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Animal Heath Bill - 12 November 2001

Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon): Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon): Earlier this year, when I needed to get over to Bentham and Ingleton for my surgeries, the quickest route was to drive up Wensleydale in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague). Normally, it is a wonderful drive against the sun and along the river, with the dales on each side. However, then FMD arrived in his constituency and the journey became rather sinister.

I could see the pyres alight, with their smoke, and smell them from a long way away. The fields were empty of animals. Above all, there was a terrible sense of claustrophobia. I wondered how FMD could be in Cumbria and Wensleydale, north and south of my constituency, but not in mine. I spoke too soon, because two days after the Prime Minister announced the general election, we had our first case in Ribblesdale and, by the time that we had finished, we had had more than twice as many as there were in my right hon. Friend's constituency. Indeed, one of the few remaining totally restricted areas is in the Skipton area in my constituency.

I saw at first hand the coruscating effect on people of all sorts and businesses of all descriptions of the countryside being literally shut down. I reflected on what the lessons might be as we tried to learn them. The first lesson is still true today. Ministers frequently announced schemes—to get animals to slaughter, to get animals to market, to get animals into processing plants, or to provide welfare for animals—and a week later, I would inquire of the people who had to implement them, often trading standards officers, what had happened. They would say that they did not have the operating instructions yet, so they could not do anything. The gap between instruction and implementation throughout the epidemic has been far too long.

An enormous amount depends on the most recent autumn movement programme, because people in my constituency who are caught with too much livestock up on the hills that they cannot sell are sucking the pebbles dry. However, the DEFRA computer failed. It has continually failed, which has meant that wrong orders have been given, people were cleared who should not have been and farmers were caught in an immensely frustrating, Kafkaesque situation of knowing that they could achieve something if only the machine would provide the right answer. That is still a problem. I recognise that the public sector has a catastrophic record of trying to make information technology work and that enormous strains are placed on it, but a lot of problems still need ironing out.

The second lesson is the fact that there was no central personnel function; I do not think that MAFF ever applied one. A very limited number of the departments in the Ministry supplied almost all the people to handle the epidemic; some departments escaped with almost none of their people being taken. To what extent was somebody at the centre considering whom to send, where to send them and how to bring the teams together? It took a tremendously long time to put co-ordinated management teams in place.

Foot and mouth came to my constituency a long time after it came to Cumbria, Devon and Wensleydale. It was not at the beginning of the experience but towards its end, yet the vets seemed to be in an autonomous organisation, managing themselves—not very well, because that is not what they are there to do. It took a long time to bring the components together and introduce some sort of integrated management programme.

Because of all that, and because the election was taking people's attention away, the idea grew up in my constituency that the Government did not want people to know about our epidemic. It took place out of the public eye, without attention—because after all, it had already been announced that the epidemic was under control. Indeed, that announcement was made before the outbreak in Skipton and Ripon even started.
Even before one professor mentioned the fact to the Select Committee, I thought that the biggest problem was that MAFF was terribly out of touch with the industry that it was in charge of. In my constituency, as well as in that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks, and in Cumbria, it seemed to have an image of agriculture derived from watching "All Creatures Great and Small". Wonderful and entertaining though that programme was, it was only a partial mirror of agriculture in my constituency. The number of people who commute between different holdings seemed to catch the Ministry entirely by surprise. The industry had moved away from the Ministry's perception of it.

"Agentisation"—if that is the right word to describe the acquiring of agency status by the various MAFF organisations—certainly played a part in that. We must now ensure that we have the necessary information about what is happening and where, which is crucial for the future handling of outbreaks.

What I have said so far is just a preliminary, because now I shall turn directly to the Bill. It is not about the prescription of a certain method of fighting foot and mouth disease. It is, we hope, clearing the way to fight that disease more effectively, either by slaughter or by vaccination—although there are questions to be asked about the compensation that would be paid in the event of slaughter as part of a ring vaccination scheme. That subject was skated over cautiously, which makes me think that the Treasury did not want to be too precise about what might ultimately be paid. The Minister will, of course, have said from the beginning that getting farmer consent is crucial to combating the disease, and that is linked to a perception that the payments are reasonable.

