats" and the United Kingdom saw them as primarily intelligence gatherers, although this was not necessarily so in other countries. There they may be seen as "facilitators for legal process documents"—a very different concept of their work. In the UK the liaison officer's role went only as far as the point where arrests and seizures were made in this country.
I was particularly grateful for a conversation I had with a drugs liaison officer—perhaps the same one to whom my noble friend Lord Wallace referred—who made some very important points. The first was that he felt there needed to be better co-ordination of drugs strategy. Some applicant countries perhaps had not recognised until recently the importance attached to drug smuggling.
While many improvements were being made, however, there was neither sufficient funding nor knowledge to address this area adequately and governments needed to recognise that. Structures in police forces varied enormously, and were changing, but there was a great need to identify priority areas and distinguish between low level criminality and organised criminality, and adopt methodology to tackle these issues.
There may be a problem accepting intelligence-led policing, which deals with serious and organised crime, drug smuggling and money laundering, because of the perception of its "sinister overtones". This is a real problem and can be tackled only by working away in a multi-agency approach, using co-operation and sharing expertise in law enforcement matters, which will begin to give applicant countries confidence in these new systems and tools of police work.
I was told that the police have a poor image, perhaps not surprisingly understanding their past connections. They are still seen as being corrupt and ineffective, but it is to be hoped that the work being done on community policing, to which I referred earlier, will produce major change in time. Generally, the police are badly paid and that is a sure recipe for corruption. When we spoke to the Polish Minister about that, he told us that many professions were poorly paid, which I rather felt missed the point about the temptation which could be put before police officers in their unique role.
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It was apparent that leadership at all levels of policing was vitally important. Many officers were in charge of policing under the old regimes and needed excellent training to help them move to the new order. In his working document, Professor Monar tells us that,
"Further structural problems include a shortage of experienced senior officers, due to the dismissal of officers with a questionable political past and major recruitment problems because of relatively low salaries and the better pay in private security services. In many cases effective coordination structures with other institutions involved in the fight against organised crime and money-laundering, such as the ministries of finance and the border guards, are still missing".
I shall turn now to resources. It is vital that we support our liaison officers, who are doing a quite magnificent job helping the applicants to reach their required standards. In order to do that, I shall illustrate the difficulties under which they labour. In the Minutes of Evidence, Neil Bailey tells us that,
"If the number of member states goes up to 20, the cost of Europol will need to go up because Europol will need to be bigger so it will cost us more. At the same time, because there are more countries contributing, our actual cash contribution may not be that much greater. We may find that we are having increasing requests to assist in the applicant countries during the build-up to accession and the difficulty with that is, although on the one hand the EU will give us the money back to send people to help, the problem for me is that if I send two officers to one of the applicant countries for six months I have two empty desks back in London and work which I should be doing I cannot do".
Currently, 17 NCIS liaison officers are drawn from the police service and HM Customs and Excise, with more posts approved if funding can be found. At present, NCIS is funded principally through levies placed on local police authorities and other partner agencies, although I know that the Government have plans to change this. At times it is difficult for local police authorities to see the benefit derived from funding such complex work, but an illustration of this would be that, during the past financial year, the NCIS drugs liaison officer network contributed to the seizure of drugs with an estimated street value of £270 million. Some 443 people were arrested; 88 major disruptions of criminal organisations took place; and 43 controlled deliveries of drugs were requested or offered by UK law enforcement officers through the DLO network. Furthermore, during 1999–2000, the DLO network was responsible for 32.1 per cent of arrests attributable to the organisation. That is an excellent record which I hope illustrates the effectiveness of the liaison officers' work. It is not difficult to imagine what impact those drugs and criminals would have had on the streets of our local cities, towns and villages had they not been apprehended through the intelligence system.
How much harder it will be for the applicant countries to come up to this level of performance. So I believe that we must have a commitment to employ, train and equip their police to work co-operatively with other border agencies, border guards and customs. As we have heard, massive funding is still required to upgrade eastern borders.
If we have not provided good training, equipment and a commitment to high standards, as well as consistency in applications and procedures to comply

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with the EU acquis, we can expect to see real problems in the future. We know that applicant countries are eager to join the EU, but in order to do so smoothly and with confidence they will also need our support. They will need it in the areas of cross-border surveillance operations, hot pursuit, better data protection systems, better judicial and legislative systems, better crime management and very much more training in multi-agency working.
