Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
Monday 9 June 2003
MR ELLIOT
MORLEY, MR
JIM SCUDAMORE
AND MR
MARTIN ATKINSON
Q100 Mr Wiggin: Yet only 25% of farmers
you wanted to comply have joined the scheme.
Mr Morley: That suggests that
maybe there was not as big a problem as some people were making
out in relation to the question of fallen stock.
Q101 Mr Drew: If we can look at herd
health planning, as I think it is referred to, where has this
idea of licensing gone? Obviously the Royal Society talked about
this and we have discussed it on a number of occasions—I
am pretty sure we will have asked you what your views are—but
could you bring us up to date on what the current thinking is?
Mr Morley: The issue of licensing
is an aspect of policy which is still under consideration in a
range of measures which follow on from FMD, and that includes
such things as animal health insurance, animal disease levy and
licensing of livestock holdings, which is part of that general
approach which is still basically for consultation, and is up
for consideration. There is a practical issue, however, on licensing
of livestock holdings which is on database management, and this
did come up in relation to our discussion on fallen stock, in
that as part of this health and welfare strategy it is clearly
going to have to be concentrating on making sure we have accurate
and up-to-date database management, and one way of addressing
that is certainly through some kind of licensing or registration
scheme. So we have to consider it as an issue but at the moment
it is still very much at the formulation stage and there will
have to be a consultation.
Q102 Mr Drew: And would it be likely
that this would have a de minimis level because obviously part
of the problem, and I keep raising it, is we are not talking about
what most people would concede as farmers: we are talking about,
to use a pejorative term, hobby farmers who could be keeping one
animal rather than anything we would technically call a herd.
Is this the sort of thing we are talking about?
Mr Morley: That we would have
to look at very closely because on the one hand you would not
want to have a regime that imposed bureaucratic burdens on people
who just had a couple of animals more as pets than anything else.
On the other hand, when there is a disease risk and an epidemic,
whether animals are pets or commercial, they are still at risk
and we do need information on where they are in relation to managing
any disease risk, so we have to give careful thought to that.
Q103 Mr Drew: In terms of the opportunity
we have already had a debate on how these things are to be afforded.
Is it possible that if you went for whole herd planning you could
look at this coming into cross-compliance within the changes within
the EU? I suppose the qualification would be how would you ensure,
if you were going to look for registration or a licensing scheme,
that the non-supported sector would have the incentives to be
included, or would want to be included? Is this being actively
followed?
Mr Morley: You have touched on
a problem in the sense that you have supported livestock sectors
and unsupported livestock sectors. Now, you could theoretically
make a case in relation to changes under the CAP and you could
have cross-compliance in relation to animal health plans, but
then you could only apply cross-compliance to the supported sector,
and you have sectors—pigs and poultry—which are unsupported,
for example, although ironically there is probably more evidence
of health plans in the pigs and poultry sector than in the supported
sector at the present time. But the health plan approach is desirable
and will certainly feature in the consultation on animal health
and welfare strategy, and has already been embraced by a number
of assurance schemes.
Q104 Mr Drew: To what extent are
the assurance schemes including the right criteria that we should
be judging the health and welfare of farm animals by? Are these
in their own way too minimal to make that much of a difference,
or would you think that this is something that could in due course
be registrable and would do a lot of the groundwork and save some
of the costs, and undoubtedly would be one of the arguments against
doing this on a proper comprehensive basis?
Mr Morley: We will be consulting
on the particular issue of whole herd plans as part of the strategy
and those are the kind of issues we do need to think very carefully
about.
Q105 Mr Wiggin: Defra is responsible
for policing animal welfare. Can you tell us if the number of
cases of poor farm animal welfare is increasing or decreasing?
Mr Morley: I am not sure we have
figures that will say whether they are increasing or decreasing.
We do get a number of cases every year as you can imagine of cases
of animal cruelty and neglect. They are a very small proportion
in relation to the overall livestock sector; nevertheless some
of them can be severe and we do have powers for dealing with this.
The principal power is the improvement notice under Section 11
which is issued by the State Veterinary Service whereby the livestock
farmer is under an obligation to take steps to rectify any weaknesses
that our State Veterinary Service has identified in relation to
their care. If the improvement notice is ignored there are other
powers under both animal health legislation and the 1911 Act.
There are some weaknesses which have been identified in some aspects
of this which we could address in the animal welfare book.
Q106 Mr Wiggin: I would appreciate,
even if you do not have exact figures on the number of cases going
out—
Mr Morley: We can write to you
on that estimating what we do have.
Mr Scudamore: As far as I am aware
it is more or less level, but we do have annual statistics and
we can send you those.[2]
Q107 Mr Wiggin: I was about to ask
you for an estimate of the number of farms on which animal health
standards need to improve. Might that fall into the same statistic?
Mr Morley: That is very difficult
because you have standards that you can clearly measure improvement
against where there is a very clear sub standard care, and you
are into the realms of illegality there. Then you have a very
grey area of standards which may not be illegal but may not rank
with the best, and that is a difficult area in terms of how you
evaluate that and, again, quality assurance schemes and the animal
health and welfare strategy are ways that we can set standards
based on good standards and the best standards and help people
achieve those, not only in terms of prosecution but in terms of
encouragement and education as well.
