Oral evidence

Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee

Vets and Veterinary Services Sub-Committee

on Monday 12 May 2003

Members present:

Mr Michael Jack, in the Chair
Mr David Curry
Mr David Drew
Mr Mark Lazarowicz
Paddy Tipping
Mr Bill Wiggin

__________

Memorandum submitted by the British Veterinary Association

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR PETER JINMAN, President, British Veterinary Association, and MR CARL PADGETT, Honorary Secretary, British Cattle Veterinary Association, examined.

Q1  Chairman: Good afternoon, gentlemen and others who I know have come along to join us this afternoon. Welcome to this, the first of our evidence sessions in our inquiry into the veterinary profession and the veterinary service. The main Committee, of which we form a sub-committee, decided that this was an important area to look into, particularly in the light of the experience of the foot and mouth outbreak and the questions that were raised therein about the state veterinary service and the contribution of the private veterinary profession to that and many other matters. You will be aware that the Committee has also just recently undertaken and published a report on matters connected with TB and again it raises some very important issues which I am sure colleagues will want to touch on in the evidence that we are going to be taking. We have first in front of us the British Veterinary Association, Mr Peter Jinman and Mr Carl Padgett. I wonder if you would respectively identify yourselves for the Committee and tell us what roles you have?

Mr Jinman: Thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity to come and speak today. My name is Peter Jinman. I am currently the president of the British Veterinary Association. I am a practitioner in Herefordshire in a mixed practice and so well in a position to discuss the subject matter of the day.

Mr Padgett: Carl Padgett, another veterinary practitioner from the Lancashire area, much nearer your part of the world I believe. I am currently a member of the British Veterinary Association Council and Honorary Secretary of the British Cattle Veterinary Association.

Q2  Chairman: Thank you for sending us copious quantities of evidence, magazines and other very useful information. I have tried my best to absorb that information. I see in the audience that a very good friend of mine, Barry Johnson, is here so I am feeling very much at home with all this Lancastrian input. One of the themes that comes through from the evidence which the Committee has received so far is the juxtaposition between falling profitability in the cattle sector and what appears to be a question about the amount of veterinary service professional help, which particularly the livestock sector can afford to buy, the implications that that has on the size of the profession, the work the profession undertakes and the relationship that has to some of the statutory work which the veterinary profession has to do. I am thinking obviously about animal health welfare issues. By way of an opening shot on that, I wonder if you would like to comment on whether the livestock sector is financed well enough to continue to employ your services.

Mr Jinman: No doubt the NFU will give you some facts and figures on that. Our perception undoubtedly is that when profitability in an industry and a sector rises the usage of the veterinary profession also rises. When the capital value of stock rises then also it is true to say that the use of veterinary time rises. If one thinks this through, it is not exactly illogical. As a veterinary surgeon, what I will be doing when I go on to a farm is discussing with the farmer the cost of treatment related to the event with which we are dealing. This is very often on a flock or herd basis. When one is dealing with cattle, it is very commonly on an individual basis, when we are dealing with what we term 'fire brigade' medicine. In other words, sick animal, phone call in the morning, go out, see it and then we would discuss what the options are, what the chances of survival are, what the costs of treatment are related to the value to the farmer of that animal. When we are dealing with slightly larger scale herd and flock health problems, clearly we are looking across a group and making a diagnosis or suggestion or indeed hopefully trying to look ahead and plan for the farmer a way to avoid losses and improve the outturn. That is a different basis but it is still always based upon what that industry is looking for in terms of its return and trying to assist that.

Q3  Chairman: What do the economics of the livestock sector currently tell us about the prospects for work in the field of large animals? There is an undeniable common strand that runs through all the evidence again, which says that because of the economics of the livestock sector, the reducing demands for veterinary services, large animal experience, the practices that deal with that are on the decline and there will be implications arising from that.

