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Foot and Mouth - 3 July 2001

Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon): In the next quarter of an hour we may find out just how wide awake the Department is, as that is the purpose of the debate.

Since the election was called, in Craven, which is within the area of North Yorkshire that I represent, and in the neighbouring parts of Lancashire—notably but not exclusively the Ribble Valley—there have been 86 confirmed cases of foot and mouth, nine cases of slaughter on suspicion and 345 premises culled out as part of a contiguous cull. About 39,000 cattle and 219,000 sheep and lambs have been slaughtered since the election was called.

First, I want to praise Dr. Steve Hunter, who is the director of operations in Yorkshire, for his handling of the matter. However, in doing so, I also give thanks to all those who have worked to tackle the disease and who have not been thanked enough, including the secretaries in what was the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the administrators, the Army, the vets and those in local authorities who worked hard to contain the outbreak and find a way through it.

The key fact is that businesses in my constituency, including farming, were closed down long before the first outbreak of foot and mouth there. The outbreaks in Hawes, in Wensleydale in North Yorkshire, in Lancashire, to some extent in Cumbria and in Bradford had frozen all normal activity in my constituency for weeks before an outbreak occurred within its boundaries. The shutdown had enormously wide ramifications even before the disease affected the constituency itself. Because foot and mouth arrived there relatively late and intensely—in Craven, the intensity of the disease rivals that in Cumbria—for many businesses, especially in the tourist trade, the summer has been shot through already. Businesses in Malham Dale, Grassington and Three Peaks—indeed, all those in north Craven and the Pennine dales—live largely off tourism, especially but not exclusively during the summer months. For many of them, the real crisis will be winter survival. Even when the last case of foot and mouth is dealt with and the last farm premises have been cleansed and can look forward to restocking, the business crisis will be only beginning for some businesses and will be in full torrent for many of them.

The problem is that the Government's assistance for areas affected by foot and mouth was allocated before the outbreak hit my area and the neighbouring constituencies. The Government announced business rate relief for three months, with Government participation of 95 per cent. for businesses below £12,000 rateable value and 75 per cent. in an on-going programme for those above £12,000. However, that scheme ended two days ago. Craven district council sent out 579 applications for relief. Of the 198 applications that have come back, 24 had a rateable value of more than £12,000. There have been 87 awards, but the scheme has ended.

The Government made allocations under the rural recovery programme via the rural development agencies. In Yorkshire and the Humberside area, the money—£2.5 million—was allocated when foot and mouth was confined largely to the Wensleydale outbreak. Cumbria received £11.8 million. I am sure that my colleagues from Lancashire will point out the similar discrepancy between the sums that Lancashire constituencies will get and the sum for the whole north-west. Both allocations pre-date the incidents in Craven and most Lancashire constituencies.

We must also consider the Government's scheme to match funds raised by charity. In Craven on Wednesday, the Craven Trust was launched with a target of raising £1 million. People are generous, have lived near the crisis and have seen its searing effects closely, so I think that that money will be forthcoming. The Government promised to match such money, but the scheme ended two days ago.

Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall): Will the right hon. Gentleman also note that the same problem has arisen in the west country? The Western Morning News launched an excellent "green wellie appeal", but it seems that the Government are again backsliding on their original promise to match funding.

Mr. Curry : I merely wish to point out what is happening in my constituency and its neighbouring areas, because the epidemic started much later there. That does not mean that the problem does not exist in many other parts of the United Kingdom.

On aid for tourism, I am in favour of trying to encourage overseas visitors back to the United Kingdom. I merely point out that in the Yorkshire dales, for example, 90 per cent. of our visitors are national rather than international, and that of that 90 per cent., 80 per cent. are regional. We want to attract people back from Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield and Sheffield.

I have raised the subject on four previous occasions. I have seen the Minister, and was one of the first Members of Parliament to meet the new Secretary of State, to whom I am grateful for responding so rapidly to my request to meet her. I raised it in the Queen's Speech debate and following the foot and mouth statement. Each time, Ministers told me that I had an excellent point and that they were reviewing matters and taking them seriously. I thank them for the sympathy, but that will not put any people back in business and keep them there. I do not want sympathy; I want Ministers to do something about the problem now.

My next theme is agriculture and the recovery programme. The people worst affected in my constituency are farmers in heavily infected areas whose farms are not themselves infected. One could argue that it would be in the farmers' economic interest for their farms to become infected. By common consent, the valuations are relatively generous. Most farmers opt not for the standard scale but for individual valuations. Although the money paid for what is in effect a compulsory purchase is relatively generous, I do not claim that it in any way takes away the trauma that farmers suffer, or that it is preferable to being able to carry on business. I merely state that funding has been made available, sensibly in this regard. Those farmers can do nothing. They are practically frozen, and are in the worst situation possible. It is the same situation as for many businesses, but perhaps without the hope of being able to recover as quickly.

