Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
WEDNESDAY 17 OCTOBER 2001
THE RT
HON MARGARET
BECKETT AND
MR JIM
SCUDAMORE
40. Is someone making sure that the evidence
is shared because certainly from my postbag, where a new report
on the implications of foot and mouth on the future of farming
arrives every day pretty well, there is certainly a lot of literature
to digest and it would be a pity if all of these activities performed
their functions separately without having the opportunity to look
at each other's conclusions and look at some of the literature
which has been made available to one group but perhaps not to
another.
(Margaret Beckett) I think everybody is doing their
utmost to keep in touch with, as you quite rightly said, DEFRA
on the information, ideas and advice that are coming forward.
Certainly as a ministerial team we work very hard at the spread
of mutual information and try to keep on top of the different
developments that have taken place.
41. You have not chosen to suggest that perhaps
there are a few too many hands in this particular pot?
(Margaret Beckett) Far be it from me to suggest that
people ought not to be contributing their opinions. In fact, to
go back to what I said earlier on to Mr Breed that, given the
very real need to think carefully and long term about the future
of agriculture and the future of the rural community, it is very
encouraging that so many people are taking an interest and are
actively engaged in the debate. I think it might even be unprecedented.
42. It certainly is a growth industry and I
would not wish to discourage people from making a contribution.
I have done it myself so I would not want to put anyone else off.
However, it does seem strange to have various arms of government
pursuing parallel, overlapping, in some cases virtually identical
briefs with different people leading them. There seems a danger
at least of producing rather incoherent responses from this process,
so who is the person who is pulling all these strands together
to produce a coherent picture?
(Margaret Beckett) I think it is a mixture of officials
and ministers.
43. There is no-one owning that task?
(Margaret Beckett) For example, superficially you
could say that there is a duplication between some of the work
that Chris Haskins has been looking at and some of the work that
the Rural Task Force has been doing, but he was asked to look
specifically with a Cumbrian focus. They were looking at the overall
picture. On the whole I think there is not duplication and hopefully
there will not be when it is completed.
44. Although his actual brief was to look at
Cumbria certainly it was also to consider what lessons would be
applicable to the other areas that have been particularly affected
by the impact of foot and mouth. I am sure, having met him on
a number of occasions, he is not going to restrain himself and
will give his thoughts on the broader brief as well.
(Margaret Beckett) Yes. I am sure he will not mind
my saying that restraint is not one of the qualities for which
he is known. Yes, of course, some of what he says will have wider
resonance.
Diana Organ
45. Can I go back to some of the comments that
David Borrow was making about the rural recovery? One of the good
things that did come out of the Rural Task Force of course was
the grants that were offered to businesses that had been hit by
the effects of foot and mouth and they were grants of up to £15,000.
Can I ask you one or two things for you to look at over that?
In my area the majority of grants were given to people that were
in tourist and other allied businesses. Because the landscape
was opened at the end of July they then spent all of August and
the beginning of September trying to make some hay while the sun
shone during the school holidays, but the closing date for these
grants was 30 September. I suggest to you that that shows little
understanding of how those businesses were operating during the
closure and then the re-opening of their businesses. It was only
at the end of September that they had the opportunity to think
about how they could then look at applying for a grant. Do you
not consider that the deadline was a little short and rather difficult
for small businesses to put in an application before being cut
off?
(Margaret Beckett) I take the point that you make.
I think it is difficult. No government is ever in a position simply
to have open ended schemes and there does always have to be a
framework there, there does always have to be an end date. I do
not think it is lack of understanding. It is that one can only
approach these things step by step but yes, I am conscious, as
I said earlier in response to the Chairman, of those who have
not been assisted or for whom assistance perhaps has not come
at quite the right time. Sadly, one cannot tackle all of those
problems but I do take on board the point you make.
46. Quite a few businesses, I know from the
Small Business Service in my area, missed the deadline. Most of
their budget of £120,000 for the poorest people has been
spent. Is there anybody looking at the possibility of having a
second extension of the grant because the demand is so great?
(Margaret Beckett) That case has been made and obviously
we will not simply reject it. I simply repeat that even before
the events of 11 September (or the economic consequences of those)
it is not always possible for a government to do all the things
that it is clearly desirable to do but yes, you are right. The
point that you make has been made to us and we are conscious of
it.
