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Farriers’ Qualification (European Recognition) Regulations 2008

My Lords, I admire the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for introducing this debate. He laughs modestly but I admire the way that he has introduced it because it draws attention to the fact that, once more, we are being saddled with regulations from the European Community that we do not want. That is the sort of point that my noble friend Lord Pearson of Rannoch loves to dwell on and I recommend that he thinks about it. Like the noble Lord, Lord Addington, I did not ride horses. Being tall, I was always given the largest horse and I found it all rather terrifying, so I never got beyond hanging on to the saddle with one hand. Most people did not think that that was a very suitable way to go riding, so I did not do too much of it. I declare an interest in that I am a liveryman in the Worshipful Company of Farriers. That is not a pecuniary interest; if anything, it is a reverse pecuniary interest but it is an interest nevertheless. I am worried about this measure because I think that it will lower the standards of farriering. At the moment, farriering in England involves a four-year apprenticeship. A person is then awarded a diploma by the Worshipful Company of Farriers, the purpose of which is to protect horses and the people who look after them from the attention of unqualified people. As I understand it, a Frenchman registers and then sets about his trade. In the European Union, a qualified farrier is not assessed, he does not have to take examinations and he is not given a diploma, but the United Kingdom diploma is regarded throughout the world as the gold standard that people should try to achieve. It was brought in by the Farriers (Registration) Act 1975 and was set up to protect horses. I simply ask why we in the United Kingdom should accept lower standards. We have set the highest standard and other people should be trying to climb up to it, rather than our being made to climb down, all for the purpose of some kind of uniformity. Uniformity should be accepted only if it is for the better. One thing that frightens me about this whole matter appears in the Explanatory Memorandum. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, will know this backwards because he must have read it dozens of times but I shall remind him of it. Paragraph 7.3 states: "““As the UK government is required to implement the Directive, the consultation on these Regulations did not consult on the principles underlying the Directive or those provisions whose transposition into domestic law leaves no room for discretion at Member State level. The purpose of the consultation was to explain why we are proposing to transpose in the way that we are””." It is a funny kind of consultation that consists simply of explaining what we are doing. I put it to the Minister, who is very wise and understanding, that he is imposing on the farriers and the horse-riding fraternity standards which we do not want in the United Kingdom, which are lower than the ones that we have at the moment and which will not do us as a country—nor, I suspect, the European Union—any good.