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Mr. Horam: I am glad to reassure my right hon. Friend that two studies have been undertaken, one in Cambridge in 1994 and another at Manchester university. Both studies found that there was no real difference between children born of a frozen embryo and those born more normally.
Finally, I am sure that we all agree that the HFEA has challenging responsibilities.
Ms Jowell:
Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Horam:
No, I have only a few moments left.
The authority has faced a long summer and autumn in the full glare of publicity. It has an extremely difficult and often thankless task, and in my view it has acquitted itself extremely well.
12.30 pm
Sir Colin Shepherd (Hereford): First, I thank my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the hon. Member for Tiverton (Mrs. Browning), for coming to the House to help with a matter that is of such concern. The entire veterinary profession will be grateful to her.
My hon. Friend will know that for some years I have served as a Privy Council-nominated member of the council of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. As a lay member of that council, I express my alarm at the concern that is continually voiced by my veterinary colleagues on the council and in other sectors of the veterinary profession that there is no uniformity of standards in education and training across the European Union and the European economic area.
My years with the council have left me in no doubt about just how seriously the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons regards the maintenance of standards within the United Kingdom veterinary profession. It is jealous indeed.
I need not remind my hon. Friend of the crucial need to have common high standards of theoretical, practical and ethical training throughout the EU and the EEA if there is to be public confidence in the ability of the European veterinary profession to provide for the safe movement of animals into and throughout the EU. With the removal of border checks, there is an increased need for standardised, reliable and unambiguous certification and all that flows from that in terms of confidence, especially among livestock owners. There is also a strong link between basic veterinary education and certification as we have in the United Kingdom.
My purpose in raising the matter today is to press for progress in achieving the goal of comparable high standards across all the schools in Europe. As the royal college is obliged to register anyone who applies and has a recognised qualification from a European veterinary school, it must be beyond doubt that the letters MRCS have to be unequivocally a hallmark of quality that is completely reliable.
I first became alarmed in early 1993. I need not rehearse the legislative background that resulted in the establishment of the Advisory Committee on Veterinary Training back in 1978 in line with the European directives, with its responsibility
The importance of confidence in the quality of veterinary qualifications was brought home to me by a reported experience in a United Kingdom abattoir when a Spanish official veterinary surgeon was unable to recognise the nervous symptoms displayed by a cow during an ante-mortem examination. It became clear that the OVS was not familiar with the signs of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was unsure what action to take and did not have the nous to read the operations manual.
I am reliably told that much of the training of Spanish vets in food hygiene can be extremely good--perhaps better than ours. However, we need to know that it is uniformly good so that we can be confident in hiring a vet with recognised qualifications from Spain or elsewhere overseas.
I am also reliably informed that veterinary faculties have been opened in some regions of the EU--particularly Spain, Italy and Portugal--purely on the ground of local political pressure and without regard to demand for their product or the inadequacy of funding.
It is clear that the system of visits is vital and that they should be as rigorous and penetrating as those that have been practised in United Kingdom schools. Whereas United Kingdom schools have been visited every seven years or so, it is worrying to note that in the past 10 years only 22 of the 52 EU schools have been visited. We must bear it in mind that there is also the need to visit EEA schools and those in non-EEA states that have common borders with the EU. With visits currently planned at about four per year, there will be an interval of nearly 15 years between visits--far too long a gap.
It is also worrying that an excessive number of veterinary students are being trained in Europe, while there is a perceived need to increase the numbers being trained in United Kingdom schools. As the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe put it in its discussion paper of May 1996:
In 1994 the matter was raised in another place by Lord Soulsby, a distinguished former president of the college. He expressed the worries of livestock farmers that there was an animal disease time bomb ticking away as a result of the mad rush to a single market in the movement of animals without ensuring that the necessary standards of veterinary education and veterinary practice applied throughout the EU. He went on to say that those responsible in the Commission would bear a heavy responsibility if our worst fears regarding imported animal
disease were confirmed. An equal responsibility will lie on the Council of Ministers if it allows the Commission to get away with it.