47. With all those areas of the rural economy
that suffer, undoubtedly agriculture is one of them but I would
suggest to you that other areas of the economy suffered greatly,
in fact possibly more so than agriculture; it does not matter
whether it was the village shop or the garage or tourism or bed
and breakfast. The Council for the Protection of Rural England
said that your response has been more economically damaging than
the disease itself. Are you not concerned about the fact that
in the wider rural economy tourism is not within your remit? Although
your department is rather large, tourism is still within CMS when
it is a very integral part of the rural economy and agriculture?
(Margaret Beckett) Again I entirely take your point
and it is a point which has been made before but, as I am sure
you will appreciate, not only are there those who suggest that
tourism ought to be within the remit of my department but there
are also those who think that transport ought to be in, planning
ought to be in. I am very touched by this desire to load an even
greater range of problems in my direction but I think on balance
we have probably got enough of them. You have underlined a very
serious point and, as you know, we did take steps earlier on in
the year to bring forward and to accelerate some of the moves
that were in th pipeline particularly for sole shops in villages,
accelerating the mandatory rate relief scheme. We did substantially
expand the market towns initiative so some steps were taken in
response to exactly the concerns you express. With regard to the
CPRE's remarks, yes, I do recall them. I cannot quite remember
off hand what the basis was on which they made their rather sweeping
statement, but hindsight is a wonderful thing and it is great
that there are so many people who could solve all these problems
much more easily and I just wish they had come forward at an earlier
stage with their advice.
48. Since your department does cover the whole
area of rural economies and you obviously have concern for delivering
sustainable and thriving countryside, Mark Todd was looking at
the various reports that were coming and the views that were coming
in about the implications of foot and mouth and what is happening
in the rural economy. Would you not say that it is up to you in
your department to have a very clear leadership and to be the
person that has the leading role in the strategy for developing
a thriving and sustainable rural economy?
(Margaret Beckett) Yes, I think that is very much
part of the role that is envisaged for my department and that
we all wish to see succeed. As the pressure on the department
hopefully eases, the pressure of having to deal with the disease
outbreak, one of the very important priorities will be to pursue
the work of the Rural White Paper. I personally—and I feel
I am entitled to say this because I had no part whatsoever in
bringing it out so I am not singing my own praises—feel
that the Rural White Paper is an excellent piece of work and one
of the most important things that any government has produced
with regard to the rural economy for a very long time. If we are
able to deliver on these core themes of improved standards for
rural services and the market towns initiatives, it is one of
those ideas that is such a brilliant idea that you wonder why
on earth no previous government of whatever political shade had
not spotted it before. If we are able to work along those lines
then we should hopefully be able to do something that can begin
to transform the rural economy and that would be enormously worthwhile.
Mr Breed
49. While we are still on the rural economy,
I think the Government announced a package of £300 million
for funding the rural recovery programme. Can you tell us roughly
how much of that has so far been committed and allocated?
(Margaret Beckett) I have not got the most up to date
figures. Again, I can send them to you. From memory, most of what
was envisaged with regard to rate relief and so on has in fact
been committed. There has not been much in the way of take-up
for the small firms loan guarantee scheme because people have
found other means, clearly. I understand that with deferring tax,
VAT and national insurance, for example, about £158 million
has been disbursed; I think £51 million, the business recovery
fund. From grant approvals that have been issued I think £20
million of that has been paid. I have not got detailed up to date
figures for the other aspects of the scheme but clearly substantial
sums of money have already been disbursed.
Phil Sawford
50. Sticking with the financial aspects of it,
what are the estimated costs of the outbreak to the taxpayer overall
and what mechanisms are in place to monitor control of those costs,
and is there a limit?
(Margaret Beckett) First of all, estimated costs.
As I said right at the beginning, there is a range of different
aspects of the costs. Something over a billion pounds has been
disbursed directly in compensation. We identified a moment or
two ago the very substantial part, perhaps £100 million,
£200 million, something like that, of the money that was
being made available for rural recoveries. That has certainly
gone out. As to the other costs and the impact, I think it will
be substantial; there is no doubt about that, but I cannot give
you a figure off the top of my head. Again, if there was something
reliable to tell the Committee I would certainly do so. As to
mechanisms for monitoring the control, we do seek to keep continually
under review how schemes are working out, whether costs in any
way need to be re-assessed and we all know, going back to the
point I made earlier to Mark Todd, that there have been changes
in the various schemes that have been in place from time to time
as it has been felt that the way they have developed has changed.
