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Farm Animal Welfare

I concur with the comment from stage right; I will not be long at all. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again this morning, Mr. Key. I sincerely congratulate the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), who secured the debate, on seeking it in the first place and on raising a tremendously important issue. The bulk of his speech was about caged eggs, which is a seriously important issue. Movement away from caged eggs towards humane forms of farming is essential, and UK poultry farmers are leading the way in ensuring that the most humane forms of egg farming become the norm. It is important to say that at the beginning. We are encouraged to think of ourselves these days as active consumers, not passive participants, and we exercise that power positively and negatively. Like many other hon. Members present, I suspect, and others here, I exercised my own personal boycott of companies that gave succour to the apartheid regime in South Africa, for example. On a positive note, like many others present—probably most of us—I use my consumer power to buy Fairtrade products and locally sourced food. However, our power as consumers is surely never greater than when our collective power is exercised through public bodies, acting on behalf of us all, choosing to purchase goods and services ethically. How we spend the £2 billion of taxpayers' money that goes on food each year is immensely important. It is even more important than my refusal in the 1980s to allow Barclays the privilege of managing my student overdraft. We can influence an awful lot of producers and, as we have heard, an entire market with £2 billion. This debate allows us to hold the Government to account for their failure to use that influence positively to date.