I shall end on a final quotation, again from Neil Bailey. He stated that:
"There is a willingness to do it because in the applicant countries there is a great enthusiasm for joining the EU, not just at the political level but we notice it at the level we deal with, the law enforcement level. There is a tremendous enthusiasm. Once you actually explain to people the processes that we go through, they can see the benefits and they go back enthused with the idea. The problem for them is that they have to have resources to implement the idea and that is sometimes more difficult".
2.25 p.m.
Lord Watson of Richmond: My Lords, I, too, welcome the opportunity to discuss this important subject. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Wallace on what he said in opening up the real dimension of this issue.
I notice that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who made an earlier contribution, is no longer in his place. In her closing remarks my noble friend Lady Harris spoke of the great enthusiasm of people in eastern Europe for enlargement and of the way in which, despite enormous economic difficulties and challenges—and, in many cases, real economic cost—these people are in no way confused by the choice between the lack of democracy that they had previously and the chance fully to grasp and solidify the opportunity that they now have. To greet the enthusiasm and the genuine determination of the peoples of eastern Europe to join a European Union of not only frontiers but of values by talking about a "poisoned chalice", is not only ungenerous but unwise.
It is very important that our attitude towards applicant states in dealing, for example, with the problem of frontiers, should be as generous as possible. We should show a real and warm welcome to the applicant states in the enlargement of the European Union.
In that regard, I have been struck on a number of occasions, both while travelling in eastern and central Europe and on talking to representatives of the applicant states' governments in the United Kingdom, by the very clear recognition that they all offer; that is, that in this regard Her Majesty's Government have been absolutely consistent in their support for enlargement. Of all the current member states, their clear advocacy and steadfastness on this issue is very much appreciated, understood and welcomed by the applicant states. It is important that we do not see eastern and central Europe as a poisoned chalice, but as a tremendous obligation and as an opportunity, both for them and for us.
The dimensions of what we are talking about are dramatically expressed in the first paragraph of the introductory chapter to the report:
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"With the next enlargement the European Union's external frontiers will move to the east. The Central and Eastern European candidate countries will take over tasks hitherto mainly fulfilled by Germany and Austria, becoming responsible for controlling thousands of miles of the EU's new land frontiers … They will also become responsible for controlling long sea frontiers, in the Baltic and the Black Sea".
I shall say something about that in a moment.
"The new Member States will thus assume a central role in securing the frontiers of the European Union's 'area of freedom, security and justice'—
a union of values, not only of frontiers—
"especially as regards its protection against illegal immigration and international organised crime".
The Government's response to paragraph 75 of the report is very important. It suggests, quite rightly in my view, that some of the problems are not speculative but all too real. It states:
"There are currently several points of challenge en route into the EU through Central and Eastern Europe. When the candidate countries join the EU, there will effectively be only one: the frontier control into the candidate country itself".
That is the extent of the challenge involved. That is why it is so important, when we come to the resources being made available, that we understand the danger of a paucity of response on our side.
We are looking at an extraordinary venture of European architecture; that is, the building of the new European home. That phrase came, of course, from Mr Gorbachev.
It is important to understand what is really involved here. We have the construction, in effect, of Schengen standard external frontiers, which are the absolutely necessary quid pro quo of the internal openness of the frontiers of the European Union. So the fundamental architecture must be of sophisticated, strong and dependable external frontiers—not frontiers of a fortress, but frontiers that are dependable in terms of drugs, human trafficking and the other issues—so that we may have the internal exchange within the European Union that is of such enormous importance to the motor of all our economies.
It is a huge economic challenge for the applicant states to match the technology—if you like, the state of the art—of Schengen-type external controls. I hope that I have read the figures in the report correctly, but I understand that under the PHARE programme Poland will receive something like 15 million to 20 million euros to help it during this transitional period. The Poles themselves calculate the actual cost to be somewhere between 400 million and 500 million euros. So the actual amount of assistance, certainly on a multi-lateral basis, is really tiny.
For good reasons, the report focuses on the Luxembourg Six. It does not really say much about the later wave of applicant countries. I should declare an interest here in that I am a member of the so-called "high level group" helping with some of the transitional problems in Romania, which is jointly chaired by the Romanian Prime Minister and my noble friend Lady Nicholson. Three days ago in the Palace of Westminster we enjoyed a visit from the present Foreign Minister of Romania, Mircea

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Geoana. During a meeting that took place upstairs, which I thought was quite dramatic in its own way, he said that Romania's eastern border—and, therefore, second wave—will be the longest with the East from the European Union after Finland. It is in fact longer than Poland's: it is 1,200 kilometres in length and will include the substantial coastline of the Black Sea.
