House of Commons Hansard Debates for 25 Jun 1996 (pt 19)

Mr. Nicholas Baker (North Dorset): I disagree with some of the lessons that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. He has, however, left out one important lesson that has been learnt, with which I think he would agree because he has observed it himself--the need not to rouse hysteria by violent and wild political pronouncements. He has avoided doing that in a way that the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms Harman) has not. The county council banned beef in school meals, based on no scientific evidence, although it undid the ban six weeks later. The council was Liberal Democrat controlled, of course. The ban created hysteria in Dorset, and it did incredible damage to the beef industry. Will the hon. Gentleman now say that he denounces all such pronouncements, and that that is an important lesson to have learnt?

Dr. Strang: No; I do not think that the hon. Gentleman expects me to do so. Certainly he cannot seriously suggest

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that my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham was not reflecting the very great concern at that time. I noted that, a month or so ago, even the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Forestry in the Republic of Ireland referred in the press to how the Government were handling the crisis, the announcement on 20 March and the delay before a second announcement was made.

I agree with the hon. Member for North Dorset (Mr. Baker) to this extent: it is incumbent on us to avoid unnecessary elevation of the risk and to avoid encouraging people to lose perspective. We will accomplish that by telling the truth and not by pretending that there is not an issue, because there is a very real issue.

We have always made it clear that the Government were absolutely right to come to the House of Commons to report the new information from scientists on this apparently new form of CJD. It is too early to say how many more new cases there will be of this new form of CJD, but--I say it again--even if the cases increase, we still will not know by any means whether that was caused by eating contaminated beef or beef products in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

My view is that we must tell it to the people straight. They will understand. The measures in place to keep the organs--brain, spinal cord and specified bovine material--out of the food chain is the real protection, which is in addition, as everyone knows, to slaughtering animals that show symptoms. That is the important protection, as hon. Members have already said in the House, which is why hon. Members express doubts--to put it mildly--about the two slaughter programmes.

I should like to mention some of the proposals that we have made. Opposition Members have been very constructive on this issue, and we have repeatedly made constructive suggestions, some of which the Government have taken up.

First, in the long term, we believe that there should be an independent food standards agency, the purpose of which would be to ensure the safety of our food. It would be a consumer agency, and everything it recommended and all its decisions would be entirely public. It would be answerable to the Secretary of State for Health and to the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. It would be proactive and it would draw potential risks to the attention of the Government, the public and all interested parties.

We say that in future--it will take time--there is a role for such an agency to ensure that we re-establish our reputation for the highest quality and safest food in Europe. Sadly, BSE has tarnished that reputation, and the tarnish affects not just beef, as hon. Members are aware.

The second point, too, is wholly constructive. Indeed, the more I read the documentation from Florence, the more I am absolutely convinced of the rightness of such an approach. We should have an investigation--which, as I have already said, will take only about two or three months--into why so much contaminated feed reached cattle after the ban was imposed in 1988. Two thirds of new BSE cases occur in animals that were born after the imposition of the feed ban in 1988. If we are about tackling the problem at source, we should address that fact.

If we are about a further slaughter programme, which the Minister has acknowledged we are, I submit that it may be--I put it no higher--that a proper inquiry,

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particularly in Northern Ireland, with its ability to trace, is necessary to discover which mills were offending, which farms received the feed and, therefore, which animals were most at risk. For the life of me, I cannot understand why Ministers have turned their backs on that possibility and persisted with an approach that emphasises numbers. There could now be up to 150,000 cattle in the second slaughter programme.

Mr. Budgen: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Dr. Strang: This will be the last time, because other hon. Members want to speak.

Mr. Budgen: The hon. Gentleman has mentioned a large number of proposals, which he says that the Labour party wanted to be put in place before anyone knew that there was any risk of transmission to humans. It is all very well being wise after the event, but perhaps he will tell us how much all that would have cost.

Dr. Strang: The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, which occurred to me as I read the coverage in some of the broadsheet newspapers over the weekend. The risk of a link between BSE and CJD existed from the moment we identified BSE.

Sir Jerry Wiggin (Weston-super-Mare) indicated assent.

Dr. Strang: I am grateful to the Chairman of the Select Committee for agreeing.

The Southwood committee report said that there was a possibility of such a risk, although it was remote. So the risk was always there. If we had implemented the measures--even if the Government had implemented their own measures effectively, particularly the feed ban--we would not be in our current position, spending billions of pounds tackling the crisis.

Remember that the general position--the Government's position, the Opposition's position and the European position--is that the main, if not the sole, cause of BSE in our cattle is contaminated ruminant protein. Obviously we will need to see the result of the maternal transmission experiment. There may be some maternal transmission, but if there is, it is expected to be very minor. I hope that that experiment will be allowed to be concluded with a proper, published analysis.

Support for quality assurance schemes is one of our eight points. We are moving on now to the question of certified herds, which is a very important matter, as the Minister appreciates. There is great frustration in the industry that certification is still not in place 10 weeks after it was promised. Will the criteria for exemption from the 30-month scheme be the same as those for certification to export, once the European Union agrees relaxation of the ban? I hope that the Minister will answer that question when she replies.

I should now like to deal with the motion and the amendment on the Order Paper. Many criticisms can be made of the Government's handling of the current BSE crisis, and Opposition Members have made them clearly in the House. After the statement on the new evidence of a possible BSE-CJD link, on 20 March, the Agriculture Minister told the House:

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"I do not believe that this information should damage consumer confidence and thus the beef market."--[Official Report, 20 March 1996; Vol. 274, c. 387.]

There was no strategy whatsoever, and rural areas will be paying for that appalling misjudgment for a long time. As bits of policy finally emerged, they were dogged by chaos. Nowhere was that chaos more apparent than in the 30-month slaughter scheme.

Whatever criticisms we may have of the handling of the BSE crisis by the current Agriculture Minister, I do not want to encourage the hope held by some Conservative Members that sacking the Minister will in some way eliminate the Government's culpability for their terrible failure for so many years to tackle BSE effectively. Indeed, if we are to get into the business of sacking Cabinet members, we should consider sacking former Agriculture Ministers, who presided over dreadful delays and under-enforcement since BSE was identified in 1986. That would of course mean saying goodbye to the Secretary of State for the Environment, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who are all former Agriculture Ministers. BSE and CJD are crucial matters of public health. Past and present Secretaries of State for Health were involved in the neglect of the duties of Government. Perhaps we should say farewell to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of State for National Heritage and the present Secretary of State for Health.

The Government amendment will not cut much ice with the beef and dairy industries or with our rural communities. Hon. Members who have contact with those industries or who represent rural constituencies are aware of the scale of the damage and the scale of the losses. It is true that large amounts are now going into providing some support and compensation, but they are not compensating fully for the losses. They are not compensating for the fall in the price of beef animals or for all the lost jobs in transport and other specialist aspects of the industry. It is a disaster and the House knows that. Thousands of jobs have been lost and livelihoods are at stake; that is what confronts us. I do not see any acknowledgement of that in the Government amendment.

There are very real issues to be addressed; the Minister set out the position. In their amendment, the Government boast that they have brought back from the Florence summit a "clear framework". They have done nothing of the sort: they have no timetable and no guarantee from their European counterparts of any future agreement on any of the proposed steps in the lifting of the ban.