Chamber and committees

You are exactly right, convener. We cannot be sure that the places where animals are exported to for fattening and slaughter have the same conditions that we would expect.

The bill does not cover breeding, so export for breeding is still allowed. If an animal is going across to the EU to breed and then stays there, it could be slaughtered at a future point in its life. It does not affect export for the express purposes of breeding.

Yes.

Two sets of guidance notes—those on the welfare of meat chickens and those on the welfare of laying hens—have been part of the same process. The committee will have had a letter from me that set out the reasons for the change. We have moved from a code of practice to guidance because guidance can be published, revised and updated very quickly. As you will appreciate, when it comes to animal welfare issues—especially those to do with farmed animals—it is quite a fast-moving scene. We can receive recommendations from bodies such as the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission that we think need to be applied.

The guidance in question is available for people who work with farmed animals so that they can ensure that the welfare of those animals is as good as it can be. The accommodation of such animals and the conditions in which they must be housed are examples of what the guidance covers.

I will pass that question to Andrew Voas, because he was involved in the code of practice.

Yes, but it might be worth my going over what I imagine Ms McAllan would have said to the committee at the time. The move from welfare codes of practice to welfare guidance documents was discussed in advance with all the key stakeholders. Before the publication of that first guidance document, the then minister asked officials to discuss the change further with animal welfare organisations and the sector, and they were content with the move. Officials then had further discussions off the back of that with OneKind and Compassion in World Farming, both of which confirmed that they did not raise any objections and that they had consulted with the sector.

Since the guidance documents have been put in place for laying hens and meat chickens, there has been absolutely no pushback on their being guidance documents rather than codes of practice.

I move that the Rural Affairs and Islands Committee recommends that the Welfare of Farmed Animals (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2024 be approved

I think that even the codes gave enforcement agencies an idea of the standards that were required for the welfare of whichever animal. The guidance is not binding—the binding aspect is that there should be access to the guidance.

To be quite honest, the guidance and the codes are very similar. England and Wales were also looking at a change like this. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was proposing to issue guidance that was jointly owned by Government and industry. We decided that our guidance would be Government led and Government owned, which means that we can ensure that the whole range of stakeholders’ views is taken into account.

Stakeholders are broadly content with the approach. They were content with the same approach for laying hens and meat chickens. We are putting forward today not so much a policy change from code to guidance—my predecessor did that previously at the committee—but a technical instrument that swaps out the pigs code of practice for guidance on pig welfare.

There is no requirement for us to consult, but we do not operate in that way. It is not in our interests or the interests of the sector for the Government to act to produce guidance in a vacuum. Stakeholders have to be invested in guidance and it has to be produced in collaboration with them so that it lands properly and so that it can be used and trusted. That is the approach that we will always take to anything like this that we produce. There is nothing that compels us to do it, but it is good practice.

The fact is that we still consult with stakeholders ahead of compiling the guidance. Working with stakeholders, animal welfare agencies and the farming community on what should be in the guidance is very much a consultative process that officials undertake.

I suppose that the difference between a code and a guidance document is that, although we give the committee notice of a guidance document—you would have had sight of it in November—it does not have to undergo parliamentary scrutiny in order to be applied. As you will appreciate, we are under a great deal of pressure in terms of timing and the work programmes of committees. We also want to be able to be fleet of foot when it comes to updating or changing guidance.

The instrument allows us to swap out an outdated document for a new, updated one, and to do that reasonably quickly, so that people have the right information when they are farming their animals.