We have talked a little about the problems of Poland in dealing with its external frontier. Let us just imagine what the problem will be for Romania. It is important to start now rather than later in terms of helping Romania. I do not mean that we should revert to the primitive borders that descended across Europe comprising barbed wire, watch towers and all the rest of the ghastly paraphernalia; we are talking about a quite different technology of frontier maintenance under Schengen with very high levels of information technology, mobile units, risk profiling, testing, and so on, all of which costs a great deal of money.
It is a central challenge to the European Union in this enlargement process that we do not in any way replace one iron curtain with another. We must not, because of poverty of resource, replace all the barbed wire, the army patrols and the rest of the dreary business with something that is comparable. It will be apparent to your Lordships that, were we to do so, the affront to Russia would be very great. We have only to bear in mind the oncoming problem of Kaliningrad. I believe that one of the most ghastly nightmares that could be realised in Europe is if Kaliningrad became an enclave surrounded, ironically, by the paraphernalia of a kind of iron curtain defence.
At the earliest point and with considerable diplomacy and sophistication, it is very important for us to ensure that the borders of Kaliningrad with the enlarged European Union really function for Kaliningrad, for Russia and for ourselves. That will be no small challenge because, as your Lordships will be aware, Kaliningrad at the present time is a major centre of drugs, HIV infection and many other major problems.
As I say, we have a major challenge on our hands. It has been rightly noticed and noted in this debate that the quality of our bilateral support to a number of the applicant states on the borders is of a very high order and of a very high human order. Time and time again mention has been made of the sheer quality of the officers and advisers. However, we have only just begun. We seek assurances from the Minister that not only will the quality of British bilateral aid be maintained but that it will be increased; that it will be extended beyond the first wave countries to the second wave countries; and that the United Kingdom will do its very best in the councils of the European Union to ensure that the response of the European Union is coordinated and generous and matches the historic challenge that we have, not in defending ourselves against a poisoned chalice but in welcoming the historic opportunity of the opening of Europe.
2.36 p.m.
Lord Dholakia: My Lords, the debate gives us an opportunity not only to examine the matters relating to enlargement but also to thank my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire for his chairmanship of Sub-Committee F. He has done sterling work, for which we are grateful. I am also delighted that my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond is to be the new chairman. As one who shares working accommodation with her, I know that she is totally committed to the work of the committee. I certainly wish her well.
The speakers' list clearly demonstrates my party's connection with, and commitment to, the wider Europe. It would have been interesting to hear the views of many Eurosceptics, who unfortunately are not present. Of course I welcome the noble Lord opposite. I have great respect for the views he expounds from time to time which give us an opportunity to produce even better reports.
I had the privilege to serve on Sub-Committee F which was responsible for the production of the report on enlargement. Unlike some previous reports, there was a consensus among members on the conclusions we reached. This is very much a non-controversial report and irrespective of the views we hold about Europe, the report highlights the issues we need to face in the light of the enlargement which will entail new land borders stretching to thousands of miles on the eastern front.
We were delighted with our visit to Warsaw. It gave us the opportunity to discuss key areas of concern with the authorities there. We were impressed with the way the witnesses conducted themselves. I also endorse our thanks to the ambassador and staff at the British Embassy. Perhaps the Minister could convey to his counterparts in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office our thanks for the enormous help that we received from our Embassy staff there.
There is no doubt that there is an overwhelming political commitment on the part of Ministers in the Polish Government to accession. This is further supplemented by the efforts being made by officers, for example, the border guards or the police, to meet the requirements of the justice and home affairs acquis.
Of course, many of our views on border controls are coloured by the entry of asylum seekers in EU member states. However, we should never underestimate the efforts being made in upgrading border control facilities, recruiting staff and equipping them properly. All those matters have serious resource implications, ably set out by my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond and other noble friends. But one came back with the feeling that the controls are becoming effective. There is evidence that Poland has been partially successful in combating illegal immigration. Professor Okolski of the Institute of Social Studies in Warsaw noted that the numbers of apprehended illegal migrants transiting through Poland had fallen from 30,000 in 1994 to around 5,000 in 1999. The number being readmitted from the European Union had also fallen to around 1,000 in 1999. He argued that organised traffickers had realised that the most

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profitable and efficient way of trafficking and smuggling migrants is no longer by land but by sea. As frequent press publicity has demonstrated, Italy is now a preferred target.
