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Farm Animal Welfare

I am slightly disappointed that there has not been more interest in the debate from hon. Members on both sides of the House, although we are obviously all conscious of the pressure on Members' diaries. None the less, I congratulate the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin). In former times, when he was a DEFRA Minister, he and I debated some of the issues before us, and I know how strongly he feels about them. I do not think that there is anybody in the House who is not enthusiastic about improving animal welfare—the issue is how we go about ensuring that we have genuine improvement, rather than something that simply salves our conscience by letting us think that we are doing something about the issue. At the start, I want to pick up one of the points that the hon. Gentleman made. At one stage in his speech, which I endorse and support, he seemed to confuse sustainability and welfare with the health issues raised by the quality of one's diet. It would be unwise to imply that eating caged eggs, for example, was any less healthy than eating free-range or any other eggs. One can make all sorts of arguments for not buying caged eggs, but we must be careful not to imply that they are any less wholesome. Indeed, perversely, they are probably slightly safer if anything, because it has been shown that the level of salmonella in them is considerably lower than in free-range eggs. That is an issue, and we have to be careful not to mislead the consumer. Before I address public procurement, there is another animal welfare issue that we have to consider. When we introduce measures and pass regulations in this country, we have to be certain that we are not simply exporting lower standards to other countries. We did that in the pig industry in 1992—I say this as a former member of a Conservative Government—when we banned stalls and tethers. There was massive support for that, but it is one reason why our pig industry has halved in size since then. The ban is not the only reason why that happened, and it would be wrong to blame it alone, but it put something like 5p per kilo on the cost of finishing pigs. It was quite a serious issue, but we almost certainly did nothing at all for pig welfare, because the industry simply moved to countries that continued to use stalls and tethers. The EU has now taken steps to ban tethers, which is welcome, but the measures are not in place yet, so we are, as the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) said, importing large quantities of pigmeat produced from pigs kept in stalls and, indeed, tethers. We have not, therefore, helped the welfare of pigs overall, even though we might have done something, as I suggested earlier, to salve our conscience.