By Greg Heffer, Political Correspondent For Mailonline
10:45 19 Jan 2024, up to date 10:55 19 Jan 2024
Ministers are anticipated to again an MP’s bid to make the stealing of cats and dogs a selected prison offence.
Tory backbencher Anna Firth, MP for Southend West, will right this moment proceed her marketing campaign to get her Pet Abduction Bill handed into legislation.
It is aimed toward making it against the law to take or detain a canine or a cat from the lawful management of any person.
Under the laws, anybody convicted of the offence may face a fantastic or a most of 5 years in jail.
Ms Firth is anxious that, because the legislation at the moment stands, pet theft is handled the identical as another lack of an proprietor’s property.
By altering the legislation, Ms Firth desires to offer police forces a better potential to watch pet theft of their areas by distinguishing it from different varieties of theft.
She additionally hopes it should see courts impose harsher sentences for these abducting beloved household pets than they’d for different varieties of theft.
Ms Firth warned low prosecution charges meant stealing a cat or canine had change into a ‘low-risk, high-reward crime’.
Alarming knowledge confirmed an estimated 2,160 dogs have been reported stolen in 2022 – round six every day.
Research by Direct Line Pet Insurance additionally confirmed just one in 4 stolen dogs was discovered and returned.
There was a surge in reported pet thefts in the course of the Covid disaster, as criminals sought to revenue from a spike in demand for pets throughout lockdowns.
According to the BBC, the Government is ‘very sympathetic’ to Ms Firth’s plan forward of her Bill’s Second Reading within the House of Commons.
The Southend West MP mentioned: ‘I simply discover it unbelievable that we deal with the lack of a dwelling creature, a member of our household, as if it’s a energy software or a laptop computer.’
Ms Firth has launched her Bill as a Private Members’ Bill, a mechanism which permits legal guidelines to be launched to the Commons by backbenchers and never ministers.
Such Bills hardly ever change into legislation except they obtain the Government’s backing.
In an article on her web site, Ms Firth defined how she thought her Bill would assist sort out pet theft.
She wrote: ‘As the legislation at the moment stands, the theft of a pet is handled because the equal to the theft of an merchandise or a chunk of property.
‘It’s against the law, nevertheless it doesn’t have a “distinctive identifier in crime datasets”, which suggests it will possibly’t be monitored or distinguished from different varieties of theft.
‘The different situation is when a pet thief involves be sentenced by the courts.
‘At the second the sentence displays the worth of the “merchandise” stolen, however how do you set a real worth on a beloved pet?
‘And should not the trauma on the animal in query be considered too when contemplating sentencing a prison who’s prompted the pet and proprietor a lot misery?’
She added: ‘The goal of my Bill is to make pet abduction a selected offence.
‘I additionally need to make sure that the Government is supplied with the information to sort out prison exercise by establishing a mechanism for pet abduction circumstances to be distinguished from common property theft throughout the justice system.’
The Government beforehand pledged to make pet abduction a selected prison offence, however no such laws has been handed.
Measures have been included within the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill however this was dropped by ministers in May final yr to a backlash from campaigners.
