Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee
3 November 2026
Contents updated on 4 Nov 2026
Legend
Transcript markers
- text Sentence being played
- text Search result
- text Intervention cited by the link you opened
Click a sentence to play the video from that moment. Select text to quote it with the speaker, timestamp and link.
More options
Official source
Offset
Transcript offset
0s
Text size
Export
Replay
Versions of this video
Transcripts may differ slightly from one version to another.
Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee House of Commons
Follow its sittings00:05 - 00:31
Speaker 7
Welcome to today's hearings of the Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee, as we explore some consumer protection issues that are of the moment, one around fireworks regulation, and the second around Black Friday. David Bowles, I'm going to come to you first, if I may. So, we've got bonfire night coming up. It's a time of actually some distress for animal lovers and their pets. Just what are the things that you're worried about?
00:31 - 02:10
Speaker 4
Yeah, so, this year is quite unusual because we've got bonfire night, obviously, next week, followed the next day by Diwali, and then we go into essentially a four month period because you then get New Year's Eve and then Chinese New Year, where you get most of the complaints about fireworks on pets. So, we've got three sorts of evidence. We've got evidence from pet owners, and there's been a large number of surveys done by organizations like the RSPCA, Dogs Trust, Redwings, and that finds that probably for horses, about 60% of horse owners are concerned about firework use on their animals. With dogs, it goes down a little bit, from 40 to 60%. With cats Protection say it's around 40 to 60% as well.
So, we know that there's a body of evidence showing that owners themselves are very worried about the impacts of that. We now have some pretty good scientific studies. University of Utrecht has done some good scientific studies on the impact of fireworks on dogs and horses. And we know the impact on farm animals, for instance, dairy cattle. There's been studies that show milk yields go down if you have firework displays next to dairy cattle.
And interestingly enough, there is one piece of legislation on pigs, the welfare of farmed animals, which states that you can't have loud noise next to pigs over 85 dB. So, that's already legislation, and, of course, with fireworks, we're discussing bringing the noise level down from 120 to 110.
The rest of the transcript is for Pro customers
Unlock the full transcript, chat, and every analysis feature with Polyfact Pro.
The video itself stays free to watch, in full, no account needed.
Start a free trial