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Mr. Jopling: I have read a parliamentary answer which stated that Ministers were first told about the BSE situation in June 1987. That was a week or two after I left the Ministry, which was fortuitous timing from my point of view.
Mr. Home Robertson: The right hon. Gentleman is playing the part of the third wise monkey. I understand that BSE had been heard of in 1985--certainly in 1986--and perhaps he should have paid more attention to the papers circulating in his Ministry at that time.
I have to declare an interest in the subject. Only this morning, I was out in the rain feeding cattle. Many other people have an interest--some 600,000 jobs are directly involved in the production and processing of beef, ranging from farm workers, through hauliers and butchers, to caterers. Of course, we all, as consumers, also have an interest in British beef. The purpose of the debate is to make the point that the Government have abdicated their responsibility to all those interests in the past few years. The Government's response to BSE has been characterised by waste, incompetence and prevarication.
The Government's response has been characterised by waste, because £3.5 billion has been spent dealing with the crisis. I do not complain that the money has been spent, but it has not been spent effectively. The crisis is
still here even after all that money has been spent. The resources should have been applied more prudently and effectively.
The Government's response has been characterised by incompetence, because Ministers have repeatedly failed to ensure that their stated policies are implemented properly. For example, the feed ban was introduced and then it was discovered, again and again, that the feed mills and merchants were not sticking to the rules. It has also taken far too long to ensure that the standards for slaughterhouses were applied and enforced effectively.
The Government's response has also been characterised by prevarication. For example, we saw a six-month delay in the accelerated cull agreed by the Prime Minister in Florence in June. From June to December, nothing was done. As my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East (Dr. Strang) said, the Government could have started to identify the cattle. In Northern Ireland, it would have been a straightforward matter to identify the 1,700 cattle that might have to be slaughtered under an accelerated cull scheme, because proper records are kept.
In Scotland, it is estimated that some 4,300 cattle will have to be culled, but they have started to be identified only in the past few weeks. In England and Wales, some 121,000 cattle need to be identified--heaven help us.
Sir Jim Spicer:
The hon. Gentleman has roots in the farming community. Does he not understand the situation faced by farmers in my constituency? For example, the chairman of the local NFU had 103 cattle waiting to be culled at the end of September. What would his reaction have been if someone had said that his cattle needed to be checked, and that he would be given a list of the ones that had to be slaughtered? The chap would have been suicidal. The idea is ridiculous.
Mr. Home Robertson:
The hon. Gentleman underlines the fact that the over-30-months scheme was not operating well at that time. But it would have been perfectly straightforward to begin the process of identifying the cattle to be dealt with under a selective cull in those areas where there was no backlog, such as Northern Ireland, Scotland and some parts of England and Wales. Prevarication has been the name of the game for the Minister, the Government and the Minister's predecessors, who thought that they could contain the problem. They hoped that it would go away, and they were under the illusion that consumers at home and abroad would be satisfied with bland assurances. Goodness knows, we have heard plenty of them over the years.
The Government could not recognise the threat of a multiple crisis when it hit them between the eyes. There was a crisis of animal health, a potentially serious risk to human health and a massive economic crisis. This crisis did not start last year, but has been bubbling away and threatening to explode since 1986-87. They have had time enough to consider it, but they have prevaricated. We can compare that with the reaction in other countries. The French, Germans and others in mainland Europe immediately introduced drastic eradication policies--slaughtering all contacts with BSE cases and offering full compensation to the farmers concerned. In that way, they have been able to keep the situation under control.
I had an informal conversation with the former Finance Minister of the Irish Republic, Michael O'Kennedy, who told me that he sought advice from his officials on what to do about cases of BSE in Ireland when cases were identified early on in the Republic. The advice was that eradication would be expensive, but that failure to eradicate would be a great deal more expensive. Unfortunately, this Government thought that they could get away with trying to contain it in the hope that it would fizzle out. Plainly, that was not going to happen.
