Angela Eagle MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 13 Oct 2025 · Bovine Tuberculosis Control and Badger Culling · Hansard source

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  I am well aware of the increased risk of disease and issues suddenly emerging, having lived through the last outbreak of foot and mouth in this country, albeit not quite in the way that the shadow Minister did. It can be catastrophic, so it is very important to think about how we can be ready to scale up surveillance very quickly. In her contribution my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) talked about the battle against covid that we all lived through a few years ago and compared it with this battle. Even though the repayment method will be long, money was no object then; in this instance I am afraid that finances and money have to be an object. We have to try to get our surveillance and ability to respond quickly in the best place we can within the resources we have, so there is more of a constraint than there might have been in some of the examples that my hon. Friend used.

• 11 Sept 2025 · Male Chick Culling · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for securing this debate. She raised this issue in a Westminster Hall debate on animal welfare standards in farming in June, and I am grateful to her for giving us the opportunity to focus on the subject in more detail today. I fully recognise that there is strong public feeling on the routine culling of male chicks, as highlighted by the breadth of support that the Vegetarian Society’s “Ban Hatch & Dispatch” campaign has attracted. My hon. Friend has spoken passionately on the subject this evening. As a nation, we are rightly proud of the high animal welfare standards that underpin our high-quality British produce. This Government want to build on and maintain our world-leading record on animal health and welfare, and we are absolutely committed to ensuring that animals receive the care, respect and protection that they deserve. I completely understand that the culling of day-old chicks is a process that many, including someone not far away from this Dispatch Box, may find incomprehensible and wasteful. I assure my hon. Friend that all farm animals are protected by comprehensive and robust animal health and welfare legislation, including when they are killed. Regulations set out strict requirements to protect the welfare of animals at the time of killing, which includes male chicks in the egg production sector. As she pointed out, the permitted killing methods for chicks, such as gas stunning, are based on scientific research and assessment to ensure that the birds are spared any avoidable pain, distress or suffering. All laying hen hatcheries in the UK use argon gas mixtures as their stunning method. That is a much more humane method than other gases, such as carbon dioxide, which is routinely used in several European countries and elsewhere in the world. However, as has been commented by the Animal Welfare Committee—an expert committee advising the UK, Scottish and Welsh Governments on animal welfare issues—the routine killing of chicks is principally an ethical issue, rather than a welfare problem, because it does not lead to direct welfare harms. Of course, that does not mean that we should not work to see if we can move away from it in the future as quickly as is practical and possible. Being able to do that relies on viable alternatives being developed; my hon. Friend talked about some of those in her remarks. The Animal Welfare Committee reviewed the alternatives to culling newly hatched chicks and published its independent opinion on this issue last year. In its report, the committee recommended that chick culling should be banned as soon as reliable, accurate technologies were available. It also highlighted that several consequences would arise from such a ban, and as such it would be crucial to learn from those countries that have already committed to move away from the culling of male chicks. My hon. Friend mentioned that Germany, France and other European states have banned the culling of male chicks, but some European states have encountered issues following a ban. In some cases, in countries where there is a ban in place—Germany, for example—male chicks are merely transported to other member states prior to being killed, which is not the welfare gain one would want to get from such a ban. Any ban on the culling of male chicks needs to allow for the rearing and processing of those male birds that hatch despite the use of in-ovo sexing technology. Another issue flagged in the Animal Welfare Committee’s report is the fact that male chicks provide a whole food source for exotic animals and raptors.