The action taken by Poland clearly demonstrates a need for corresponding effort from the European Union. We welcome the Prime Minister's visit to Warsaw as a welcome sign of his personal commitment and the commitment of our country towards enlargement, but it has to be backed up by a practical commitment to providing extensive and well co-ordinated assistance to the candidate states.
Can the Minister spell out how that is being done following the Prime Minister's visit to Warsaw? I suspect that there is scope for considerable improvement. The political commitment of European Union leaders needs to be visible and unambiguous to maintain support for all EU membership within the candidate states. What is more, the EU should more clearly commit itself to a timetable for enlargement. I shall come to that point later.
Perhaps I may quote from paragraph 77 of the report:
"Enlargement demands efforts on both side. In adopting the EU acquis the candidate countries are undertaking comprehensive and often painful reform. The Union and its political leaders must be equally committed and vigorous in helping the candidates to complete this reform—in giving them moral as well as practical support. In the candidate states the prospect of early enlargement is vital if the process of reform is to be kept up, and public support for accession maintained—fears over frontier security should not be made to supply a pretext for delay. The precise timetable for enlargement is beyond the scope of this report. However, the most advanced candidate countries have set themselves a target of 1 January 2003. It may not be possible to meet this target; but if so, it is at least incumbent on the EU to offer a clearer indication of the likely timetable than it has done hitherto".
It would be helpful if the Minister could give some indication of the timetable. Would he confirm that it is still the intention of the European Council that the first wave of candidates might be able to take part in the 2004 European Parliament elections?
The area which concerned us most during our visit to Warsaw was that aid was poorly co-ordinated. It was not getting to some areas and was duplicated in others. We have no doubt that there is scope for better co-ordination, possibly through the Commission. Can the Minister elaborate on what is being done towards co-ordinating resource delivery through a single agency?
I support what my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond said. This is the first enlargement since the incorporation of the Schengen acquis into the treaties. To put it differently, it is the first time that Schengen membership has been part and parcel of EU membership rather than being a separate club. Would the Minister agree that that is likely to create the possibility of delaying enlargement because all new member states are required to adopt the acquis in full as a prerequisition to membership? If that is so, should it not be avoided at all costs? Border controls must not, and should not, be used as a pretext for delaying enlargement. However, there is assurance in the readiness of the member states to continue to apply the
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traditional Schengen procedures—admitting new members but without lifting internal border controls until the existing members are satisfied that Schengen standards are being met. It would be helpful if the Minister could indicate what standard of border controls will be required as a pre-condition of EU as opposed to full Schengen membership.
At present the definition is too vague. The Government described it as,
"generally severe and effectively managed borders".
That generalisation is not good enough. The Schengen member states must provide a more precise definition. Will the Minister urge them to make their requirements as specific as possible and to do so before the end of this year?
Your Lordships may wish to read the evidence of Mr Adrian Fortescue, the European Commission's Director-General for Justice and Home Affairs. He has expressed concern that, for the first time, certain important Ministers who had not been closely involved in past enlargement negotiations are playing a big part. Is there a danger that justice and home affairs in general could be a factor for delay? His answer is yes.
What part is our Home Secretary playing? There is a contradiction between what Home Office and Foreign Office officials said in their evidence to the committee. I need not elaborate, except to refer your Lordships to paragraphs 52 and 54 of our report. I draw attention to the Home Secretary's comments in the other place on 1st February. He said:
"The Schengen countries that currently maintain a border with eastern Europe are all absolutely clear that they have to maintain border controls … for many years to come.
Although we are not formally a member of the Schengen area, we take part in Schengen. One of the reasons that I want to do so is to stiffen the resolve of my fellow Interior Ministers".—[Official Report, Commons, 1/2/01; col. 485.]
The Home Office cannot have its cake and eat it. Is that a helpful role for the Home Office to play? Jack Straw refers to countries currently maintaining borders with Eastern Europe. That means Germany, Austria and possibly Italy. It is obvious that they have particular and legitimate anxieties, but although the EU must take account of their concerns, it is by no means clear that they are well founded. The Germans, for example, have well known concerns about free movement rights for workers and fear an influx of Polish and other cheap Eastern European labour after enlargement. There is no evidence that that will happen, particularly in the light the EU's earlier experience of enlargement. Given the insistence of the Home Office that the UK must preserve its autonomous border control rather than fully joining the Schengen area, on what basis does the Home Secretary want to "stiffen the resolve" of Schengen members? If the Government are committed to retaining autonomous UK frontier controls, they should not seek to influence the frontier policy of Schengen states. If they accept that the security of UK frontiers depends on that of Schengen frontiers, why is the UK not a full member?

