Examination of Witnesses (Questions 33-39)
Monday 12 May 2003
MR ROGER
EDDY, MISS
JANE HERN
AND DR
BARRY JOHNSON
Q33 Chairman: Good afternoon. We
have before us the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the deciders
of those who do or do not become members of your profession. I
think it would be helpful for the benefit of the Committee if
you would be kind enough to introduce yourselves, and identify
the posts that you hold in the Royal College.
Miss Hern: I am the Registrar
of the College, and therefore have statutory responsibility for
maintaining the Register—as you said, deciding who gets
on it and who gets off it as well.
Mr Eddy: I am the Past President
and Senior Vice-President of the Royal College at the moment.
First, I must apologise on behalf of our President who cannot
be with us this afternoon; he is in Zagreb so I am deputising.
I was a dedicated farm animal practitioner—not from Lancashire
but from Somerset where there is real dairy farming, and our practice
did have responsibility for 23,000 dairy cows at one point, before
quotas. I am retired from practice now but still an officer of
the Royal College. On my left Dr Johnson is known to you, Chairman;
I believe he has shared a bottle of wine with you on occasions!
Dr Barry Johnson is from Preston in Lancashire, also a large animal
and equine practitioner.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed and thank
you for enabling Dr Barry Johnson to be identified to the Committee.
I can definitely agree we have shared the odd bottle of wine but
also some very useful information has passed between us as a source
of what happens in your profession.
Q34 Mr Wiggin: One of the matters
touched on earlier was the number of vets, and one of the problems
touched on is that the demand for veterinary services has dropped—I
think there has been something like a 30% reduction in the use
of veterinary services by cattle farmers. What are the farmers
doing instead? How are they able to get away with this?
Mr Eddy: We have tried to get
some handle on the answer to that question, some real data because
there is a real need to investigate and answer that question.
There is a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence coming through
that they are just not seeking veterinary treatment. They are
doing the best they can on saving up cases and, if you like, getting
the vet to come once a month instead of once a fortnight. I think
perhaps Dr Johnson could answer that because he is in the thick
of it, and has come across a number of examples.
Dr Johnson: One of the reasons
is there are less farms. There are an awful lot of farms, big
and small, who have gone out of business over the last few years.
Also, where the value of the animals does not justify the expenditure,
then it is not seen.
Q35 Mr Wiggin: So, on farm burial,
presumably some animals are being culled for economic reasons
and that is going to change dramatically because of the cost of
not being able to bury on farm as well?
Dr Johnson: I do not think the
costs of that will alter.
Q36 Mr Wiggin: To what extent is
the reduction of practices doing farm animal work the result of
declining demand and to what extent is it the result of better
returns from other veterinary work? Is it fair to say you are
doing your job better which is why it is happening less frequently?
Mr Eddy: Our concern in the Royal
College is not the business of preserving jobs for vets—that
is essentially the role of the BVA—but we do have a real
concern about the provision of veterinary services across the
whole country and we do know in the marginal livestock areas in
particular that there is an increasing problem of availability
of veterinary services. Practices which have a small number of
farms are now saying it is uneconomic to continue servicing those
farms, so they are just giving up the farm animal and concentrating
on their equine work or small animal work. In other areas, and
again Barry has some good examples from his part of the world,
there are quite a large number of farms that just do not appear
to use veterinary services. We mentioned Heddon-on-the-Wall earlier.
There is not a vet in Northumberland who will admit to ever being
on that farm so it is quite likely that he has never had or seen
a veterinary surgeon—and there are a lot of farms, or shall
we say livestock holdings, that have never seen a veterinary surgeon.
Q37 Mr Wiggin: I believe you are
going to increase the number of veterinary graduates certainly
by 2010, is that right?
Mr Eddy: There has been a shortage
of United Kingdom produced veterinary surgeons over the last 15/18
years—there is no argument about that. Ten years ago we
were producing about 300/330 vets per year: that number from the
data in front of you is going to rise to about 700 in about four
or five years' time, and the shortfall has been made up with people
coming in from either the European Union or the old Commonwealth
countries, because most of those only stay for 2-4 years but they
add a very valuable contribution, and there are quite a lot of
Europeans now working in veterinary practices, and very successfully.
But we do believe, because there is no growth left in veterinary
practice either in the companion animal or the production farm
animal, that it is likely that within 5-10 years there is going
to be a surplus of veterinary graduates, so I would like to put
to bed the rumour that I know is circulating in Whitehall that
there is a shortage of vets. The Anderson report suggested there
was a shortage of vets and I know other people in DEFRA believe
it, and I think the Minister told you that there was a shortage
of vets, and blamed the TB backlog on the shortage of vets, and
people are saying we need more places at veterinary school. The
College has commissioned a modelling exercise by the Institute
of Employment Studies—in fact, I am meeting them again tomorrow
because we are going to update that model and see whether it is
worth doing it again—but that shows quite clearly that within
10 years we will be overproducing vets, and there is no need for
more places at veterinary schools.
Q38 Mr Wiggin: So what you are really
saying is you have risen to the challenge effectively and you
are going to be producing these 700 new vets. What percentage
of those will be large animal vets?
Mr Eddy: The BVA in their submission
imported a survey from the Association of Veterinary Students
where I think it was 12% of students coming into veterinary courses
had aspirations to do farm animal practice, and within three years
of the school that was down to 8%. Now that is a remarkably low
figure. Only 10 years ago I used to do some lecturing at Bristol
Veterinary School in the final year and at that time over 50%
of the final year students had aspirations towards farm animal,
or mixed with a farm animal bias, so there has been a big change
in student aspirations in the last few years.
Q39 Mr Wiggin: Do you think that
that is because of the evidence we just heard about the fact you
can follow a case through if it is a companion animal?
Mr Eddy: I think there is some
real research required here to find out why this is. We have just
recently realised on the gender issue that only 280 boys applied
for the veterinary course last year. Is that an issue? Is it the
TV programmes which are all companion animals? The Herriot factor
in the "70s was a very dominant factor across the whole world
in increasing the demand for veterinary education, and that was
basically mixed and farm animal practice, but we are past Herriot
and now into another era on the television. Or is it, which I
suspect, to do with the role models developing in our veterinary
schools? We say in our evidence that the veterinary schools are
financially supported by charities in terms of building infrastructure
for companion animals and the equine departments, and they have
developed some very good departments generating a lot of income
and producing a lot of good role models which I think students
attach to. The role models in university are very important. That
has not happened in the farm animal departments firstly because
there is no charity money to fund the infrastructure required
and, secondly, there is limitation on the amount of income they
can generate from their practice to expand and develop the role
models that are necessary. So we need research to find the reason
why the aspirations of these students are changing; at the moment
we can only guess.
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