Tim Bonner: Hunting, sentience and avoiding responsibility for bad law

One of the most frustrating aspects of politics is that the consequences of stupid legislation are often not realised until long after the perpetrators have left the field. I fear that in years to come we will be looking back at the passage of some current legislation, not least the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill, and finding that those responsible for it have fled the scene of the crime in the same way that the backbench MPs who pushed through the Hunting Act are dead or departed, and the Prime Minister who allowed them to do so has slid into irrelevance.

Today marks 17 years since the hunting ban came into force, but no one will be putting themselves forward to answer for a piece of legislation that wasted so much time and resource whilst achieving so little. The Hunting Act is a high profile case, but there are plenty of examples of more mundane pieces of legislation that were passed for the wrong reasons or in the wrong way which no-one is now willing to take responsibility for. A prime example is the Marine and Coastal Access Act of 2009 which adopted an ideological and hugely over complicated approach to creating an English Coastal Path. This meant that it took years to pass the legislation and that 13 years after it came into force and many, many millions of pounds later, the English Coastal Path is still far from complete. Yet nobody, least of all the ministers involved, have ever had to answer for the decisions that led to this ridiculous and wasteful bureaucratic muddle.

Coming back to the present, the Sentience Bill is a particularly appalling piece of legislation which is the result of a ridiculous over-reaction to a manufactured social media campaign. It was claimed that the government did not believe that animals are sentient, but rather than pointing out that this was wholly incorrect and that the acres of animal welfare legislation on the statute book explicitly accept that animals have the capacity to experience feelings and sensations, the government promised to legislate. Its first attempt was so bad that after a mauling from the Efra Committee the then Secretary of State threw it as far as he could into the long grass and left his successors to deal with the mess.

The second iteration of the Bill, which is before parliament at the moment, is possibly an even worse piece of legislation, but it has the political advantage of not posing a short-term threat. It would set up an 'Animal Sentience Committee' with statutory powers over Ministers who will have to respond to its consideration of whether their policies will have a negative impact on the welfare of sentient animals. The committee could therefore be the perfect vehicle for inserting an animal rights agenda into the legislative process. The current government says that this will not prove a problem for Ministers because it will control appointments to the committee, ignoring the very obvious problem that the day will come when the political cycle turns and another government will be making those appointments.

The current government is clearly embarrassed about its Bill which it originally thought would be a useful generator of headlines, but which after sustained criticism in the House of Lords it is now trying to sneak through the Commons with the minimum of debate or delay. It has calculated, and sadly is probably right, that in 17 years' time when the negative consequences of this Bill are clear, no-one involved will be left to answer for it. The Alliance will continue to highlight the dangers that the Bill represents and many MPs will raise them. It looks, however, as if the government is willing to trade someone else's problems tomorrow for an easy life for itself today.