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I trust that EU member states will not constitute themselves into a rich man's club, expecting others to join the enlargement process on their terms. Some of the new countries are still trying to establish economic stability. They will need help, not a diktat from member states.
Border control is closely associated with asylum seekers—a subject that arouses considerable emotion whenever we debate it. The fear and xenophobia reflected at the highest level in the Tory Party should not influence Jack Straw in taking a decision that is good for us, good for Europe and good for those who wish to join us. I want my country—Britain—to be at the forefront of the debate on enlargement.
2.48 p.m.
Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, as this fascinating debate has been monopolised so far by the Liberal Democrats, it might be healthy to have an alternative voice, although I assure them that mine will not be a very disputatious one. It is customary for speakers to say how wonderful our reports from European committees are, but I really feel that this is one of the most illuminating reports to have appeared from our European sub-committees in recent months, or even years. It has opened more windows for me into the enormous complexities and importance of the issues than any other that has emerged recently. Its merit is widely recognised outside this House. The relevant committee in another place paid tribute to the work of our committee, which has looked so deeply into the issues.
Therefore, I consider that, in recognising the contribution that the report makes, one should congratulate rather than criticise—at least, to begin with—and I congratulate its chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire.
Two lessons come blasting out of the report. But the stronger of the two is the one about which we deserve to be reminded. It is that freedom of movement between countries is splendid; we all enjoy it and welcome it. It seems to make complete sense and logic. However, it has a price. Quite simply, borders which are open to allow trade, free movement, tourism, and so on, inevitably are open not only for the good but also for the bad.
It is inevitable that the more open that we seek to make the traditional borders between nations in Europe, the more necessary it will be—this is where a more illiberal note comes in—to have controls to replace border controls. It will be necessary to have more bureaucracy, organisation, enforcement, mobile units, checking and documentation behind borders in order to pay for the freedom that one has at the border itself.
I believe that the situation in relation to borders is a little like the Internet. With the Internet we have a fantastic, liberating instrument which gives the world access to information. Of course, it comes with great benefits but also with great dangers. Like the Internet, the open border can be used for licit and illicit
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purposes, for more trade but also for legal and illegal immigration and movement, human trafficking, criminal arrangements and the type of issue to which the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, referred in her fascinating contribution. Those represent the dark side of open borders. Nothing comes without a price.
With regard to Schengen and the question of the Schengen acquis—now the EU acquis—being applied to the applicant states—the lively democracies of central and eastern Europe—that price is still higher. The prices, or hurdles, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, described them, are very high indeed. One quality of the report is that it identifies those problems so candidly and frankly in its analysis.
One has only to start reading the report to discover on page 6 that the possibility of, or rather the need—indeed, the requirement—to move the frontiers of the European Union from the west side to the eastern side of the applicant states raises the prospect:
"that they will cut through long existing cross-frontier economic, ethnic and political links. Local and regional markets in eastern border areas, relations of ethnic minorities on one side of the frontier with their ethnic homeland on the other side, and political relations with neighbouring non-EU Member [countries] could be affected".
With regard to the trafficking of human beings, the report goes on to say that,
"a reflection group set up by the European Commission … suggested that 'tighter border controls"—
that is, on the new, eastern frontiers—
"will only drive up the price, and thus the profits, of this criminal trade'".
Therefore, for the Schengen countries, undoubtedly that is a very high hurdle indeed.
There are possibilities that frontiers that have been relatively permeable, even in the darkest days of the Cold War and, indeed, even for centuries back, where people went to and fro easily and did their trade, will now not only be created in a new sense—I fully take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, in relation to this—but will also imply the need for visas. Visas will be required in areas where for hundreds of years farmers have been free almost to walk across and see their relatives. These are dangerous areas where new triggers could be pulled to inflame local feelings in south-east and eastern Europe and near-central Asia. We need to watch them carefully.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, rightly urged us not to fall into the easy phraseology that is rightly referred to in the report. That involves the prospect of replacing the old iron curtain with a new Schengen curtain. That may not happen but there will certainly be a wall of some kind; it may be an electronic or a virtual wall, and it may not have the familiar barbed wire and watchtowers that we associated with frontiers of the past. There will be an extensive and high-technology arrangement, which will create a barrier as surely as any barrier that existed during the Cold War and before it. There will need to be a barrier. If the internal border controls are to be removed, the internal politics of the EU will create enormous pressures for such a barrier. It will be expensive and there will be

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uncertainties. As the report fairly points out, one does not know where the borders of Europe will finally settle.