In pursuit of the goal of rapid slaughter—if and where that becomes the policy—there is great curtailment of the right to resist. In practice, the right to resist, protest and appeal becomes all but extinct under the Bill.

The key emotional issue has been the contiguous cull. The Select Committee took evidence from Professor David King, Professor Mark Woolhouse and Professor Ray Anderson, and I thought that they made a convincing case that the contiguous cull was a crucial weapon in getting ahead of the epidemic, which had got ahead of the Government and roared out of control. One reason why it was out of control—and here I have some sympathy for the Government—is the fact that they did not take action immediately the first outbreak was detected, during those crucial three days between 20 and 23 February. We have been told that had action been taken immediately, the epidemic might have been cut to between a half and a third of its eventual size.

I can understand that if Ministers see one outbreak, there is some hesitation about the extent to which draconian action must be taken. That is why it would be good to see the papers that were submitted to Ministers at that time—and we would also like to see the papers that scientists wrote for Ministers, and for the Prime Minister, when vaccination was actively being considered. I hope that they will be made available to the inquiry, and that the inquiry will publish them. I have heard reports that the "lessons learned" inquiry may take evidence in private; I hope that it will not, because that would be a serious error, not only from the Government's point of view—that does not concern me much—but from that of the farmers and the rest of the community, which concerns me greatly.

There was a catastrophic failure to get to grips with the illness in Cumbria. It simply got out of control and the local people could not cope with it. That happened in Devon as well, and it meant that the contiguous cull became, perforce, the instrument by which we tried to catch up.

Of course some farmers were irresponsible—just as a percentage of any group of people, such as politicians, estate agents or anyone else, will be irresponsible. We have all heard of the famous farmer in Thirsk with seven holdings who commuted freely between them without any effort at biosecurity. However, I do not think that that was the predominant mood among farmers, by any means.

Most farmers were petrified of the disease, although that was against their own economic interests. In my constituency—and, I am sure, in that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks—for the many farmers who are still stuck up on the hills trying to keep on practising agriculture, the irony is that the disaster that overtook them was the fact that their animals did not get foot and mouth disease. Their economic interests would have been better served if their animals had contracted it. Now they are desperately struggling to maintain some form of normal agriculture, which is a testimony to the sheer guts and determination of farmers. What they can do is survive, as they have done for generations, but there is no logical or practical reason why they should carry on. They just hang on in there, because that has been bred into them through generations of farming stock.

If slaughter is the policy, the logic of the Bill is implacable, because 50 per cent. of outbreaks occurred within one and a half miles of the local source outbreak, and it is crucial to be able to kill animals before the incubation period—three to five days—is up, and the disease can be transmitted. However brutal it sounds, killing the animals quickly is at the heart of the argument once we embark on a slaughter policy.

It is therefore inevitable that many uninfected animals will be killed. There is no guarantee, however, that those animals would have remained uninfected, and the few that might have been infected would have set up other centres for the spread of the disease. We were told that there was a 17 per cent. chance of the disease moving from infected premises to surrounding premises; if slaughter is the policy that we are to embark on, then if it were done, it were well it were done quickly.

The Bill clears the way to do that, but at an enormous cost. It is draconian. If the farmer cannot come to an agreement with the Government's regional vets, in practice he has no further recourse. The Government appeal to the magistrate, and the magistrate issues a warrant. The farmer has no right to appear and state his case before the magistrate, and although there may not be a man waiting outside on a motor cycle, someone will be on the telephone as soon as the magistrate issues a warrant, and the slaughter will take place.

As the Minister told us, the farmer can go to judicial review, but that is about process and legal competence; it is not about the substance of the issue. The farmer may get some retrospective intellectual satisfaction, but he ain't going to get his animals back. He will have to start from scratch again.

