Budget Resolutions
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Liberal Democrats MP for Newton Abbot since (elected).
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Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
The hon. Gentleman cherishes the NHS; does he agree that the single patient record, of which he speaks so eloquently, must be delivered by sovereign British technology?
<Question HRSContentId="{3418D750-36CE-46C3-B5B5-92DA6384BD80}">3. <QuestionText HRSContentId="{340771E4-2AB6-4E54-89CA-71DF26C5B3F3}">What assessment she has made of the potential impact of reducing the value of thank you payments under the Homes for Ukraine sponsorship scheme on the retention of hosts.</QuestionText> </Question>
With the dropping of the thank you payment from £350 to £100 on 1 January, many hosts find that their costs are no longer being covered and are considering evicting their guests. Hosts and guests are <span id="559" class="column-number" data-column-number="559"></span>being encouraged to move to a lodger scheme using the “rent a room” scheme. I am told that the going rate for a room in my constituency is around £600, and universal credit would pay a lot more than the £350 saved from the thank you payment. In addition, Ukrainian guests would lose the help available from the local authority to move on to a first private rental. All in all, this reduction in the thank you payment looks likely to cost the state more than it might save and to reduce the help on offer to our Ukrainian guests. Will the Minister meet me and local Ukrainian hosts, or would she prefer to think again about the reduction?
I beg to move, That this House has considered e-petition 750612 relating to placing a requirement on drivers to report collisions with cats. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers—I suspect they might need to change the nameplate. The petition was started by CatsMatter, a group co-funded by Mandy Hobbis and Tiya Ivy, who are here today. I am standing in today for my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), who had the privilege of meeting Mandy ahead of today’s debate and learned that both of them had lost cats on the roads. Anyone who has waited up for a pet that never came home will understand why the campaign has kept going since 2017. I should declare an interest. I have always lived with cats and have lost several to being run over. Just a few weeks ago, a family member lost their cat, Comet, who was hit by a car in a residential cul-de-sac and just left there. As with every loss of a cat, they were devastated. My daughter Emily has a beautiful white fluffy cat that rules the Wrigley household. He is called Ignatius D Flufflesworth—not that he comes when called by that name, of course. He was, however, very fond of joining in with my Zoom calls during the pandemic and pretending he was in a James Bond movie. I know how much he means to her, and the idea of losing him to a car accident without knowing what happened does not bear thinking about.
I agree. Cats are not just companions; they are members of the family, so, yes, collisions should be reported. Clearly, we are not alone. By the time the petition closed on 17 June, it had gathered 189,192 signatures, many of which were in my own Newton Abbot constituency.
Yes, absolutely. It is the not knowing that is really awful. I will come on to that. I am told that this is the largest cat welfare petition that has ever come to Parliament. That is a great many people and they deserve to have their concerns properly heard today. So where does the law stand?
From my experience, I suspect that the right hon. Member’s third option is probably correct. On people’s confusion about where to report a collision with a cat, section 170 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 says that a driver who hits certain animals must stop and, if necessary, report it to the police. Those animals are horses, cattle, asses, mules, sheep, pigs, goats and dogs. Cats are not on the list.
I tend to agree, and we will come to working animals shortly. Cats are not on the list. Neither, I might add, are llamas or alpacas, which gives a fair idea of how old the list is. It has come down to us, almost untouched, from the Road Traffic Act 1930. The usual explanation—my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) must have read my speech in advance—is that these are working animals with an economic value to their owners, whereas cats were seen as pets. Rule 286 of the highway code does advise drivers to report any collision with an animal and, where possible, to find the owner of a cat. However, that is only guidance, and a driver who hits a cat can carry on driving without breaking any law.
Yes, I agree—it should. In their response to the petition, the Government noted they have “no current plans” to change the law due to the fact that cats are small and often out at dawn and dusk, so a driver may genuinely not know that they have hit one. They argued that, alongside research into how councils identify cats found on the road, compulsory microchipping offers a better way forward.