There is a process of continual review and monitoring and control.
Yes, there has to be a limit. There is always a limit to what
one can afford.
51. Can I also raise this issue of reports of
fraudulent claims? There were numerous items in the media where
it was suggested that valuers and farmers had inflated the value
of their animals and there was reference to farmers as subsidy
seekers. I understand from reports in the press through the summer
period that ministers were to have an inquiry into these allegations.
There were cartoons with farmers driving Rolls-Royces. It seems
to have gone quiet but what happened? Did you find any?
(Margaret Beckett) There were, as you say, a number
of reports. Let us not get the two things mixed up. On the one
hand, and again it goes back to the point I made earlier to Mark
Todd and that which I made a moment ago, the position changes
and evolves. Initially, if I recall correctly, and Jim will correct
me if I get this wrong, there was quite a careful but time-consuming
process of valuation. Because the scale of the disease that caused
problems people came under pressure (perfectly understandably)
for a more automatic system and that indeed was introduced. At
first that seemed to work reasonably okay and then, as time went
on, there began to be a feeling, although I do not know whether
it was more than that, that instinctively people were starting
to regard that as a floor and were looking at valuations above
that rather than taking that as a broad, not ungenerous average
on approach. When that was thought to be beginning to happen the
Government did make changes correspondingly to the scheme, but
all the time the impact of how valuation was working was changing
because the pattern of the disease was changing. That I think
is an understandable process of human operation of a system. One
may say maybe the controls should have been tighter. I am sure
some people were saying maybe it should have been earlier, but
that kind of thing happens in ordinary human life. Quite separately
from that there were allegations that there were people who were
specifically seeking to be fraudulent and one does get these allegations.
I am not aware that there was much in the way of heavy evidence,
and certainly our priority has been to make sure that the schemes
were working as intended, that they were giving the support that
they should be giving in the way that they should give it and
that they were not being misused and that was a priority. Obviously,
if, as such schemes are run, evidence emerges of what looks like
deliberate fraud, then that is a matter for the prosecuting authorities.
My impression is that that has not been my experience, if indeed
it has occurred at all.
52. Can we be clear on that, that as far as
we are aware through your department and other departments, we
are not aware that there is any substance to these allegations
that has been proved, because there were also claims of wild variations
in the clean-up costs afterwards? There was also a suggestion
of double indemnity where some farmers had collected insurance
payments and also compensation from the Government. To be absolutely
clear, is it your contention that there is absolutely no evidence
that we are aware of and no prosecutions to date?
(Margaret Beckett) I am not saying there is no evidence.
I am saying I am not aware that there is any widespread evidence
of problems. I do not know off hand—I do not know whether
you know, Jim—whether there are any prosecutions in the
pipeline along these lines. What we have tried to do, and you
asked earlier about the context of monitoring and control, is
to maintain a system of monitoring and control such that things
do not get so out of hand that we actually reach the stage where
people are successfully behaving fraudulently. I would be an idiot
to say that it has never happened in any case but all I can say
to you is that I am not aware of such cases or of evidence that
is as strong as the implications there have been sometimes in
various reports.
David Burnside
53. Mark and other members of the Committee
have referred to the number of inquiries that have taken place,
the three announced by Downing Street at the end of August. There
appears, if you look on the dark side, to be a regular mish-mash
of inquiries here. The Government and the executive have resisted
the calls from early summer for a full public inquiry with all
the powers that that type of inquiry would have, including calling
witnesses. The Secretary of State will be aware of the pressure
from the farming community through Farming Weekly for instance
which had a big petition calling for a public inquiry and, although
farmers are small in numbers nowadays, I think that is significant
coming from the farming community. Would she not reconsider bringing
the inquiries under the one auspice of a full public inquiry?
If I can throw in my supplementary which I raised in the House
before the summer recess, I believe from my part of the world
that the terms of reference that have been set by both the Agriculture
Committee, similar to this Committee in the Stormont Assembly,
and by the Department of Agriculture in Stormont, are better than
those of your three inquiries that were announced in August. She
said that she would listen and learn and liaise. I wondered: has
she taken any lessons from the better handling of foot and mouth
in the Province than has existed in England? Also I would point
out that our Department of Agriculture in Stormont uses the word
"agriculture" which I hoped she might use instead for
her department in the future.
