Holly Willoughby calls Robert Buckland MP 'the govt's chief pet detective'

The South Swindon MP appeared on This Morning this morning after a distressed pet owner recalled how her beloved pooch had been stolen and later found buried in undergrowth in a bag.

The traumatised dog is now slowly recovering from the ordeal while her owner pushes for pet theft to be taken as seriously as kidnapping.

Mr Buckland said: "I want to make sure we get a real focus to this disturbing issue. The story we heard is harrowing and has been repeated around the country.

“We’ve heard of thefts involving violence, where people have been punched to the ground and had their much-loved pets taken off them.

“We’re seeing a rise in pet ownership, partly as a result of lockdown, and a rise in the value of many dogs. We are getting more and more reports of thefts that the prime minister and I think might be the tip of something even more sinister.

“Clearly, people are seeing a value to dogs, selling them on and profiting from a black market in animals. That’s what we want to look at quickly, we want to get to the bottom of what is going on here and then see what measures need to be taken, whether that’s changing the law or toughening up the way transactions are carried out – a lot are cash-only.

“Let’s look at the underlying drivers of this serious criminality and see what we can do to urgently tackle the problem.”

Philip Schofield acknowledged that Mr Buckland and the PM had both issued strong statements about the seriousness of pet theft but asked what was actually being done to stop it.

Mr Buckland replied: "We need to try to stamp out some of the incentives. No-one should be buying pets in anything other than a regulated or structured way. We need to deal with making sure the police and agencies get the seriousness of this."

Holly Willoughby criticised the way theft laws treat pets as people's possessions, as some consider them to be like members of their family, and wondered if that definition could be changed.

Mr Buckland replied: "I want to examine the emotional harm caused by the theft of a pet and see if we can reflect that better in the law or use existing laws more robustly – we’ve just increased the max sentence for animal cruelty to five years.

"We need to link this type of offending with more serious offending - even organised crime, which we think is fuelling some of this appalling crime.”