• 11 Sept 2025 · Male Chick Culling · Hansard source

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  I agree that when a supply chain, however difficult, is established and we try to move away from it, there can be unintended consequences. We have to look at the whole series of issues along that chain, so that we do not end up in a situation that has lower welfare outcomes than the one we started with. I assure my hon. Friend that the Department is well aware of that, and we will not move in any way if we would end up in a worse welfare situation than the one we started with, but he makes a perfectly good point. As I was about to say, another issue flagged in the Animal Welfare Committee’s report is the fact that male chicks provide a whole food source for exotic animals, and we would have to replace that. In recent years, there has been phenomenal global progress in the development of technologies that could help to end routine culling of male chicks by identifying or determining embryo sex before hatching, and it appears that this is going on in the dairy industry as well. There is clearly a lot of scientific work going on to see what we can do to get away from the current situation in our livestock supply chains. Several new methods and systems have appeared, and many refinements in existing systems have continued, since the publication of the Animal Welfare Committee’s report on this subject. We welcome the UK egg industry’s interest in the development of day-zero sexing technology, which enables eggs to be sexed prior to the start of their incubation. Such a commercial system offers many benefits, including economic and sustainability savings by directly freeing up hatchery space, in addition to providing an ethical solution to the culling of chicks. In Germany, one alternative is the rearing of male layer chicks for meat production, also known as brother hens. Due to their slower growth rate, rearing brother hens requires a greater input of feed and a longer rearing phase to produce a smaller bird with less desirable body composition, making it more challenging to rear them commercially at scale in the UK. There is a lack of published research on the welfare of brother hens, but animal welfare concerns have been linked to this practice. In particular, managing aggression and high mortality within all-male flocks can be problematic, often accentuated by housing inappropriate to the birds’ behavioural needs. Aside from in-ovo sexing technology and rearing of brother hens, I was pleased to hear about an initiative to assess the viability of dual-purpose poultry breeds in the UK—that is, breeds that can be used for laying and meat. Clearly, they are not as specialist as the different breeds currently used for the laying of eggs and for meat, but since they are dual purpose, they do not result in the mass culling of males in the laying industry. The initiative was awarded funding earlier this year as part of DEFRA’s farming innovation programme. Using birds that can serve both as egg layers and meat producers could offer an alternative to chick culling, but it is different meat—they grow and turn out differently than UK consumers are perhaps used to. It is also thought that dual breeds bring other animal welfare benefits, as hens of dual-purpose breeds have lower incidences of keel bone fractures, and some breeds show less injurious pecking behaviour than found in commercial laying hen breeds. The males of dual breeds have better walking ability, lower levels of pododermatitis and better feather cover than fast-growing meat chicken breeds. In addition to the animal health and welfare benefits, the project is also looking at the sustainability benefits of dual breeds. Dual breeds have lower protein requirements, and a German trial found that locally grown beans were a suitable alternative to very high- protein soya. If this approach to chicken breeding can be made viable, become popular and be accepted by UK consumers—those three things all have to work—it may deliver sustainability benefits. Bringing value to male layer chicks is of key importance, and I look forward to hearing the outcome of this research and whether dual-purpose breeds might offer a more ethical and sustainable approach than our current one. This Government were elected on a mandate to introduce the most ambitious plans in a generation to improve animal welfare, and that is exactly what we are going to do. Our farm animal welfare policy is backed by a robust evidence base, and is supported and shaped by input from our many excellent stakeholder and expert advice groups. I look forward to speaking to hon. Members about this in more detail soon. Although, as I said earlier, this is principally an ethical rather than animal welfare issue, that does not mean that we should not be trying, very robustly, to address it. I look forward to seeing progress in this area over the next period.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Asylum Accommodation · Hansard source

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  We have had a 50% increase in raids and arrests on illegal working since we came into government, so perhaps the shadow Home Secretary should have spent more time when he was in government enforcing the rules on illegal working. We are doing more, including extending the law on illegal working to the gig economy. That measure is in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, which he voted against.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Asylum Accommodation · Hansard source

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  The Home Office is not buying hotels. As for the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, there are currently 61 service users housed in his area, which is less than 15% of the quota, and there are zero hotels.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Asylum Accommodation · Hansard source

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  At the peak under the previous Government, there were 400 hotels in use across the country, at a cost of £9 million a day. Thousands of asylum seekers were left in limbo in those hotels as decision making collapsed. That was the chaos that this Government inherited a year ago, but we have taken action to restore order. We are cutting the overall cost of asylum accommodation, and we are committed to ending the use of these hotels entirely by the end of this Parliament.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Asylum Accommodation · Hansard source

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  I can assure my hon. Friend that we keep all these issues under close monitoring, and we are doing our best to ensure that individual areas take their fair share of the burden when it comes to looking after people in our asylum system. Just to reassure her, we have sped up asylum decision making. The system that we inherited was paralysed, and we are getting it going again so that we can deal with this issue as quickly as possible.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Asylum Accommodation · Hansard source

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  As it happens, I can. We have extended the move-on trial until the end of the year.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Asylum Accommodation · Hansard source

