Alexander King: How a lazy political promise is now threatening to kill Britain’s shellfish industry

Alexander King is a consultant, and former legislative special adviser in No10.

I wouldn’t blame you if you missed it, but those of you who keep up to date with Fishing News may have seen reports that the shellfish industry is very concerned by the way Defra is updating guidelines for the handling of live crustaceans.

The Shellfish Association of Great Britain has said that if implemented as they fear, they “could potentially put large swathes of the shellfish industry out of business”.

Often with stories like these, it is worth looking back to see how we ended up here. There is usually a government commitment gone awry, or some policy lever pulled without due consideration. A political stone is released from the top of the mountain, and there follows an avalanche of red tape which crushes an unsuspecting business.

In this case, we can trace back the offending stone to the debate over animal sentience. Or more precisely, sentient lobsters.

Back in 2017 during debates on our departure from the EU, pro-animal welfare campaigners raised concerns that the EU Withdrawal Bill did not transfer the principle enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty that animals were sentient beings. Organisations such as Compassion in World Farming organised petitions that had hundreds of thousands of signatories demanding the legal recognition of animal sentience in British law.

Tory MPs were bombarded with angry letters from constituents who simply couldn’t believe that their MP didn’t consider their beloved pet Rover to be capable of feelings. An amendment to the Bill, in this vein, was defeated – but a commitment was made to recognise animal sentience in law and a draft bill to achieve this was published.

You might at this stage ask whether all this was really necessary. The UK is after all the country where the RSPCA was formed a full sixty years before the NSPCC, and the idea that European countries have higher standards of animal welfare than us is for the ethically-treated birds. Ironically, as the RSPCA noted prior to the referendum, it was EU rules which prevented us from banning the live exports of farm animals or the importing of fur.

But the Tories were of course alive to one of the golden rules of politics (that people prefer their pets to other humans) and took the path of least resistance. The 2019 Conservative Manifesto made clear the Party would ‘bring in new laws on animal sentience’, and the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill was introduced in Parliament in 2021.

Job done, you might think. Wound closed, manifesto commitment met, onto other things. But the devil, as ever, is in the detail. While the draft Bill addressed the issue by including one clause which stipulated ,,inisters ‘must have regard to the welfare needs of animals as sentient beings’, the actual Bill introduced and eventually passed in 2022 was far more expansive.

Instead of a single clause asking ministers to recognise what some might argue had always been de facto recognised, the Bill created an ‘Animal Sentience Committee’, empowered to consider how government decisions take account of animal welfare.

In practice, this means a quango now issues reports on their view of whether the government has given “all due regard to the ways in which the policy might have an adverse effect on the welfare needs of sentient animals affected”.

To be clear, this does not just involve issuing reports on animal welfare bills. One recent example of the Committee’s work includes a report on the insufficiencies of the Online Safety Act in reducing animal suffering. What began as a simple acknowledgement of animal sentience in law has ended with another quango empowered to range across government policy.

Those less concerned by quango proliferation might argue that ministers still have the power to ignore the Committee’s views and push ahead with whatever policy they wish, and that the only action demanded of government is to respond to these reports via written statement in Parliament.

But for those who do fear such things, there is ample evidence for the heavy weight such bodies bear on internal Whitehall policymaking, and the fear of external media pressure any dissenting judgement on government policy brings.

None of this is to suggest that the Committee does not have expertise upon which the Government might wish to call, or that what they have recommended might be sensible. But to butcher a phrase: while I might approve of what it says, I can disagree with its right to say it.

And what about lobsters, I hear you cry? Well when the Bill was first introduced, it recognised the sentience of ‘vertebrate animals’. But after the publication of an LSE study into the “Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans”, a government amendment was tabled to recognise the sentience of creatures such as lobsters and crabs.

The announcement was clear that it would “not affect any existing legislation or industry practices such as fishing. There will be no direct impact on the shellfish catching or restaurant industry.” The minister was slightly more cautious, remarking that while this would not change any rules for business now, “in due course, the Government may wish to consider whether it would be appropriate to amend the scope of other animal welfare legislation to include [them].”

Four years on and ‘due course’ has arrived. Campaign groups are using the declaration of crustacean sentience to demand higher welfare standards for businesses, while those businesses fear for their survival.

I take no official view on crustaceans beyond the deliciousness of Cromer crab. But what started out eight years ago as a simple commitment to recognise the sentience of animals in law has morphed into another quango involved in decision-making across government and potentially a whole industry at risk. Those are real people with real livelihoods and families to support.

The lessons for Conservatives are clear. This episode provides evidence of some of the issues with which the Party needs to grapple in opposition: how difficult it is to tackle the size of the state while under constant pressure to intervene; the effects of gold-plating political commitments made in haste; and how ‘guided’ we are by quangos.

But it is more than that. It is a salutary reminder that every piece of legislation, every clause, every amendment, has a consequence in the real world, and a price that is usually paid by businesses and people, even years later. There is no such thing as a ‘free’ political commitment, and parliamentarians should remember it.