Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their valuable contributions to today’s debate and their strong support for these regulations; it is much appreciated. These regulations are important, so it is very good that we can bring them in smoothly. The key issue raised in the debate is that of small abattoirs: every noble Lord who spoke mentioned the problem of the closure of small abattoirs. One of the reasons we wanted to exempt small abattoirs from the scheme, in order not to put extra administrative regulatory burden on them, is because we know what pressures they face. I am acutely aware that many small abattoirs have closed over, I would guess, the last decade. It is much harder for abattoirs to stay open, and I am very aware of the extra stress that that puts on farmers. Farmers like to know where their animals are going, and with abattoirs becoming more centralised and larger, they do not necessarily know the abattoir and the people running it in the way they used to. As noble Lords have said, animals have longer travel distances, often in hot vehicles, so it is not great for animal welfare. When I was president of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, we had a campaign around small abattoirs, so this is something I know quite a lot about; it is very close to my heart. In fact, last year, I chaired the Oxford Real Farming Conference session on small abattoirs and talked to people from the industry, as well as to the people running mobile abattoirs, who were represented at that meeting. The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, talked about the small abattoir fund, which Defra was running at that time. That fund was for a fixed period, which has now come to an end. I have been talking recently to the Farming Minister, Daniel Zeichner, about small abattoirs—I know that he has a particular interest in them—and what we can do next to support the industry, because we in Defra are extremely aware that this is particularly challenging in more rural areas. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, is from Yorkshire, others are from East Anglia and I am in Cumbria, and we all have the same problem. Our nearest abattoir is probably a two-hour drive in a farm vehicle. One of the issues we are coming up against is the skill set. It is an extremely skilled job, and there is a problem with staffing abattoirs. We need to look at that, because it is all very well having funds, but if we do not have people with the skills to do the job, and people who want to train to do that job in future, we are never going to solve the problem. We are looking at how we can encourage people to look at this as a career choice. It is not always an easy career choice to sell, but it is an important and valuable job and it can be very well paid.