(Margaret Beckett) Can I first say that if we only
had one case then we would probably could have handled it a little
better. That is without any disrespect. I do not in any way dissent
from what you said about the way things have been handled in Northern
Ireland, but they were in rather a different position. With regard
to the whole general issue of the inquiry, yes, of course I accept
that. To me it is one of the developments that has taken place
generally in political life of recent years. There are some moves
that in some way become fashionable and the demand to have a full
public inquiry is heard almost every week—sometimes I get
the impression it is every day—into anything that has gone
wrong. That is not in any way to denigrate or undermine the very
serious consideration that obviously had to be given to what was
the proper form of inquiry for this very devastating event. I
simply say to you that there is a sense in which no-one any more
says, "We should have an inquiry". They always say,
"We should have a full public inquiry", and I think
many of the people who say we should have a full public inquiry
into whatever it is perhaps have not fully taken on board that
there is a very specific legal identity for what is properly called
a full public inquiry which involves very substantial amounts
of time, very substantial amounts of public money, and very often
people are not as satisfied with the outcome as they thought they
would be when they called for a public inquiry because it takes
longer than they had hoped and it is not as conclusive as they
had hoped and so on. What the Government sought to do was to identify
an inquiry process that would meet what we felt was the underlying
need that lay behind that understandable and justifiable call
for a full public inquiry, namely that people wanted a full investigation
of what had happened, a full examination of what had happened
and to have as much light as is possible cast on all the implications
of the outbreak. We have talked about three inquiries. We regard
this as one inquiry process with three elements. I personally
think, and I hope this may be a view that will in time catch on,
that this is a better and more effective way to approach the inquiries
into the aftermath of this particular disease outbreak than the
alternative of a single inquiry would have been. Instead of asking
one group of people to look at every single aspect of all the
different issues, what we now have are three completely independent
groups, one of whom is looking specifically at this particular
outbreak and what actually happened and what are the lessons that
we can learn about what was handled well and what was not handled
so well. Separately the Royal Society are looking at the whole
issue of disease outbreaks and epidemiology and so on among animals
because, as you will appreciate, we have had a range now of outbreaks
of animal disease. Nobody is better fitted surely to do that on
an independent basis than the Royal Society, just looking at the
science and the epidemiology and not distracting themselves with
anything else about did somebody give the right advice here and
so on. Then, again separately, there is the other aspect which,
without any discredit to those first two, I regard in some ways
as the most important fundamental, which is a group of people
who are charged again, not with distracting themselves about what
exactly happened in March or exactly happened in June, but looking
at what should the future be in trying to answer the questions
that Colin Breed and others have put, and indeed that many people
in the farming community are putting. Because they are separate
parts of the one process they will all be able to operate faster
than they conceivably could have done, it seems to me, if they
had tried to roll it all into one, and hopefully they will be
able to give people information, advice and perhaps some answers
a lot earlier than could otherwise possibly have been the case.
It is of course not up to me. It is a matter for the Prime Minister.
Only a Prime Minister can appoint a full public inquiry which
again emphasises what is supposed to be the very specific nature
of that inquiry process. What I hope and believe is that the independent
process that we have put in place will actually give people what
they want more speedily and effectively than the alternative would
have done.
54. What is the timing? Just update the Committee
on the timing of the three inquiries.
(Margaret Beckett) The Policy Commission are hoping
for a report by Christmas. Dr Anderson has already started to
read himself in and so on, but he will really begin his work when
the information and advice and input he is seeking will not impede
the handling of the disease. That is a little bit of a fluid situation
but he certainly hopes to complete his work in six months from
when he is in a position to be able to begin it. The Royal Society
I have a feeling will be in the spring. Again, that is a matter
for them. The Chair and the timing are all in the hands of those
independent bodies. None of them is on this year's timescale.
Mr Todd
55. What people who felt there should be a full
public inquiry wanted was an opportunity to have their say and
to see some of the key players in the handling of the outbreak
cross-examined and taken to task where errors were seen to be
made. I do not think the three inquiries give those people that
scope.
