Policy background
- The Government has made clear its commitment to raising animal welfare standards, and to ensuring that animals do not lose any recognitions or protections now that the UK has left the EU.
- The Government is therefore legislating to ensure that animal sentience is explicitly recognised in domestic law and to enhance scrutiny of major policy decisions taken by UK Ministers which impact on the welfare of sentient animals.
- In its 2019 manifesto, the Conservative Party made a commitment to "bring in new laws on animal sentience." The Act fulfils this pledge. The Act includes provision to maintain a committee called the Animal Sentience Committee ("the Committee"). The role of the Committee will be to consider the ways in which a policy might have an adverse effect on the welfare of animals as sentient beings and to give its opinion in the form of a report. The Committee will be able to investigate a policy, both during and after its development.
- In 2020, in response to ongoing discussion surrounding the potential sentience of decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs, Defra commissioned LSE Consulting, part of the London School of Economics and Political Science, to produce a review of the scientific evidence on the subject. Following peer-review, the ‘Review of the evidence for sentience in decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs’ was published on 19 November 2021. The Bill was subsequently amended during Report stage in the House of Lords to bring these invertebrates within the scope of the Committee’s reports.
- The Act applies to all animals (other than humans) if they are vertebrates, decapod crustaceans or cephalopod molluscs. It therefore applies to wild animals, as well as domesticated animals.