We do not know what advice has been provided to Ministers by civil servants in MAFF, the Northern Ireland Office and the Scottish Office since 1987, and it will be interesting reading for historians when that material is published in the distant future. But my guess is that officials will have offered alternatives to Ministers, ranging from expensive plans to eradicate the disease and to research its causes, through to minimalist measures to try to fob off the public. Inevitably, the Minister and his predecessors chose the low-cost, high-risk options, which have led to a high-cost crisis. They must stand condemned, and that is what this debate is about.
I have mentioned that I am personally involved in beef farming, and I represent a lot of beef farmers in and around the Lammermuir hills in East Lothian. I know a little about beef production, which is now just about ticking over, after a fashion. But it is depressing--to put it mildly--for farmers and everybody else working in the industry to breed, feed, keep and try to finish specialist beef cattle when there is no market for them in many cases. There is a risk that they will end up in incinerators at the taxpayers' expense. We cannot go on like this.
I read a report a couple of months ago in the farming press in Scotland about a specialist producer of Galloway cattle. The report was concerned with a pure beef breed which--because they are slow-maturing cattle--could not be finished within 30 months. Therefore, the producer is considering putting all his calves from that pedigree herd of Galloway cattle into what is euphemistically described as a calf processing scheme--slaughtering the little things at birth. What is the sense in allowing that obscenity to continue in the agriculture industry?
It is absurd that this particular sector has become the focus of a major health scare, as beef farming is overwhelmingly extensive. I have only seen cattle grazed traditionally, and wintered on hay, silage and cereals in straw-bedded housing with appropriate minerals and protein supplements--when necessary--in winter only. Antibiotics are used only on specific veterinary advice when a beast gets ill. That is in marked contrast to other sectors in agriculture, such as the dairy, pig or poultry industries, where the livestock are housed intensively and fed on artificial compound feeds. No doubt that is perfectly safe, and I am not criticising those involved, but I find it extraordinary that the most extensive section of the industry has become the focus of such a health scare. It is bizarre that the beef sector has been branded as unnatural and unhealthy as a result of the BSE shambles.
The Government stand condemned for allowing such an absurd and damaging image of the industry to develop at home and in mainland Europe. The beef industry--from production to processing and marketing--is now in a state of collapse. The home market may have recovered well, but the hills and uplands of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England cannot remain in production for the United Kingdom market alone.
We must have access to export markets, and that is what is so stupid about the car stickers of Eurosceptics, which say "Stuff the EU--eat British beef". This is one sector where we depend almost totally on the mainland European market, which the Government have allowed to be destroyed by a full-scale food scare as a result of their awful relationships with our European Union partners.
It is important to recognise that the scare--both at home and, above all, in Germany--started long before the ban, and that the ban was a result of the scare, rather than the other way around. We must find a way out of this that will involve better relations with our European partners, and that will start only when this Minister has gone and a Labour Minister takes over. We need to look to bring British beef back on to the market in mainland Europe.
I should like to ask some specific questions of the Minister, as it is not clear how that can be done under present circumstances. When a case of BSE is discovered in the rest of the EU, it is the herd associated with the animal concerned that is flagged up as possibly infected with BSE. Here in the UK, it is the farm that is flagged up as irrevocably infected, and there is no way out of it. We have heard about the United Kingdom certified herd scheme and the beef assurance scheme. One of the main principles of the certified herd scheme refers to herd history, and states:
"the animal was born in a herd which had never had a case of BSE and in which no suspect BSE case is under investigation; and the animal had not entered or moved through any herd in which a case of BSE had been confirmed in the six years before the animal's slaughter."
The beef assurance scheme, which may explain this more clearly, states:
"The herd must not contain animals originating from dairy herds, including bulls and first cross dairy animals."
As I understand it, that will cover practically every beef herd in the United Kingdom, because most commercial beef herds work with cows that have been bred out of the dairy herd--Hereford Friesian, Angus Friesian and Limousin Friesian cross suckler cows. A high proportion of cattle come from the dairy herd, so how on earth can Northern Ireland farms or Scottish farms which fall into that category satisfy these criteria? The Minister must explain that.
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