Britain’s red lines on animal welfare must mean something

Steve Witherden  – MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr

A ban that stops at the border is not really a ban. Indeed, a commitment to animal protection must be a full commitment, one that applies both domestically and to any imports. In the context of an increasingly ambitious trade agenda, that matters more than ever.

Britain has a legislative record which gives some grounds for pride on how we treat animals under domestic law. We banned fur farming in 2000 and outlawed the production of foie gras by force-feeding in 2007.

We banned sow stalls (cages used for pigs during their pregnancy) in 1999 and now require CCTV in slaughterhouses across England, Scotland, and Wales. These hard-won protections were the result of public pressure from civil society, parliamentary will, and moral seriousness.

Yet there remains a long-standing tension between what we prohibit at home and what continues to arrive through our ports. For example, fur and foie gras are still imported, still sold in our shops and restaurants, including from EU countries where their production remains legal.

How do you maintain the integrity of a domestic ban when international trade flows in the opposite direction? Resolving that tension is not straightforward, but it is a question which this UK Parliament and the next Senedd must continue to take seriously, as I do.

Above all, we need to be alert to the inherent tension between boosting our post-Brexit trade, pursuing closer economic ties with the European Union for the sake of our agricultural sector, and maintaining our standards.

This tension will deepen as we negotiate future trade deals. For example, the economic deal struck with the United States has opened the door to the possibility of our markets containing products that come from a country with very different rules.

It is already permitted for beef that has come from feedlot to come into the UK, a system where cattle are confined and fed diets to help them reach slaughter weight – where the motive is profit rather than welfare.

Discrepancies

And as negotiations continue, the discrepancies between UK and US standards once again risk undermining our own regulatory framework. In the US, practices such as sow stalls, battery cages, veal crates, and the use of growth hormones remain legal in most states, while farmed animals are excluded entirely from the US Animal Welfare Act.

The public does care deeply about animal welfare, so politicians must ask whether enhanced agricultural market access comes at a price we are willing to pay.

Commercial pressure has a way of eroding commitments and even bending interpretation of the law, as The Animal Law Foundation argues has happened with the Animal Welfare Act 2006 over the last two decades.

We do not even have mandatory labelling for animal products, meaning consumers are not able to make sufficiently informed choices. This is not an abstract concern. According to Food Standards Agency data, 76% of British consumers say they care about animal welfare in the food they buy.

Yet without mandatory labelling of how animals were farmed here and overseas, consumers have no way to act on their values at the point of purchase. If we are serious about giving people genuine choice, transparency measures must be part of any trade conversation.

Meanwhile, British farmers face the prospect of being undercut by cheaper imports produced to lower standards – penalised, in effect, for their higher standards. This is not fair competition, it is a structural disadvantage imposed on those who have invested in better welfare, only to find that investment turned against them.

Interests

My farming constituents in Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, and across Wales and Britain too, badly need a trading framework which protects their interests.

We also need honesty about enforcement at home. Research by The Animal Law Foundation, which has done important work scrutinising the gap between animal welfare law and its application, reveals that in Wales less than 5% of farms are inspected, and where non-compliance was found, prosecutions were commenced in less than 1% of cases.

These numbers serve as an important reminder that we should not forget about enforcement once laws are passed. But the Labour government’s ambitious Animal Welfare Strategy for England, published in December 2025, has acknowledged this problem.

The Strategy has committed to better tracking, transparency, and a review of the enforcement system, with the first published data expected in 2027. This is important progress, but we must ensure it is not undermined by future trade deals.

The UK-EU SPS Agreement expected in 2027 will ease many trade frictions and be a huge benefit to Welsh farmers. We need to be careful, though, to make sure that easing friction does not mean surrendering our standards.

Our red lines must mean something for our farmers, who play by the rules, the animals who cannot speak for themselves, and for the majority of British consumers who expect better.