I hope that there will not be a delay in enlargement as a result of the proposal. I listened closely to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, in that context. Enormous problems could be created.
What are the consequences of saying that the Schengen acquis is part of the EU acquis and that the acquis communautaire must be accepted with, I hope, sensible—transition—arrangements—the—report mentions this—to move the frontiers from the internal western side to the external eastern side? The first consequence—the report is very helpful in making us all face this—is that old controls will be replaced by new controls. The new controls will be extremely extensive and they will range behind borders and involve interference with freedom of movement not across frontiers but down high streets and in towns and villages. Documentation and mobile units will be required.
That brings us to the role of documentation in the form of identity cards. What about them? I am not sure whether the report touched on that issue, but the successor report in the other place clearly faced up to it. The Home Secretary told the Home Affairs Committee in the other place:
"If you wanted to go down the Schengen road—which, for the avoidance of doubt, I do not, and neither does the Government— and lift border controls, then you would have to have a strong system of internal controls and that would lead you, inevitably. into a system of compulsory identification cards".
That is a difficult issue; it is not clear cut on one side or the other. I am not sure where noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches stand on that issue, which lies near the heart of the matter. Almost all of the relevant countries have identity cards and documentation of some kind. The system will have to be strengthened, made electronic, mobilised and placed under the general system of the Schengen information system, which will become—it already is—an enormous central depot of information and control. The liberally minded among us should ask how that system is supposed to be accountable to our democratic legislatures. It will have enormous power over the movement of almost everybody in the movement-free zone in the new electronic walls of Schengen.
My view is that the internal demands—that if western barriers are to be reduced, eastern barriers must be built up—are carried a little too far. There appears to be a degree of exaggeration about the terrors that are associated with immigration from the east. Many people have the old-fashioned view that Poland is teeming with people who want to come west, but that view is completely out of date. Poland is a dynamic modern economy. If anything, just as British workers ship off to Ireland to do the work for which there are no workers in that country, I suspect that there will be movements from Germany back into Poland because people will go to the new, dynamic and
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reasonably free economies that have not been subjected to the full glories and restrictions of many western European economies.
The truth is that an attempt to build up this great new electronic wall is not going to succeed—but I may be wrong. The new Europe has no eastern frontier. Ideology tried to impose one for 70 years, but it collapsed. The attempt to build a new wall, I believe, will fail, as walls usually do. Europe, in this sense, is an idea—a very powerful idea— but it is never a single-state identity in the united states USA sense, nor is it a superpower; and it is never going to be complete. There is not a final arrangement for Europe, as you often hear some people saying. It is going, I hope, to be an ever-open and expanding entity.
I like, and treasure, the free movement.It is very enjoyable for us western Europeans, but I fear its replacement, especially if that means a lot more documentation and especially if vast electronic walls have to go up to calm the fears of the existing members of the European Union. Like so many other things about the great European. Union, they are excellent up to a point but if pushed too far and with too much dedication and insistence, they achieve the very opposite of what is intended.
3.1 p.m.
Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I am most grateful, as have been all other speakers, to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for instigating this debate this afternoon. The scrutiny committee's excellent report on EU enlargement is a testament and tribute to the noble Lord's interest in and commitment to this area. It is a very well-informed document, well researched and well supported. The kind words that have described it during the debate have been not just well meant but absolutely accurate.
This has been a Liberal debate and the noble Lord, Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, added to it with his interesting contribution. Certainly I have learnt a lot through being involved in this. The Government are also very grateful to the committee for its expert assessment of the issues facing the EU and the candidate countries in the run-up to enlargement. Certainly their views have helped to inform our thinking, and we hope that a constructive dialogue with Parliament will continue, as I am sure it will, under the careful stewardship of the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond. Her contribution this afternoon was ample testimony to what we can earnestly and honestly expect from her.
The Government are committed to a swift and successful enlargement of the European Union. This will remove unnatural divisions in Europe and help to ensure the future peace, prosperity and strength of the EU, the candidate countries and the wider Europe. We are pleased that the Nice Council and the Swedish presidency have confirmed the political priority that they attach to early enlargement.
We have set ambitious targets, but they are realistic. With efforts on both sides, there is no reason why the targets should not be achieved. Perhaps I may say to

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the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, that it is by target setting that we can focus minds. We are working hard, along with the presidency, to ensure that the present position on both the full movement of persons and on home affairs will be completed for the most advanced candidates by the end of this year. Achieving this goal will, in our view, demonstrate a major advance in the process of the negotiations.
