Patricia Gibson – 2023 Speech on Road Traffic Collisions Involving Cats

The speech made by Patricia Gibson, the SNP MP for North Ayrshire and Arran, in Westminster Hall on 9 January 2023.

I welcome you to your place, Ms Harris. I am delighted to participate in this important debate, which arises from the e-petition relating to requirements to stop and report road traffic collisions involving cats. I thank the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for opening the debate with a comprehensive overview of the situation. I also pay tribute to charities such as Cats Protection, Blue Cross and Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, which do so much to promote the wellbeing of animals and have provided us with some important briefings for the debate. I should declare that today I am using my Cats Protection pen, which I received at the charity’s event just before Christmas.

Everyone appreciates the importance of family pets, and we can all appreciate the distress and trauma when a family pet goes missing. Thankfully, many cats who wander off on their adventures soon return home safely when they are hungry enough. However, there are cat owners whose cats wander off and never see them again; sadly, on occasion, that is due to the cat being knocked down by a car and left on a roadside, or staggering away from the scene of an accident only to die before it can reach home. Owners are left distressed, often with no information, and, sadly, as those who have pets will understand, they feel as though a beloved family member has simply vanished. Those who own pets—as I once did; I owned the much-missed Kitty sand Misty, and hope to own cats again at some point—benefit from them in so many ways. That is why they are loved as members of our families. They provide huge comfort and health benefits, and also go a long way to combating loneliness; I speak as a vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on cats.

This petition is not party political, as has been shown by the consensus in this Chamber. It is about doing the right thing—a simple thing that will do so much for cat owners. It calls for cats to be accorded the same legal recognition as dogs, and for the same obligations to apply to collisions involving cats as to those involving dogs, under the Road Traffic Act 1988, which requires drivers to stop and report accidents involving a cat. It is not in any way a controversial request for our feline friends to be accorded parity in law with dogs when it comes to road collisions. We last debated the issue in 2019, and I honestly cannot understand why we are still debating it.

We all understand that for such a change in the law to really work, we would need joined-up thinking. We need to get to the compulsory microchipping of cats, so that their owners can be informed if they are involved in an accident. Compulsory microchipping of cats has not yet happened, but I remind the Minister—I am sure that I do not need to, but I will—that the Tory manifesto in 2019 committed to

“bring forward cat microchipping, giving cat owners peace of mind”.

That is a Tory policy that I and everybody else in this Chamber can support—and it is not often that the Minister will hear that! However, there has been no movement on that commitment, and that needs to change.

Margaret Ferrier

The Government’s stance has been that there is no need to legislate and create a requirement for local authorities to scan cats for microchips, because the majority already do so as best practice. Does she share my concern that that leaves policies at local authority level too open to change, for example where budgetary restrictions mean there are fewer staff available to perform the task?

Patricia Gibson

Yes. Many local authorities currently work very hard to screen cats for microchips, where possible; I will talk about that in more detail later. Local councils are under pressure, but it is important that there is leadership and support from a central Government level in both Scotland and across the UK. I will talk a wee bit later about how Cats Protection provides very important support in that regard.

The Scottish Government recommend that all cat owners should microchip their pets, so that they can be reunited with their owners if they are lost or injured, but they have not yet moved towards compulsory microchipping, which is a move I want to see. However, the Scottish Government are willing to examine and reflect on the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs call for evidence and the recent public consultation on the matter. I am confident that we will get to a place where cat microchipping will be a compulsory element of cat ownership, just as it is with dog ownership. Like many others, I am keen to reach that point as soon as possible, because the responsibility of owning a cat and the responsibility towards cat owners ought not to be different from the rights and benefits currently accorded to dogs and their owners.

In the UK Government’s action plan for animal welfare, which was published in May 2021, the commitment to cat microchipping was repeated. The plan said:

“We will introduce compulsory cat microchipping to ensure lost or stolen cats can be reunited with their owners as quickly as possible.”