Mr. Patrick Hall: Is the right hon. Gentleman arguing for the retention of the current system, whereby DEFRA officials would have to apply to the High Court for an injunction, with all the inherent delays?

Mr. Curry: No, I am not, because one has to follow the logic. If a slaughter policy is to be implemented, it has to be effective. But I want reassurances. Because farmers had the right that the hon. Gentleman explained to the House in his speech, it was imperative for the Government to get them on side and ensure that the maximum number were willing to co-operate. One of the instruments for doing that was a compensation scheme for compulsory slaughter—a scheme that everybody agrees was relatively generous.

If the Government do not need to do that because they can get the farmer on side through compulsion, does that mean that in any future outbreaks, they are likely to take a more stringent view of the appropriate level of compensation? I ask that as a speculation born of an eternity of suspicion of the Treasury, both when I was a Minister and under the present Administration. The Treasury is unchanging; perhaps that is good for society as a whole, but it just does not feel like it at the time.

The Bill also provides a penalty for poor biosecurity by docking up to 25 per cent. of compensation. That provision needs a great deal of examination in Committee. How do we arrive at 87.75 per cent. as opposed to 74.66 per cent.? Is there a scale of biosecurity? Will it be published so that the farmer has a checklist and can ensure that he does not fall foul of it? How will the Minister ensure that biosecurity measures are not installed at the last minute? It is perfectly possible to make things look impressive for an inspection, as the Government, having introduced such a gendarmerie of inspectors, must surely be aware.

Mr. Martlew: Does the right hon. Gentleman think it fair that farmers who did not give a damn during the outbreak, leaving gates open and going from one farm to another—although there were very few of them—should receive the same amount of compensation as those who took the proper precautions and still got foot and mouth? Or should there be some way in which the farmer who took precautions is compensated fully?

Mr. Curry: I am not arguing against the principle of a penalty. I want to ensure that the farmer knows what measures he will be assumed to have taken to comply fully with the regulations, and I want the process by which the figure is finally arrived at to be transparent. He should also have assurances about the means that the independent person he can appeal to uses to undertake the task. As in much legislation, the principle might be difficult to dispute, but how it works in practice is the key for people on the ground. Will it work in a way that is clear and evident to everyone?

Then we come to the Bill's curious nooks and crannies. We have all heard the rumours that have abounded during the course of the epidemic about farmers infecting their own flocks, with infected apples, and tongues, bits of tail and other parts of the carcase being discovered on farms. Nobody, as far as I am aware, has had a charge pressed against him for that reason. However, if a farmer does infect his flock, he will be in a curious position. The Minister said that at present he cannot be prosecuted and gets full compensation. Under the Bill, he will spend two years as a guest of Her Majesty, he is banned from keeping animals for life and he takes, in some cases, up to £400,000—75 per cent. of the compensation—to prison with him.

Mr. Morley: The right hon. Gentleman makes a reasonable point. He made it before in the Select Committee, which is one of the advantages of pre-scrutiny. I have discussed this with officials and understand that the advice remains that we have to pay the 75 per cent. compensation because of human rights legislation. The animals are being compulsorily taken and killed. However, if someone deliberately infects their animals, there is the possibility of implementing action for fraud and getting the money back in that way.

Mr. Curry: I am glad that the Minister has discovered a way. When he discovered this curious fact in the Select Committee, he gave the impression that he had trodden in an unpalatable substance and wondered what it was doing in the Bill and why someone had not told him about it. No doubt he had an earnest conversation with his officials immediately afterwards. I am delighted that he has sorted the matter out, even by this curiously circuitous route.

If farmers are to be discouraged from infecting their own animals and if they are to maintain the rigorous attitude that they have maintained until now, it is important that those who are struggling to carry on farming in these most difficult circumstances have all the help that they can get. They want things to be rigorous; they do not want risks taken. They have the right to expect that schemes reflect their circumstances, work and can be accessed easily.