I do not think that the noble Lord had BSE in mind, but that catastrophe serves to demonstrate the scale of the problem when things go wrong. Let us not forget swine fever, Aujesky's disease or foot and mouth disease, all of which can easily achieve pandemic proportions. It is an important matter, given the need for many United Kingdom cattle farmers to restock in the aftermath of the BSE culls.
In his reply, Lord Howe, the then Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, expressed his shared concern. In the light of the Commission's December 1993 report on subsidiarity, he said:
Later in his reply, Lord Howe said that
The then Minister referred also to the withdrawal of support from the sectoral directives, which would have the effect of doing away with the Advisory Committee on Veterinary Training. Given that the Department of Trade and Industry is espousing the deregulation exercise through the simpler legislation for the internal market--SLIM--initiative, how does that square with the implied support by the then Minister for the ACVT? This is particularly worrisome because one of the ACVT working party meetings for 1996 has been cancelled. All the signals are that there is no support for the mechanism that is to be used to examine training.
Given the conflict between the Department of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, what interdepartmental consultations are taking place between the Department and the Ministry that might parallel the consultations that should be taking place between DG XV and DG VI within the European Commission?
At the end of his reply, the then Minister said that assurances had been received that the principle of visitation is one which the Commission firmly supports. Pressure would be maintained, he said, to ensure that the proposed voluntary scheme for visitations would get off the ground and that there would be a proper programme of visits. The then Minister said that he would ensure that if deficiencies were identified, the Commission would be pressed to take action. Alas, it is clear from the
correspondence between the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and the Commission, and from the concerns and frustrations expressed by the Federation of Veterinarians in Europe in its paper, that little progress, if any, is being made.
Throughout all the papers and comment that I have read and heard runs a common thread. That is the need for strong political pressure to be applied by most member states.
"to ensure a comparatively high standard of veterinary training in the Community".
I am now alarmed by the fact that the committee is being denied the means to discharge its work. I refer to the reduction in the number of meetings and the withdrawal of financial and managerial support for the system of visitations to veterinary schools.
"Excessive student numbers add to the growing unemployment figures of veterinarians in a number of countries and result in a lowering of standards in schools which has implications not only for the state concerned but other members who are the recipients of exported animals and migrating veterinary surgeons."
That is particularly important for the United Kingdom, as Mr. Roger Eddy, a council member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons pointed out in his address to the British Veterinary Association congress in Chester this year:
"In each of the last five years more graduates from overseas have been registered than from the UK. In 1995 only 45 per cent. of registrations were from the UK and there were more graduates from Spain than from Ireland which has always been a supplier of graduates to the UK."
It is worrying that some courses in Italy have such deficiencies that they are technically in breach of the directives. Schools which should be declared delinquent are still turning out graduates whom the royal college still has to accept. It is also worrying that such a rigid attitude should be taken by the European Commission. Directorate-General XV appears to be concerned only with the regulation and the internal market when perhaps it would be sensible for it to collaborate with DG VI, which has to deal with the consequences of inadequate veterinary standards, as was pointed out in 1994 by Mr. Barry Johnson, the then president of the royal college, in his letter to DG XV.
"The United Kingdom supports the application of subsidiarity and will, of course, examine the results of any such review. Nevertheless, the potential costs to the Community and the UK of inadequate standards of veterinary training are such that any proposed changes would have to be examined very carefully."
Two years on, the question must be: what further thoughts does my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary have? Subsidiarity may be all right in the United Kingdom, where we trust our standards, but can we trust standards everywhere else?
"financial arrangements for the EAEVE visits are still unclear and discussions are continuing with the Commission to resolve the question of funding."--[Official Report, House of Lords, 5 July 1994; Vol. 556, c. 1218-19.]
If I understand the position correctly, the Commission has now completely backed off funding, leaving it to the deans of the schools. Will my hon. Friend the Minister confirm that or put me right?
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