As the report rightly identifies, both chapters raise some difficult and no doubt sensitive issues for the accession process. However, may I state again that the Government are committed, as ever, to resolving those. One of the report's main interests was the implications for enlargement of inclusion for the first time of the Schengen arrangements in the EU acquis. Implementing a Schengen-based system for the candidate countries is, as everyone has said, a massive task with significant resource implications. The UK and the EU both recognise that and, in response, EU financial assistance to the candidates specifically for JHA issues—especially through the PHARE programme—now stands at 130.7 million euro for 2000, which represents a 400 per cent increase over the last three years. That is a very significant increase in support.
But the process by which the Schengen acquis is implemented also recognises the scope of the task. The EU does not expect full-implementation on day one. Instead, we expect the candidates to show that they can provide an effective standard of border control by the time they accede to the EU.
There will then be a period of further implementation, and evaluation, before internal borders with other member states are removed, during which time they will have acquired access to the tools of Schengen co-operation, most notably the Schengen Information System—the SIS.
We should be clear that the time taken to become full members of Schengen would not affect the candidates' rights of free movement. The two are quite separate. Accession countries that have not yet passed through the second phase of Schengen implementation could operate dual frontier controls in the same way as we do.
The report was concerned also that the EU had not specifically defined the minimum standards that it would expect to see on day one of accession, and that the candidates were confused, perhaps, about the standards that they were expected to meet. I am pleased to say that that position has now moved on: consultation with the candidates has advanced considerably in the past six months. The Government will press for that dialogue to continue, most immediately in the debate at the JHA Council on 16th March.
Lord Watson of Richmond: My Lords, nevertheless, will the Minister acknowledge, particularly when we look towards the second wave of candidates, that the amount of resources available on a multilateral level within the European Union and the PHARE
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programme are really completely inadequate to meet the task that is required? The real financial burden of doing this will be very difficult. Therefore, will he assure the House that the Government will use every opportunity to ensure that the priority of that is understood by other members of the European Union?
Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I am sure that the priority is understood. Certainly it is understood by our Government. No doubt that is an issue which will be examined most closely in the various discussions and meetings which will need to take place. It would be negligent if we did not do that and the Government are of course aware of that issue.
As I said, debates will continue at the JHA Council on 16th March—a week today—when the EU will explore with the candidates ways to increase practical co-operation.
We also recognise the need to ensure that EU enlargement does not create fresh divisions between new member states and their neighbours who will remain outside the EU. Some very sensible observations were made on that particular set of issues.
The Government are thinking carefully about the consequences of EU enlargement for the countries further east, and we have encouraged the Commission and candidate countries to take into account views of the EU's new neighbours. And by furthering cooperation between the EU and Balkan countries following the Prime Minister's initiative on combating people smuggling, we shall further extend the area of freedom, security and justice.
It is important to recognise that there will be a new relationship between new member states and their eastern neighbours. That is inevitable. But that does not mean that genuine travellers should be in any way disadvantaged. There are a range of ways to deal with the situation. The Schengen acquis recognises the existence of routine frontier traffic and regular travellers, for example.
But while the Government consider that we should be sensitive to the implications of enlargement for those outside the EU, we should not over-react to the situation. That is a relationship in which adjustments will be made on both sides. For example, last year, Poland introduced a visa regime for citizens of Belarus and, from discussions with the Polish authorities, we know that the implementation of that regime has not caused major problems, which we find very encouraging.
A number of points and questions were put to me during the debate and I shall try to deal with some of the issues. Border control was at the heart of those observations. On a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, the UK supports the efforts of the EU to develop close partnerships with the countries of eastern Europe. We believe that strengthening border management, administration and co-operation in the fight against organised crime is an important element in that co-operative relationship. The EU and its member states have

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contributed to the improvement of border administration across the region. We welcome the EU's recent allocation of an extra 3.9 million euro to strengthen border management in the Ukraine and in Moldova.
