Madam President, this is a long-running battle. We presented a petition some three or four years ago to the Luxembourg Presidency with two million signatures on it about this issue.

I welcome what the Commissioner has said today, and some progress is starting to be made at last. We are waiting very anxiously for the outcome of this working group, and I hope it will be able to put its findings before the Council before the end of this Presidency.

But we have waited and we have waited, and up till now not one single DG VI inspector has been appointed to monitor the trade in the transport of live animals, in spite of the fact that this House has called for this over many years.

Our Tory friend talked about the needs of consumers, and Welsh farmers are actually getting ready to supply French consumers. From tomorrow they are getting around the ferry ban by starting up two new services from Harwich and from Shoreham in Sussex to take 5,000 lambs a day to Boulogne. Why? To perpetuate a fraud on French consumers, because those lambs will be slaughtered in France and sold as French lamb and not Welsh lamb because it gets a higher price in France on that basis.

I say to our colleagues on the Committee on Budgets that it is not enough simply to look at the refunds in terms of whether or not the transporters are going to be performing their duty in treating the animals nicely on the way. What we have to do is change the way the refunds are given so more generous refunds are given to people who are killing animals close to the point of production and not encouraging all this animal transport. A ridiculous amount of live transport is going across the Channel every day. It is absolute madness!

Mr Commissioner, I hope you will relay this back in no uncertain terms to the Council - who do not seem to bother to show up at this plenary - that we want those eight-hour time limits agreed quickly; that we want enforcement of good conditions and we want you to have the tools to be able to do that enforcement and monitoring. We want to tackle this consumer fraud; we want to throttle back the refunds for live transport and we want transport on the hook and not on the hoof.