But we are still in the dark as to what is happening with the implementation of that plan, just as we are—incidentally—with the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill, which ought to legislate on very important aspects of animal welfare; undoubtedly, we will debate that Bill again soon. It matters, because it is all part of the same conversation about the small amendment required to the Road Traffic Act 1988.

The vast majority of cats in Scotland—around 70%—are microchipped, which demonstrates that most cat owners understand the benefits of doing so. About 29% are still not microchipped, which amounts to about 227,000 cats with no permanent form of identification; that is a problem.

We have heard from around the Chamber of the heartbreak of cat owners who either do not know what has happened to their cat, or who have to deal with their cat being struck by a car and finding that out—sometimes by accident. The sad reality is that we do not know how many cats are involved in road traffic accidents, because it is a not a legal requirement for a driver to report a collision with a cat, but Petplan believes that about 630 cats are run over every day. That is a huge amount. Some 35% of drivers admit to having hit a cat, and it is believed that between 7 million and 9 million cats are at risk every day of being involved in a road traffic accident, given the free-roaming nature of our feline friends.

If we are seeing an increasing number of cats being microchipped, and seeking to move to a point where all cats are microchipped as soon as possible, it is important that measures are in place so that those microchips can be scanned. I applaud the work of Cats Protection, which has worked with some local authorities to provide scanners to ensure that cats found on roads can be identified. Local authorities are also working hard to ensure that they are able to do this, as revealed by the Cats Protection freedom of information request, but there is still some way to go.

The call for the creation of best practice guidance for local councils will be supported by all responsible cat owners, because it will ensure that all cats found on our roads are scanned for a microchip and have their details logged, and that owners are informed so that—as the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Lia Nici) said—as heartbreaking as that news can be, they can find out what has become of their beloved pet.

James Daly

Why use best practice guidance rather than the legal requirement?

Patricia Gibson

I think we are speaking at cross purposes. As I said, there should be a legal requirement for microchipping, but we want to look at the best way that local authorities can manage that information and roll it out so that it can be completed as soon as possible. I believe that microchipping should be a legal requirement.

I echo the eminently sensible concerns expressed by Blue Cross that if all this work is done in the way we wish, in the interests of cats and cat owners—picking up on the point made by the hon. Member for Bury North (James Daly)—there must be well-administered and efficient communication between database companies to ensure that microchip details and information on lost, stolen or injured pets is properly shared and centrally available.

The suggestion of a single point of access would considerably streamline and simplify the current database situation, incomplete though it is, and make it more user-friendly for the designated approved users. It would save time and resources, and provide the best outcomes for cats and their owners should the worst happen.

It is no surprise that over 102,000 people signed this petition to appeal to the UK Government to amend legislation in a simple and straightforward way to make it a legal requirement for drivers to stop and report accidents involving cats as they are already required to do with dogs. Many of us engage in the debate about whether we prefer cats or dogs, but I think we would all agree that cats deserve parity under the law when it comes to road traffic accidents. Across the UK, we love our pets, and animal welfare is important to every one of us. We just need to look at our inboxes to see that; every single Member of this House receives more emails about various aspects of animal welfare than any other issue. I have to say, that took me a little by surprise when I was first elected in 2015.

Animal welfare really matters to our constituents, and it matters to MPs across the House. Our pets keep us healthy and add to our happiness, and they are treasured family members. Cats do this just as much as dogs; some would say even more so, but that would start a whole UK-wide argument that would keep us here all day. It is clear that if we can give protection to dogs through compulsory microchipping and reporting of accidents when collisions happen, we can certainly do it for cats. There is no reason for us not to do so.

I urge the Minister and the UK Government to make the required amendment to the Road Traffic Act 1988 and give our cats and their owners the consideration they deserve. Alongside that we need to ensure that cat microchipping is an integral part of cat ownership so that they are given the protection currently accorded to dogs. Let us get on with it and stop any further delays. A promise was made in the Government’s 2019 manifesto. This is one of those rare measures that will have support from across the House—from every MP in every party—so there is no reason to delay. It will encounter no opposition, so I urge the Minister to speak to his colleagues and get it done.