A number of observations were made about resources. A number of options are currently under discussion within the EU fora generally to establish a strategy for financial burden-sharing in managing the EU' s external frontier. The Government do not view the fact that those have yet to bear fruit as a lack of commitment to enlargement. However, it would be the first occasion on which external assistance has been provided in relation to a state's responsibilities for controlling its own frontiers. The Government want to examine the implication of all that in relation to their own frontier controls, as well as any precedence for other areas of EU competence, before adopting some of the solutions that apparently have been canvassed.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, drew attention to the issue of illegal immigration. As a government, our concern is to ensure that EU enlargement does not adversely affect the current situation within the EU. The assessment that eastern enlargement, without improvements in border controls, will exacerbate illegal immigration, trafficking in people and drugs and organised crime is based upon close examination by technical experts. Currently, there are several points of challenge on routes into the EU through central and eastern Europe. When candidate countries join the EU effectively there will be only one: the frontier control into the candidate country itself.
In many of the countries border demarcation, which will form the new EU border, has yet to be defined. In some candidate countries, road and rail crossings are unstaffed and the only controls in force are at the main airports. There is evidence to suggest that some of the candidate countries do not yet have the expertise or the resources to patrol borders in order to provide an effective control. That aspect of enlargement must be carefully monitored. Several noble Lords on the Liberal Benches, rightly drew attention to that. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, referred in particular to liaison officers.
It is worth saying that in addition to our immigration liaison officers in the Balkans, our key agencies, including the police, Prison Service, NCIS, NCS and other NGOs, are involved across all the applicant countries. We have drug liaison officers in Warsaw, Budapest, Sofia and Bucharest and we shall consider posting further liaison officers as the need arises and as enlargement and the difficulties and problems of enlargement become more apparent.
I believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, quite rightly raised the costs of SIS participation. That has a cost implication, but it needs to be considered against the broader picture of police funding. In terms of Schengen, we believe that it represents a valuable investment in the fight against cross-border crime. The Home Office has appointed a programme manager, tasked to deliver by the end of May a definition of the programme, its organisational structure, a timetable
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for delivery and an assessment of the costs. The programme may well be composed of a number of individual projects with their own start and finish times.
The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, asked about target dates for enlargement. As I said earlier, we believe that target dates galvanise negotiations and that the time is fast approaching for the EU to concentrate minds by setting a target date for the conclusion of negotiations with those countries that are ready for membership.
It is a matter for debate as to whether the Gothenburg Council would be the right time to do so and that will depend on a number of factors, including, I would argue, progress in negotiations between then and now.
Perhaps more provocatively, the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, asked about the comments made by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary about a stiffening of resolve on some of the border matters. It is right that my right honourable friend made that observation. This is a serious issue and hard considerations must be taken up and given proper examination. And yes, sometimes there will have to be a stiffening of resolve. There is nothing wrong in saying that and being plain about our intentions from the outset.
I said that the committee's inquiry feeds into a vitally important debate on EU enlargement which will no doubt continue throughout this year. I hope that today's debate will not be our last opportunity to discuss the issues raised and I welcome the committee's report as a contribution to that debate.
The debate presents an opportunity for me to reflect on the views of the House and the importance of the work carried out by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, during his excellent chairmanship of Sub-Committee F. As he now steps away from that role, we are eternally grateful to him for the quality of debate which his expert knowledge has provided. I am sure that the whole House will want to join me in thanking him for his most valuable contribution. Sadly, the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, has left the Chamber, but we look forward to her continued contribution as chair of that committee.
3.15 p.m.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. The subject deserves a fuller House than we were able to achieve on a Friday afternoon. I want to underline everything the Minister said about the issue being an important one to which we must return on a number of occasions.
The noble Lord, Lord Howell, mentioned identity cards. They were considered in one of our previous inquiries. I well remember his noble friend Lord Pilkington becoming convinced during the inquiry that Britain should opt in entirely to the Schengen arrangement and that we should also adopt identity cards. I suspect that that is the direction in which we shall find ourselves going. We are of course half way towards having identity cards in this country. I have

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my identity card with me; it is my driving licence. Indeed, Northern Ireland also has non-driving licences as identity cards.
The issue of frontier controls raises questions about the relationship between an enlarged EU and its new near neighbours. Other sub-committees of the House's EU Committee will deal with that. The problem of what happens if there is a gap between rich and poor at the border which sucks in crime, illegal labour and so forth is part of the reason an EU strategy towards Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya is a very important part of dealing with the issue of immigration.
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I must not delay the House—it is time for everyone to go home. I simply ask the Minister to consider the expansion of the liaison officer network. It is an interesting and important departure in policing practices and in the practice of the Home Office. I suggest that as the Prime Minister has committed us to a further enlargement in respect of which there are major budgetary implications, it might be appropriate after the election to have a Home Office consultative paper on the subject.
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House adjourned at nineteen minutes past three o'clock.