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Farriers’ Qualification (European Recognition) Regulations 2008

My Lords, it is for each individual member state and competent authority to set their standards. We are trying to encourage free movement of professions and we will buy in, as we do in other professions, whether it is medicine, engineering, science or dentistry—there are all kinds of issues like that—with the need to meet certain basic conditions. In this case, the basic conditions are those that I set out: if you are in a country where there is no competent authority you must still meet a set of criteria and prove that you have been practising in the profession for at least two years. You have to show that you are running a lawful business in another country to enable you to come over here on a temporary basis. It is for others to decide, but there may be the odd one or two farriers who are better than some of our farriers. We have 390 here who are not qualified, in the sense that we are discussing qualifications—those with grandfather rights. One has to ask, who judges those? Are they better or worse than others from other countries? It would not be me who would want to make that decision.