There is also a problem of bottlenecks in cleansing and disinfecting. It is fair to say that, in my constituency, most people regard the operation up to slaughter, culling and transport to have been carried out not merely efficiently, but with great sensitivity. Recently there has been much more controversy, because certain things went wrong with a cull that happened close to Skipton, as such incidents always seem to, so it was much more public than the others. Since then, some groups of people have been desperate to find anything that has gone wrong and any little incident has been magnified into fiction worthy of Harry Potter, of whom I am a devotee. Myth has run riot, partly because little proper information was issued at the beginning. Now, the smallest fragments of circumstantial evidence are woven into tremendous horror stories.

Once a cull is over, the animals have been carted off and the sheeted lorries have disappeared, the real problems begin. There have been problems with people not being allocated a case officer for long enough, and with the rotation of case officers. It is rather like when a relative dies: everyone is busy until after the funeral. The busyness keeps them occupied, but then they have to cope with what follows. People have not been given adequate information about what follows. Different case officers are involved, so the information that farmers get about what they can do—whether they can make hay or store it—has differed from farmer to farmer and from place to place. The timetables have differed. There has been no consistency.

Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold): I draw hon. Members' attention to my connections with farming, which are set out in the Register of Members' Interests. Does my right hon. Friend agree that those who have lost their stock need the Government to give a lead on the role of British agriculture? If we are to get such people back into agriculture, they must make important economic decisions after the six-month quarantine period. They will have to buy expensive stock, which will take time to reach peak production. They are wondering whether it is worth going back into agriculture, and we need a lead from the Government to get them back.

Mr. Curry : I agree absolutely with my hon. Friend. Indeed, that point will form the content of some of my concluding remarks.

If negligence and non-observance of the rules in the agricultural industry have contributed to the spread of the disease, let us hear about it and see the evidence. If there are to be prosecutions, let us have them. Far too many stories have attributed the spread of the disease to such things, but none has been given substance. Nothing is more anguishing for farming communities than to be told that they are somehow responsible, but that no one will ever bring a case. I know that obtaining evidence is difficult, but if cases are to be brought, let us knock off the non-attributable stories about how the farming community has contributed to its own crisis.

I also draw the Minister's attention to the circumstances of children in my constituency who have come from farms where culling has been taking place to sit public exams. There is evidence that the cull in my constituency coincided precisely with the period of public or internal examinations and of standard assessment tests. Will the Minister ensure that examination boards understand that individual children might have been under great pressure when taking exams?

I want now to deal with the farm crisis that is looming in the autumn. I said that the business crisis will continue well after the cull and when the disease has, I hope, been eradicated. The end of the epidemic does not mean that farming will escape. We already know that the new premium is at an historic low because of the price on the continent. Even after the cull and welfare disposal, which will take care of 3 million to 3.5 million lambs that would have gone into consumption, there will still be a surplus of 1.5 million to 2 million on the home market because of the closure of the export market, which would normally take 6 million lambs a year. Many of those would have been the lighter lambs. The Government need to consider their response. There is a case for aid to private storage, and there might also be a case for a Government scheme to remove some of the lighter lambs. Otherwise, we shall have immensely low prices and we shall simply move from the present crisis to the resumption of the economic crisis that was a four or five-year constant for agriculture before foot and mouth hit.

I want to talk a little about the aftermath of the crisis. Some farmers who have lost all their stock might be able to quit the industry. To be frank, they might be better off economically than they would have been if they had quit before the epidemic struck. Others might be able to stay, and the process of restocking could accelerate the development of scrapie resistance in breeding flocks, which would be a small gain. Those people might also think a little about the management of their systems. I have been struck by the fact that many farmers are so busy running their farms that they can no longer think about how they manage them. They are run off their feet: they have shed all their labour and pared things down to the bone and they work every hour that God gives simply to keep things moving from day to day.

It is also true that the industry, particularly the sheep industry, will emerge smaller but perhaps fitter from the crisis. We all acknowledge that there was a significant surplus of as many as 3 million sheep. That fact has given rise to the great myth that somehow the foot and mouth epidemic was a vast, planned economic cull to scale the industry down to size. However, it is none the less true that, following the crisis, we are able to examine factors such as stocking densities and management systems.

