Lord Blencathra (Con)

My Lords, we should at least be grateful that we are dealing with this matter well after the dinner break. I support my noble friend’s amendment. I also support government Amendment 301. It is a big improvement on the current law, but I am very disappointed that it omits some of the essential features of the proposed new clause in the original Amendment 316 that my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood had advocated for. The Minister is a very talented lawyer, an excellent addition to this House and a nice person to boot. Her amendment is supported by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, who is also incredibly able and almost as nice as the Minister. So I am being brave, or rather suicidal, when I say that these two lawyers have missed some of the crucial points in Amendment 301, as opposed to the proposed new clause in my noble friend’s original amendment. It seems that the government amendment is punishing people only for the perversion of the crime itself and not for the cruelty to the animal concerned. Rather than continuing to say “the proposed new clause in the original amendment from my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood”, I will simply refer to it as Amendment 316, which was its number in the Marshalled List in Committee. Amendment 316 would have not only criminalised sexual activity with animals but treated the conduct as an animal welfare matter. It would have given courts express powers to remove animals from offenders, direct their disposal, rehoming or destruction, and make disqualification orders tied to the Animal Welfare Act. Government Amendment 301 criminalises sexual activity and touching but does not include those explicit welfare remedies or the statutory link to the Animal Welfare Act. Amendment 316 had a built-in mechanism for disqualification orders for owning, keeping, dealing in or transporting animals, and would have required those orders to be treated “as if made under section 34 of the Animal Welfare Act 2006”. Government Amendment 301 contains no parallel disqualification provisions, so an offender convicted under that amendment will not automatically be subject to the same statutory animal control prohibitions unless other legislation applies. Later in my remarks I shall come to the Animal Welfare Act and say why it is not adequate to deal with this problem. Amendment 316 would have expressly allowed courts to make offenders subject to notification requirements and tied in amendments to the Sexual Offences Act and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act for images. Government Amendment 301 changes the wording elsewhere, replacing “intercourse” with “sexual activity”, but the core text does not set out the same notification on image-related court powers. Amendment 316 explicitly amended the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 to add images of sexual activity with animals and attach the same animal welfare disqualification remedies to convictions for those image offences. Amendment 301 does not include those parallel amendments. We now come to the crux of the matter: the penalties. Amendment 316 carried higher maximum custodial sentences—up to five years on indictment—and therefore signals a higher statutory seriousness and sentencing range than Amendment 301, which is up to just two years on indictment. However, when we look at sexual activity with a corpse in government Amendment 302, we see that the maximum penalty will be raised to seven years, if I am right.