A cross-party committee of MPs has raised a series of concerns about the government's plans to improve animal welfare protection.

The Commons environment, food and rural affairs select committee indicated that current plans had not been fully thought through.

Ministers have also failed to prove that the draft Animal Welfare Bill would not create excessive bureaucratic burdens and costs, said the report published on Wednesday.

The MPs also said that the government should consider whether new protections against unnecessary cruelty should be extended to octopus, squids and cuttlefish, crabs, lobsters and crayfish.

They also warned that fishing could be inadvertently caught up in the existing legislation, with the use of fishing hooks leaving anglers open to charges of mutilation.

"We therefore doubt the government's position that the draft bill would be unlikely to have any impact on traditional fishing or angling practices," said the report.

But the committee agreed with the government that neither commercial fishing nor recreational angling should fall within the remit of the draft bill "and we therefore support the government's intention to exempt fishing as an activity" from the bill.

"Amendment is necessary: even if prosecutions for fishing-related activities were to prove unsuccessful when brought, the fact remains that those prosecutions should not be able to be brought in the first place," added the report.

The MPs also said they were "extremely concerned" that the government apparently intends its new cruelty offence will cover the deliberate infliction of unnecessary suffering, but not unnecessary suffering which arises as a result of negligence or neglect.

"The government's apparent position would represent a backward step in terms of animal protection: it would lessen the current protections in existing animal welfare law and would significantly restrict the scope of the cruelty offence," said the report.

Committee chairman Michael Jack backed "the development of an approach to animal welfare which doesn't just wait for a problem to occur but enables action to be taken to protect animals before irreversible suffering takes place".

"However, the draft Bill very much had the feel of a 'work in progress' and, before the government further advances its legislative plans into areas such as pet fairs, circuses and game birds, it must give a cast-iron guarantee that an obligation to consult will be enshrined in law," he said.

"The government must work hard to take the rough edges of its initial proposals before the bill is introduced to parliament."

Red tape

With red tape a key current political concern, the MPs were also critical of the regulatory impact assessment undertaken by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

"Defra's assessment of the probable enforcement costs arising from the implementation of the legislation as 'negligible' appears to us to be simplistic in the extreme," said the report.

The department had "ignored the probable increase - at least initially - in prosecution and conviction numbers from the new offences which the draft bill would create".

And officials had appeared not to "have accounted for the fact that proposals in secondary legislation will require appropriately skilled personnel to provide enforcement and inspection services and veterinary expertise in newly regulated areas such as animal sanctuaries, livery yards and greyhound tracks".

"We received evidence suggesting that there is a significant skills shortage in these areas and we are therefore concerned that the regulatory impact assessment does not quantify what extra resources will be required nor how they will be provided," continued the report.

"We consider that the regulatory impact assessment accompanying the draft bill fails to demonstrate that the benefits of the proposed legislation would exceed the costs, as is required by Cabinet Office and National Audit Office guidance.

"The regulatory impact assessment shows evidence of a lack of thorough consideration, on the part of Defra, about the likely consequences of enacting the draft bill.

"It fails to demonstrate what measurable benefits would arise from enactment and provides only weakly evidenced and limited cost information.

"We are concerned that Defra's poor assessment of the likely long-term implications of the draft bill, together with the extent to which Defra proposes to defer policy decisions to secondary legislation, indicates that Defra is not yet properly prepared to legislate in this area.

"We therefore consider that the regulatory impact assessment lacks credibility and provides an inadequate basis for pre-legislative scrutiny."