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  By March this year, 15% fewer people were in hotel accommodation than at the end of 2024. We are saving money on the chaos that we inherited from the Conservatives, and we have announced that we will end the use of hotels by the end of this Parliament.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Asylum Accommodation · Hansard source

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  We are as anxious as my hon. Friend to end the use of asylum hotels, but the backlogs we inherited from the Conservatives and the time it was taking—decision making collapsed by 70% in the last three months of that Government—have made it harder to empty hotels than we thought it would be at the beginning. However, we have sped up; there has been a 116% increase in initial asylum decisions. We are speeding up the system, we are getting people through the system, and we will close all asylum hotels by the end of this Parliament.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I assure the hon. Member that we take action against those who break the rules by working illegally. Raids and arrests for illegal working are up 50% in the last year; civil penalties in the last quarter were at their highest rate since 2016; and we are taking action to close the gig economy loophole through the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, which he and his Conservative friends voted against.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for raising this issue. While the clandestine entrant penalty scheme has to be rigorously enforced in order to be effective, it also provides a very fair process of appeal for hauliers against penalties that are not justified by the facts of a case. I am sure that my hon. Friend will assist the company in his constituency through that appeal process.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  By speeding up the asylum process, so that people are not trapped in asylum hotels by huge backlogs, and by increasing decision making by 116%, following the 70% fall that we saw in the three months before the last election, we will get the system moving again.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Immigration centres are not used for indefinite detention. We can only keep anyone in detention in an immigration centre if there is a reasonable prospect of their removal. If there is not, they have to be released.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Anyone who is in a hotel is someone who has claimed asylum, and whose asylum claim is pending. They are not necessarily illegal immigrants at all, and the hon. Lady should make that position clear.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  To tackle illegal migration, we must work across borders in co-operation with other jurisdictions. Were we to leave the European convention on human rights, we could not work with those that sign up to it.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  There is an amendment to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill that extends the requirement to check illegal working to the gig economy, the zero-hours economy and all those areas that have non-traditional employer-employee relationships. I look forward to being able to operationalise that when the Bill becomes law.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  When people arrive and claim to be children, there are tests at the border to check whether we think they are children. If they are accepted as children, they are put into local authority care, so they should not be in asylum accommodation at all. If they are seen to be adults and end up in asylum accommodation, they can always make an appeal to the local authority that they are in and undergo what is known as a Merton age assessment test, which will decide on their age once and for all.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Illegal Working · Hansard source

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  We are shortening the time that it takes to process asylum claims by getting the system that we inherited from the Conservatives working again. That is why there has been a 63% increase in the number of initial claims processed. That follows a 70% fall in the period before the last election.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Illegal Working · Hansard source

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  We are tackling illegal working by significantly increasing enforcement. That is why we have had a 40% increase in visits and a 42% increase in the number of arrests for illegal working. There are fines of £60,000 per illegal worker discovered, and those who are discovered working illegally can be arrested and put on the route to deportation.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Illegal Working · Hansard source

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  I am reeling at the New Labour point that the Father of the House has made. E-visas basically give us the capacity to do a similar thing, and they are easily checked, which is why, in the border security Bill, we are extending those checks to the gig and zero-hours economy.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Illegal Working · Hansard source

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  Clamping down on illegal working is a crucial element of our strategy to tackle immigration crime. Since coming to office, this Government have increased raids, arrests and civil penalties to their highest levels in years. Our Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill will introduce tougher provisions in this area, particularly to bolster our enforcement action against illegal working in the gig economy.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Illegal Working · Hansard source

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  Enforcement of the law is the best way to deal with this issue, which is why there has been a 40% increase in visits to check whether illegal working is going on, and a 42% increase in arrests since this Government came to office.

• 21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source

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  The Conservatives—who conveniently called an early election so that the Rwanda scheme would never start, after spending years saying that even perpetrating the idea of a Rwanda scheme would stop the boats—know as well as I do that over 84,000 people crossed the channel in small boats in the years from the Rwanda scheme being put into law to its being abolished. They can sit there and say that—

• 21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source

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  Does my hon. Friend agree that when we came into government, there were more than 18,000 foreign national offenders living in our communities who should have been deported and had not been? When we left office in 2010, that number was 4,000.