Q108 Mr Wiggin: On this subject,
what sort of sanctions can you impose on farms that do not improve?
Mr Morley: They can have the animals
confiscated and can be banned from keeping animals.
Q109 Mr Wiggin: Will the Animal Welfare
Bill be published in draft and be subject to pre-legislative scrutiny?
Mr Morley: That is my intention
at this stage. As you appreciate, there are procedures which it
has to go through in order to receive authority for this but having
had the consultation which is very good, and having had a lot
of response from the general public and from organisations, there
is a lot of support in principle for an improvement in streamlining
of legislation which goes back to 1911, and the way I would like
to address this is to bring forward a bill in draft and allow
another round of consultation on it.
Q110 Mr Wiggin: Lastly, in some parts
of the country it is possible that there will be an absence of
veterinary cover that would normally be available through the
private sector. Would the State Veterinary Service provide veterinary
cover for farm animals where private practices do not exist any
more, and what implications would that have for State Veterinary
Service routine work?
Mr Morley: It is not the function
of State Veterinary Service to step in when there is no private
veterinary cover available. Have we been asked to do that?
Mr Scudamore: No.
Q111 Mr Wiggin: Would you do it if
you were asked?
Mr Atkinson: Certainly we would
take on the statutory functions carried out by LVIs at the present
time, and we are doing that in one or two areas where we are finding
difficulty in getting LVIs to do tuberculin testing but we would
not have any role in provision of routine veterinary care to the
animals on the farm.
Q112 Chairman: Can I get some handle
on the amount of contact that what I might call the world of the
official vet has with livestock farms, either directly through
State Veterinary Service vets or LVIs? Mr Wiggin was talking about
welfare standards but, first of all, how many livestock farms
are there which potentially you can go and visit?
Mr Morley: 150,000 approximately,
but we can give you the figure on that.
Q113 Chairman: This is not meant
to be a trick question but let's say it is 150,000 plus or minus
whatever the margin for error is, how many of those in any one
year might be expected to have some form of "official"
visit?
Mr Morley: They would not expect
to have one every single year—
Q114 Chairman: That is why I said
in any one year.
Mr Atkinson: It would depend on
the sector. We have routine tuberculin testing of cattle herds
and the frequency of that testing depends on the status of the
herd, so if you were a cattle farmer in the south west you would
probably have an official visit every month or so at the moment
but in other parts of the country where we do not have a TB problem
the routine tuberculin test may be once every four years. If you
were a sheep farmer you might never have a visit unless there
was a suspicion of a case of an exotic disease which we were tracing
or following up or if there was an allegation of poor welfare,
a complaint—that is a visit from the State Veterinary Service.
As we have already recognised, there are about 7,000 LVIs out
there, and many of their activities are paid for by the State
Veterinary Service such as tuberculin testing. Many of their other
activities, such as export certification, although they are doing
it in an official capacity they are paid for by the client, but
that gets them out on the farms. However, these are, of course,
the individuals who are the private vets for the livestock industry
and therefore they will be attending as and when requested to
do so by the farmer, and we do not have really any information
about how big the service that is needed might be.
Q115 Chairman: Do I get the impression
from what you have just said that if the strategy in whatever
shape or form emerges it is going to require a lot of self-policing
by the livestock industry of whatever elements go into it, because
if there are 150,000 potential places to go and visit you have
not either with State Veterinary Service or LVIs got enough capacity
to go round and check up to see if whatever comes out of the strategy
is being adhered to?
Mr Morley: That is true to a certain
extent but it is worth saying that most farmers will have their
local vet on their farm on regular occasions. Private vets are
given guidance from Defra and through the State Veterinary Service
on a whole range of issues—welfare and disease surveillance—and
we would expect vets to use their professional judgment, and if
they felt there were problems in particular areas to draw them
to the attention of the State Veterinary Service for further investigation.
Q116 Chairman: So does Mr Scudamore
submit a report every so often headed The State of Animal Welfare
in Britain? Does he give you a sort of overview from time
to time?
Mr Morley: There is an annual
overview in the country which we discuss, and we do have an animal
welfare division within the Department who I meet with regularly
in relation to their vets, and they discuss with me areas of concern
and trends within the sector, wherever they are.
Q117 Mr Lazarowicz: This links to
the question of the Department's surveillance strategy and you
rightly refer to the role that private vets play in that, and
in your own strategy document which you launched last year you
emphasised the importance of improving collaboration with vets
in private practice. Could you give us information on how you
envisage doing that, and generally sharing information more widely?
Mr Morley: At the moment the strategy
is not published and it will be in draft, but there is already
a great deal of contact between the Department and the State Veterinary
Service and the private veterinary sector. As I mentioned there
are guidance notes, correspondence and interchanges; our ministry
vets do attend a range of veterinary conferences; they present
papers to various conferences in relation to aspects of animal
care, diseases and epidemiology; there is a lot of regular contact
between the State Veterinary Service, Defra and the private veterinary
sector, and we do want to develop that. Again, going back to the
follow-up from the independent reports, there are issues of making
sure we have a list of private vets who are available to help
in the event of a disease outbreak; there is a need to have updates
in relation to training on being familiar with exotic diseases
and identifying them; and that is an on-going process in relation
to our relationship between Defra and the private sector which
is very close.