There are some reflections for the Department that I would like to bring to the Minister's attention. It is true to say, although I say it with some caution, that the Department—MAFF as was—has become rather disconnected from the industry that it is supposed to be supervising. It was a tremendous shock for it to discover that in my constituency farms did not all sit in nice, compact holdings. They were scattered over many different locations and were fragmented. Had that sunk in sooner, perhaps some of the movement permissions that were granted earlier would not have been granted, in recognition of the risks involved.

The Department has lost knowledge of the industry. That is partly because ADAS—the old Agricultural Development Advisory Service—has been floated off, and partly because the staff of the Department largely fulfil a gendarme role in policing the giving of grants. The issue is serious and needs to be addressed.

It is a myth that we need more vets. We need many more people at the technical level, such as animal health officers, because vets are doing many jobs that they should not do. We need far more competent people at the level below vets. They would have helped a great deal with the crisis. Vets should be integrated fully into the mainstream administration of the Department. It does not make sense for the vets to be in separate hierarchies, parallel to the main administrative organisation. That has been a real problem in the handling of the epidemic. Vets are not supposed to be managers and it is much more effective if they are integrated into the management system.

In my experience, the Department has been reasonably good at giving statistics. I have no complaint about the statistics, once the indigestion caused by data protection legislation had been overcome, although we need to examine the effective workings of that legislation.

The Department is not good at communicating issues. Halfway through the epidemic, the word "biosecurity" suddenly appeared and the concept was treated as if it was an eternal truth that everybody had taken in with their mother's milk. I did not have the faintest idea what biosecurity was—I thought it was an organic washing powder. Suddenly, farms were being told that they were breaching the rules of biosecurity, but it is only in the past few days that a video has been produced to tell farmers what biosecurity is. They can hardly be reproached if they are suddenly told that management systems that have operated for generations are somehow dangerous.

There is still no piece of paper setting out for farmers the route from cull to restocking. We know that it is difficult and complex, but a timetable is necessary, setting out the steps and showing who does what and who approves what. To have in one's hands a piece of paper that sets that out clearly is important. The problem partly arises because of the Department's reliance on the wretched internet. In my constituency, most farmers are not connected to the internet and old-fashioned bits of paper are of a great deal more use to many people than a constant reliance on electronic communications, which are irrelevant to many farmers. Perhaps that will change.

We must reflect on media handling. Department officials have been thrust into the cauldron. I attended a meeting 10 days ago—a sort of anti-cull protest—to which people had come from all over the country. It was not violent, but it was extremely rowdy. It was an outdoor meeting of about 400 people. It is the sort of thing a politician has to do—it is good training, and when one has finished one is glad to have dealt with it.

A few days later Steve Hunter had to deal with a similar meeting, but it is not the job of officials to be in that political forum. Ministers ought to do that job. We need to think hard about where the role of officials ends and that of Ministers begins. The crisis has placed officials in front of the media more and more, taking the flak. They are inevitably asked to respond to political questions. All that they can say is, "Sorry, I carry out the orders." However, people shout and scream from the audience that they should denounce those orders. There should be a sensible review of that matter.

We need to look again at co-operation between Departments. It is an old story, but the epidemic has shown yet again the problems that arise if there is no proper coterminosity. In addition, we need to reflect on the circumstances in which vaccination might have a role. It is simplistic to say that there is a clear choice: that we should either kill or vaccinate. We all know that it is a great deal more complex than that, but the sooner that is spelled out, so that the argument can be conducted on sensible scientific territory, the better.

Finally, I come to the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown). We must avoid saying that because foot and mouth disease and BSE have happened, agriculture is heading for a radical departure. I do not believe in radical departures, and in any case such matters have to be agreed at European level. BSE has probably had a greater impact on the continental way of thinking than foot and mouth, which will simply push us further in the direction in which we were already going. That is not a bad thing. We must think much harder about what we want from farmers and about what public good farming is delivering. We must then crystallise our thoughts about what we are willing to pay for that public good, especially in terms of food production—higher quality and going upstream in food production—of recreation and of the environment.

People want a better balance between the broad economic sectors in the countryside, and between the ecology and the industrial activity there. This debate gives us a chance to set that out in an intelligent fashion, bringing people with us, rather than giving the impression that everything that went before foot and mouth was somehow a culmination and a preparation for the epidemic and that we will now go back to a new annus mirabilis—some anno domini in which everything will change. The world is not as simple as that. A sensible evolution is not only imperative: it is inevitable. The more signposts that we can put along that roadway, the better it will be for everybody.

I am grateful for the Minister's attention, and look forward to his reply— particularly his reply to the first part of my remarks, so that my concern about those schemes having come to an end may shortly be abated. Then we shall know that he has really woken up.

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David Curry MP | House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA | tel: 020 7219 6202