The other big question that inevitably haunts this debate is that of vaccination, because it would have avoided the need for a contiguous cull and the shutdown of the hundreds of thousands of businesses that were part of the epidemic's collateral damage. If there is an effective option for vaccination and effective equipment to test in the field—the two prior conditions—it is a persuasive argument.

We were told categorically that the equipment to test reliably in the field was not ready for use. There have been some arguments that it is, but we were told categorically by our witnesses that that was not the case. We were also told categorically that present tests do not distinguish between an animal that is infected with the disease and one that has been vaccinated and displays the antibodies.

We need vaccines that are available and efficacious. They must be able to deal with all strains of polyvalent viruses and should be long-lasting: what the Government's chief scientist called "smart vaccines", to use the jargon. Even he emphasised the danger of vaccinating an already infected animal in a ring around an infection.

I echo what my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks said with regard to the public inquiry. I do not think that it needs to replace the more rapid inquiries. I do not see why it cannot crown the various, more informal, inquiries that are taking place, so that we can learn some early lessons. This is not a zero sum game. We need to learn lessons and make sure that we have access to that crucial advice. There will be a central argument about vaccination and we need the advice of the scientific communities. Ministers are not scientists and neither are we. We are trying to understand and, ultimately, we have to decide who we are going to believe. We need the facts to make that decision. I do not want the scrapie issue to be entirely lost. I draw the Minister's attention to an article on the back page of Farmers Guardian, a journal to which I have warmed considerably since it invited me to write a column. The article refers to Professor Malcolm Ferguson-Smith of Cambridge university, who argues:

"The Government is drafting a Bill to completely remove those sheep that are susceptible to scrapie—that could mean culling three quarters of the national flock as that is the proportion susceptible to it . . . We need to know if those sheep resistant to scrapie are resistant to the development of the disease or resistant to infection, as if it is the latter they could pass the disease on".

The professor also said that it had already been shown

"that sheep resistant to scrapie are susceptible to BSE so the culling policy as a BSE measure did not make any scientific sense at all."

Those are the professor's claims. As I said, I am not a scientist, and do not know whether he is right or wrong. If he is right, some serious questions need to be asked about the course along which the Government are about to embark. I hope that the Minister will deal with that point.
The issue of tests is important. Professor Donaldson has argued that the Government are not carrying out adequate tests for BSE on cattle. Similarly, tests on the continent are not adequate, even though they are dealing with greater cattle numbers, because they are capable of detecting only the last stage of the disease.

Finally, a number of colleagues, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks and the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Mr. Todd) mentioned meat imports. A sense of equilibrium and balance needs to be achieved. If we are introducing increasingly draconian measures at home—which, for the most part, farmers agree to and think are necessary—and curtailing the right to appeal so that a policy can be dispatched rapidly, it is incumbent on the Government, out of simple fairness, to ensure that equal rigour should be exercised so that inadvertent or false imports cannot put the health of the country at risk. I know that that may have to go through the European channels. My concern is not that arrangements exist to permit trade—I am in favour of that—but whether the formal arrangements that exist operate in the conditions that are prevalent, and that we are as satisfied that the rule is enforced there as we are that it is enforced here.

Secondly, as the hon. Member for South Derbyshire said, we must deal with the level of illegal imports. We can ask people to make a particular effort only if they believe that other people are making the same effort and that the Government are, in that sense, on their side. A sense of solidarity has held the farming community together, and apart from the sheer problems of administering the regime, the one thing that farmers have constantly mentioned is that if they are to be exposed to meat from abroad, there is no point to their efforts because there is no equivalence of pain.

The Minister and the Government said that they are considering that matter, but what we have been told is very imprecise, and I invite the Minister to clarify the point. It is in his own interests to do so, and he owes it not only to farmers but to the whole rural community to ensure that we are taking every step to prevent another such outbreak, so that the draconian measures in the Bill need never be used.

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