(Margaret Beckett) First of all let us take the issue
of getting their point of view known. I entirely accept that and
I think that is not only legitimate and valid but actually genuinely
valuable, so I very much hope that all of those bodies—as
I say, because they are independently chaired and run, my officials
are not secretariat to those bodies; we are not chairing them;
it is in the hands of the inquiries how they operate—will
do as much as they can to give people a chance to make their point
of view known and to give expression to their experience or indeed
their opinions. You talked about people wanting to see people
being cross-examined and taken to task. I hope, Chairman, I can
say this because, although I have clearly had a role which has
been a later and perhaps more minor role, I have some concerns
. It goes back in a sense to what I was saying about the prevailing
culture. It is enormously important that we learn the lessons
of how the outbreak was handled. If you look, for example, at
comparisons between this outbreak and the 1967 outbreak, the effort
that was put in was absolutely heroic and it has been a dramatically
terrible outbreak and people have slaved their guts out for hours
and days and weeks and months on end to try to do their best.
Inevitably there will have been errors and mistakes but there
was also a lot of genuine goodwill and a lot of people trying
to do their utmost to deliver a service to the public in really
horrendous conditions. While of course it is right that if mistakes
were made we should learn from that, it seems to me that there
is a growing modern culture that if anything goes wrong somebody
must be to blame and one of the things you have to do is find
the person who is to blame and pillory that person. I have to
say that life has always suggested to me that just a lot of things
happen as a result of chance and bad luck and often there is not
anybody actually to blame and most people most of the time are
doing their best.
Mr Martlew
56. I think, if we are talking about blame,
somebody could well go to the farm at Heddon-on-the-Wall. If we
can go from that, the point about the inquiry is that I welcome
the three inquiries. Two of the Chairmen have given a guarantee
that they will come up and take evidence in Cumbria. If, however,
we are not satisfied with that then there will continue to be
a call for a public inquiry. If I can go back to the early days
of the outbreak, when you were not in post, Secretary of State,
and in fact your department was not in being, there is a feeling
in Cumbria, and obviously as a Cumbrian MP I share that feeling,
that there were undue delays in implementing the slaughter policy
in the early days and that had the effect of spreading the disease,
and also that there was a breakdown of communication between the
headquarters of MAFF here in London and Cumbria. In fact, the
full scale of the problem in Cumbria did not become known until
March, until Joyce Quin, the Minister, actually came up to my
constituency. What were the reasons for those delays?
(Margaret Beckett) To a certain extent, as you clearly
recognise, you are asking me to speculate. It will be a matter
for the inquiry to assess whether there was indeed undue delay
and whether there were communications difficulties. I am not in
a position to dispute that that was the case. One thing I would
say to you just from the perspective of what I have heard and
know myself is that the sheer scale of the problem that faced
people, particularly in Cumbria and also elsewhere, has to be
a factor and has to be respected as raising very real difficulties.
I cannot immediately recall but I think it is something like four
times the amount of animals being killed, or maybe it is even
more than that, than there were at the peak of the 1967 outbreak.
There were very substantial difficulties and very substantial
numbers of animals needing to be dealt with. I think the thing
that has run consistently through the whole period of the disease
and everybody has always acknowledged is that the key to eradication
is the time to slaughter and people have striven with might or
main to meet those targets of 24 hours for the initial case and
48 hours for contiguous premises and so on. People have really
tried desperately hard to meet those targets but it has not always
been easy. There has been a variety of reasons, not all of them
in the control of my department. I go back to something we discussed
earlier on. When there were arguments about valuation, that in
some cases slowed down action being taken. There were people who,
absolutely understandably, resisted the policy of slaughter, either
because they did not think it was justified or they simply wished
to resist and took legal action, for example, against the department.
All of those things did have an impact on whether or not we could
meet those targets and did, sadly, have an impact upon the spread
of the disease. All of those are things that will have to be taken
into account. I again go back to the issue of the breakdown in
communications. I think the sheer scale of the difficulties did
cause very great problems early on. I do not dispute that. I do
not know quite what to hope for from the inquiry, strangely enough.
I am not quite sure whether I hope that they will say that given
the speed and impact with which the problems hit everybody they
could not have done any more, or whether I hope that they will
be able to devise some wonderful answers that we will all be able
to use should, God forbid, such an event ever take place again.