Mr Jinman: Clearly, it is a market based economy. Therefore, the price varies on demand. One accepts there is also a very substantial subsidy system in certain parts of the country and in certain relationships within the farming system. The difference between that and veterinary medicine in the companion animal sector and the equine industry -- and I am looking there at equine as companion equine rather than the stud or racing area where it is more akin to a market basis -- is that it is profit driven. If there are sufficient funds in it, we will be asked to do the duty of looking after, treating, etc. A good example of this is that a short while ago any male calf born had no value whatsoever. We would go to assist a cow calving, perhaps do a Caesarian section, and immediately bring the calf out and have the sad situation of having it put to sleep. How do we deal with it? How do we dispose of it? If you go back a sufficient number of years, the value of the calf used to cover the cost almost of doing the Caesarian section. It does depend very much on market forces and what is happening in the industry generally as to what response the farmer will have. When we look at the dairy industry, the price of milk has a dramatic effect on demand.

Q4  Chairman: Does that also explain the rise in the small animal work at the expense of large animals? You said it is a market driven economy. Does that mean that the profession is positively opting into small animal work, pets and equine work that you have indicated and saying, "Thanks, but no thanks" to large animal work?

Mr Padgett: There are a couple of strands going on there. One, at the basic practice level where we all have to manage our own businesses and have certain professional staff on board. If there is some down time, it is very expensive down time and one has to develop services appropriately to fill that time. It is surprising how many veterinary surgeons who are mixed start to fill their down time up trying to create more demand for veterinary services in the small animal sector. Small animal work, by its very nature, is much more interesting and gives a lot more job satisfaction by the carrying through of individual cases. It is much more akin to the human medical situation where you can get pretty involved with individual cases. The draw for that on the large animal side is much less. You have to have a much greater understanding of the economics and the general farm situation to get that drive for farm work to deal with population medicine because you are not going to get involved with individual animals. The vets who prefer the individual way of working move much more towards the small animal side.

Q5  Chairman: What are the implications for the way in which veterinary medicine is taught? Is the teaching still broad enough based to give people the knowledge to choose which sector to go into or is it also responding to what the market place is saying?

Mr Padgett: I believe the teaching is broad enough to give them an opportunity to go into any aspect that they wish to go into. One of the problems that exists is the availability of caseload at veterinary schools. The small animal, equine sector seems to have more funding at veterinary schools and access to farm animal cases is much less. I personally believe that, with some degree of restructuring, there is still the possibility of getting students to spend time with farm animal veterinary surgeons who are appropriate teachers.

Q6  Chairman: I noticed that in paragraph four of your evidence, W18, you talk about the increasing feminisation of the veterinary profession and, at the same time, the pressures of doing large animal work do raise issues about 24 hour cover. It says there may be some lifestyle issues creeping into what vets will do and will not do, particularly if those female members of your profession also have family responsibilities. Perhaps you could tell the Committee how those two particular trends enmesh and what it means for the ability of your profession to give a 24 hour cover service, particularly for farm based animals?

Mr Jinman: Our colleagues from the Royal College will give you more detail on some of the demographics because they have done quite a lot on that in the paper to you. The principle is, at the present time, that the profession in this country as in others is becoming predominantly female and it will be so in a few years' time. The outturn from the intake to veterinary schools is predominantly female. There is a difference in lifestyle. There is undoubtedly a statistical truth that the working life is less so there is time out and also time spent with family. Part time working becomes a more important part of the structure. That comes quite difficult to fit into some of the large animal format and is perhaps more easily accommodated within the small animal format where it is based upon a consultation in a surgery. With regard to 24 hour cover, this does mean that there is a requirement. That is true whether it be for small or large animals. What we see in the cities is that the practices get together and, in the larger cities, they will even have full time, 24 hour night time surgeries that purely work at night. The alternative is that there may be a swap over in the smaller animal area between different practices, night cover provided by one practice for another or for a group of practices. In the rural areas, this is not possible because of the distances, depending upon the area. It is done in some areas but in many areas we are dealing with considerable distance and knowledge of the particular countryside. I can assure you that wandering around some of the parts of Herefordshire at night, trying to find farms is not exactly a task that is easily successful unless you have some knowledge of the area. It takes a little while to acquire that. There are potential difficulties and there are just difficulties, full stop, in getting 24 hour cover, contrary to that which is on page 40 of the Competition Commission report on our profession. We would like to clearly refute that particular statement.

Q7  Chairman: There is not a case to have the equivalent of NHS Direct, a Vets Direct, where people can ring a helpline number to get some telephone consultation?