Mr Atkinson: I see three initiatives
at the moment which have a bearing on this. The first we have
already talked about which is the development of the animal health
and welfare strategy which is going to be quite key in determining
what the respective roles are and what the partnership might look
like in the future. The second is the development of the veterinary
surveillance strategy which you referred to earlier which, again,
is at a consultation stage where there has been lots of input,
and that input is being considered and I am sure further consultation
will be taking place in due course. Thirdly, we are jointly undertaking
a review with the BVA into the nitty gritty of the contractual
arrangements that we have with local veterinary inspectors where
we recognise that, although this system has worked and served
us well for many decades, it needs revising and modernising and
bringing into line with the modern employment of traditional practice,
and there is work ongoing there to try to define the nature of
that relationship so that, as the emerging strategies begin to
shed light on the precise role of these vets, we have a framework
within which we can deal with that.
Mr Scudamore: On the surveillance
strategy we put out a consultation document and we had about 41
responses which we are analysing. It is our intention to produce
a report on the consultation we have had and what the issues were
that people raised and what the impact of those will be on the
strategy. Then we will produce the final strategy, hopefully in
the autumn, and we will also develop a computerised system for
collecting and analysing information. There are two issues on
surveillance: one is targeted surveillance where you specifically
go and look for something, the question being "Is the country
free from disease X" and we will do a survey, either through
abattoirs or farms, where we could, if we were looking for clinical
information, use practices to do that work for us, or we have
continuous on-going surveillance where we are continually getting
information in and looking to see if there are new events or new
emerging diseases. So both of those areas we are looking at and
both have an important role to play but so do other organisations
like the abattoirs where we look at animal carcasses to see what
diseases they have so there are areas we can look at there. There
is one other area which might be of interest to you: one of the
comments we had earlier was that the coverage by the veterinary
profession is getting worse. We do not know that we are not getting
the surveillance we want so we are going to produce livestock
population maps and on those we are going to map the submissions
we get from the species so that we can get some baseline to work
out whether we are getting the information we want and whether
it is getting worse, or what is going on, and then if we do find
there are areas where we are not getting material we will have
to see what action we can take to get the surveillance information
we need.
Q118 Mr Lazarowicz: We were told
by the Royal College in the evidence they gave us that they felt
that Defra should be developing a strategy for measuring the incidence
of a whole range of endemic diseases. What is your present thinking
on the role Defra should play in the surveillance of non notifiable
diseases? Should that come out of the strategy? Have you got views
on this at the moment?
Mr Scudamore: At the moment Defra
does play quite a big role in non notifiable disease in that samples
which are submitted by veterinary surgeons to the Veterinary Laboratory
Agency are examined to find out what the condition is, and we
have a computerised system where all the diagnoses are recorded
so, from the samples submitted by vets there is a record of the
diagnosis and in the past few years we have modified that so there
is a record of why the sample was submitted because often that
is quite important if a new syndrome or new disease is developing.
For example, with BSE you would be looking for nervous signs in
cattle so we would try and put in place a system that will pick
up abnormal clinical disease and equally that will record what
was found in terms of the diagnosis. So it is important that we
do look at non notifiable disease because often the first occurrence
of the disease will be non notifiable as happened with blue ear
pig disease. There was a new syndrome around which then became
notifiable while we investigated it and then it was denotified
when we had a good idea of the cause, so it is very important
we do look at non notifiable disease and that needs to be built
into the way the surveillance system is expanded and developed.
Q119 Mr Lazarowicz: One area of concern
is how you develop the surveillance network in the area of animals
kept as pets—livestock, cats and dogs, and everything else.
What is your current thinking of how you can include pets in the
surveillance system to identify the potential threats, both to
the animal health and possibly human health as well?
Mr Morley: This is an issue raised
by the British Small Animal Veterinary Association so we are familiar
with this and there are steps being put in place.
Mr Scudamore: There are a number
of different issues here. One is the pet farm animals that are
kept, the pigs and the sheep, because a lot of people have pet
sheep these days, and it is a question of what surveillance we
can put in with those. Really we are looking at a complex of surveillance
and education because I think the most important issue, if we
are looking for notifiable disease in pet animals, is that the
owners recognise they have a problem and do something about it,
so in that case education is going to be the important issue.
The question is how we get information to all these people, and
that is an issue which has caused us some difficulty in knowing
where they are and having the information of where to get to them,
so we then come back to the question of registration and knowing
where these animals are so we can go and see them and get information
to them. I think in those cases a lot of the surveillance for
the notifiable diseases will be by education of the owners to
recognise abnormal conditions and report them to their veterinary
surgeons and also to the government.
2 Note by Witness: See The Report of the
Chief Veterinary Officer-Animal Health 2002. published
by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, June
2003. Back
| 
