Sir John Hayes

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his support for the campaign, which has been notable; I thank him. This is about threat and risk. Where threat becomes apparent, risk can be mitigated. My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) and I spend a lot of our lives talking about threat and risk in respect of national security, and we have studied those matters closely over a long time. It is absolutely true that the early identification of the kind of risks that the hon. Gentleman describes can prevent their escalation. That is essentially what we are calling on the Government to do. The Government want to do more on domestic abuse, and they have said that—I shall say a little more about that in a moment or two. The correlation, as I have described it, is clear; we now need to decide what we are going to do about it. We can speak endlessly about the cases, which do not amount just to this particular case, tragic though it is and personal though it is to me and my constituent. Annette wants to protect other people. That is her mission—to prevent this happening to another mother, another family, another victim. The problem is that animal cruelty is regarded as an animal welfare matter, quite separate from human safeguarding. This is the challenge for the Government. It is clear that there is a gap in the way that the Government treat these serious problems, though they recognise that both are just that—serious. Earlier this year, Annette and I met the then Minister for safeguarding, the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), to make the case for a potential animal abuse register. I put on the record how well the hon. Member responded to my request for the meeting and how she conducted that meeting. She made my constituent feel valued, listened carefully to what we both said, and committed to Home Office work, which, again, I shall say a little more about in a few moments.