57. I would agree with you, Secretary of State,
in saying that the people on the ground worked very hard from
various departments, including the MAFF staff. Indeed they are
still working very hard because we are still not out of the wood
yet. The policy of slaughter I hope is seen to have worked now
that we are getting to the end of the campaign because I actually
believe that the policy was wrong. I think it is well known that
I am in favour of vaccination. It seemed to me that what we were
trying to do was to concentrate totally on the agriculture side
of it and we forgot the damage that was done to the rural economy
in Cumbria. The area that has been very badly damaged is the tourist
industry. Will your department be taking a more rounded view of
issues like this? It seems that for MAFF that was their brief,
to concentrate on that, and they were the lead department. I have
to tell you that if you were to try and implement a slaughter
policy again next year, it would not be acceptable to the people
of Cumbria. You would not be able to implement it because we would
never want to live through that again.
(Margaret Beckett) I completely understand that, and
I understand that as a reaction. It is difficult to sustain the
argument that the policy has not worked because, for example,
the feeling is that we probably had 11 separate outbreaks basically,
but if you look, for example, in Cumbria, before we had this run
of 16 days without a case anywhere in the country we had quite
a pattern in Cumbria of five days with nothing and then one case,
three days and then a case, three days. We had quite a pattern
of much more isolated outbreaks but, because we still had the
odd case coming up elsewhere in the country, that did not show
through in the overall national pattern quite as quickly as it
might have. What I would suggest to you, with respect, is that
the policy of slaughter has brought down the numbers of cases
dramatically although, for reasons that I have already said to
the Committee, we fully recognise that it is by no means necessarily
over and that the need for precautions and high level bio-security
will continue for a considerable period of time, and we hope that
everybody will be mindful of that. We have also all the way through
thought that no-one had a closed mind on the issue of vaccination
and of course it will come up in discussion afresh and of course
it will be considered afresh, but I go back to what the Chairman
asked me right at the very beginning, which is that, given the
circumstances of this outbreak, what could vaccination have contributed?
You are saying that slaughter would not be acceptable. In the
Netherlands it has repeatedly been reported that we should have
done what the Dutch did and vaccinated instead of slaughtering.
The Dutch did not vaccinate instead of slaughter. The Dutch vaccinated
first, as I am sure you are well aware, and then they slaughtered,
and there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that because vaccinating
first caused delay, although we all understand why they did it;
I am not criticising them for doing it, the delay that was caused
by them vaccinating first and then slaughtering did mean that
they had to kill more animals per outbreak, substantially more,
than we did. I think the estimate is something like they killed
10,000 for every 2,000 that we killed per outbreak. It is not
a simple issue. I have not read anything at all from anywhere
that says that, for example, ring vaccination would have worked
in the circumstances in which we found ourselves on having this
disease that was spread so hugely and so extensively across the
country before ever it was detected. The Chief Scientific Adviser
published an article in The Daily Telegraph earlier in
the year about the limitations of vaccination. You know, because
it is in the public domain, that vaccination was considered at
one point in Cumbria because it was thought that it might contribute
to slowing down the disease and protecting some animals, but (a)
there was very substantial resistance at that time, and (b) events
then moved on and it became clear that the disease was already
there where the hope had been that vaccination might give some
degree of protection. The most information that I have had a chance
to look at is in the 1967 report where they go in some depth into
the issue of whether ring vaccination would work or not, and say
in terms that ring vaccination would be of no use in dealing with
an outbreak that had already begun. They also say, by the way,
that slaughter is essential, whatever policy is adopted, which
is about as firm a statement as one could get, but they say that
emergency ring vaccination would contribute little towards control.
They looked of course at the different wider issue of general
vaccination, but we are talking about unprecedented circumstances
and an unprecedented or unique kind of outbreak and it is not
clear to me—although it would be nice to think that there
is a policy of vaccination that would mean that there would never
be any disease out there so people would never need to kill anything,
it would be perfectly acceptable and people would be able to market
those animals and eat those animals—that that has been the
position during this outbreak. Maybe it has become the position
now in Cumbria. It is still not clear to me, the evidence is not
there, as to whether that is the case everywhere.
Chairman
58. Secretary of State, could I just put a proposition
to you? Had foot and mouth disease got into the pig herds in South
Yorkshire we could not have slaughtered, could we, because you
have units of 30,000 breeding sows, contiguous units of 30,000
sows? The Ministry did not have the capacity to slaughter at that
pace. We would have had to vaccinate, if only to buy time. Is
that a correct proposition? The Chief Veterinary Officer is nodding.
(Mr Scudamore) When we got the outbreaks in Thirsk
we did prepare a plan to assess whether we needed to vaccinate
in Humberside to protect Humberside from the disease coming down
from Thirsk, and the conclusion was that a vaccination programme
would help in the disposal problem but that it would not actually
control the disease because the difficulty with pigs is that you
have a rapidly changing population from the new to susceptible
to infected. The view we took was that we would take steps to
prevent the disease getting into Humberside by putting on the
blue boxes and the red boxes and all the rest of the controls.
(Margaret Beckett) Which worked.
(Mr Scudamore) Which worked, but there was a serious
look at whether there was a benefit in vaccinating in Humberside
and Yorkshire to prevent the disease getting in, as a preventive
measure. As I say, the conclusion was that whilst it would have
helped with the disposal issues, it would not have controlled
the disease and we would have ended up circulating the disease.
There was an added problem in that the way the pig industry is
structured pigs could go from Humberside down to East Anglia as
part of the breeding pyramids, and then if we vaccinated one part
of the country we would then stop all those movements and so we
would have created even more of a problem. The question then is:
should we have vaccinated the whole of East Anglia and the whole
of Humberside and Lincolnshire? We looked at it very seriously
and the conclusion, on the advice of our epidemiologists, was
that the measures on bio-security and strict controls in the Thirsk
area were preferable to considering vaccination as a preventive
measure in the Humberside area.
(Margaret Beckett) No-one is saying that there is
not a role for vaccination. No-one is saying that this is not
going to be looked again in spades. What I would say though—and
I am not suggesting you are saying this, Eric, and I am not suggesting
your farming community is saying it—is that there is a kind
of view that somehow vaccination is an alternative to solving
the problems, and it is not clear to me that that is the case.
Mr Martlew
59. I am sorry; I may not have explained myself
very well, Secretary of State. What I am saying is that in the
broader context, not just the farming context, the loss to tourism
has been probably four, five times the amount of the loss to agriculture.
Foot and mouth is an economic disease for the farming industry.
We have made other parts of the rural industry suffer very greatly
because of that. We had the fires, we had devastation, we had
all the footpaths closed and still a lot of the footpaths are
closed in the country and in Cumbria. The idea that we go through
that again would not find any general support, perhaps with the
exception of some of the farming community, in my county. If I
can go now to vaccination, if we are going to look at vaccination,
do we need to discuss that at a European level? It would be no
good we in the United Kingdom deciding to do it. It would need
a change of policy in the EU. Would that be the case?
(Margaret Beckett) I think everybody, not just in
the EU. One of the reasons we had enormous international co-operation:
vets and veterinary students from all over the world coming in—and
I am very thankful for it—was for them to gain experience
that they realised was going to be unique. Right across the world,
and certainly within the EU, people are looking at and considering
these issues and there will undoubtedly be the most thorough discussion
and examination of what took place, including the role of vaccination.
Of course I take the point that there is the wider community to
consider and that there is a reaction there too. Again, I simply
say that while I completely understand that reaction and we will
never have this again, etc, etc, one of the reasons that the disease
spread in the way that it did was because we were not able always
to meet the 24 and 48 hour targets. One of the reasons we were
not able to do so was because of resistance in various forms,
and I am not saying that that was illegitimate. You could have
exactly the same problem with vaccination. It remains a divisive
issue. You tell me how you are going to vaccinate the herds of
a farmer who is utterly resistant to the thought that his herd
should be vaccinated and I would be very interested to listen.
(Mr Scudamore) There is an important observation that
the Secretary of State has made. It is an international question
that we deal in trade and therefore if a country is going to use
vaccination then it needs to be on an internationally agreed system.
Going back very quickly to Cumbria, we are now beginning to finish
a lot of the epidemiological work on what happened at the beginning
of this outbreak. There is no question that at least 26 primary
foci existed in Cumbria before we knew we had the disease. We
started off from an absolutely catastrophic situation, that we
know that at least 26 infected animals had gone on to farms in
Cumbria before we even started. It could well be a lot more than
that, so we started off from a very difficult position. In dealing
with vaccination, there is actually a philosophical question,
and that is: are you aiming to eradicate the disease, in which
case you slaughter and you might use vaccination to assist that,
or are you going to live with the disease? With foot and mouth
disease and with mass vaccination I do not believe you would eliminate
the virus. There is a question that is a world question, not just
a UK question: do we eradicate disease and use vaccine to help,
or do we vaccinate generally and accept that we probably have
to live with the disease with the vaccines we currently have available?
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