Mr Jinman: We all do that. I did a log on Monday of last week of the calls that came into me when I was on duty on Bank Holiday Monday. In ten telephone calls, one required a journey out, so nine were dealt with purely with telephone advice or were matters that could be dealt with not on the Bank Holiday. We are ahead of the NHS by a long way, I think.

Mr Padgett: Generic advice is very difficult in the rural situation because many of the scenarios are very farm specific, on a individual basis. It is very rare that you would give generic advice, except in the individual animal case where it is exceptionally generic in a very similar way to humans, but on the whole you could be dealing with cases that may have implications for the rest of the herd. The advice accordingly may need prior knowledge of what is going on on that farm so somebody generically answering questions by telephone is not always appropriate if they have not been on the farm.

Q8  Paddy Tipping: All that sounds difficult enough but your role is changing. Could you spell out for us how you think your role might change over the next few years?

Mr Jinman: There are a whole lot of pressures upon the industry and farming. We are dealing here with the farming industry rather than across the whole of the veterinary industry. We are well aware that the small animal has grown from next to nothing. Practices that 20 years ago were 90 per cent farm animal based are now ten per cent or they are giving up the farm side because the cost of servicing it is excessive against its returns. That is perhaps the key problem that we are facing. When you hit about 10 or 15 per cent of turnover coming from large animal return, it becomes quite difficult to service that. Coming back to the role of farming in this country, that is also dependent upon the mid-term review. It is dependent upon the EU policy and position. It is dependent upon government policy and position. The profession has always adapted. Whatever happens, it will adapt; it will cover; it will cope with things. The problem we face is one of the economics of covering distance, of driving a distance to see a individual animal or a group of animals. The likelihood is we are going to move more towards herd health planning and away from the individual case treatment. There is a problem in that and it is one of surveillance. How do we maintain what is required in this country in terms of surveillance? The obvious answer in terms of good surveillance is getting the veterinary surgeon on the farm because the person who is trained in this country is the veterinary surgeon. We have to square that circle somehow to ensure that we manage to get the veterinary surgeon on the farm and improve the education thereby of the farmer, work in cooperation with the farmer; but we still have to be able to provide the income and any expertise, the continuing professional development that the veterinary surgeon will require to provide that service. There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. If the farmers do not know what we can do for them, how do we get there to do it in the first place? A touch of pump priming is going to be required somehow to ensure the system works. At the moment, in those areas where we have TB, we do an immense amount of education at the time we are there doing the TB test. Unfortunately, we always get a little tied up in looking at TB testing instead of saying, "Here is an opportunity. What can we do to add to that TB test that will benefit the farmer and the taxpayer in terms of return?" You are putting an expert on the farm to carry out a particular process but we never take back from it all the other information and education that we carry through at that time. Nobody knows about it because it is never recorded in any form or looked at. The farmer knows because he usually has about ten things he would like to discuss with us when we turn up there that have been hanging around for the last week at least. "I knew you were coming. While you are here, will you have a look at ...?" Those words "while you are here" usually send any veterinary surgeon disappearing so please do not use them to us today. It is an important part of our function to provide that information when we are there, but it is not being used to the greatest benefit for the taxpayer.

Q9  Paddy Tipping: In effect what you are saying is you are going to be asked to do more hygiene, more food safety issues. Is there a case for government to be paying something towards that? There is a notion around, for example, of a whole farm audit. Do you see yourselves fitting into that?

Mr Jinman: There is little doubt that the veterinary surgeon is the cornerstone of this. I would refer you back to the Competition Commission report which I see you have there by you, in which it says that if indeed the decision is made that it is for the public good then the public should pay because they are the beneficiaries. To that end, we would be perfectly happy to see a proper system developed. At the present time, we are in consultation with government with regard to a new contract for the local veterinary inspector, the official veterinary surgeon under the EU rules. We would very much wish to work towards that end because we think that is important. We would add to that the feeling that we really have to get to grips with the concept of a territorial army, if you like, some sort of reserve to back up the state veterinary service because the state veterinary service plainly, as we saw with the foot and mouth situation, is not in a position to cope. Not only is it not in a position to cope; it does not have the knowledge and expertise on the ground that our members do directly. Those vets who are working in an area prove their worth during the foot and mouth outbreak because of their local knowledge and their ability to interface with not just the farming community but the whole community. It was absolutely fundamental. We have to build a structure much as is being done in Australia. They have learned a lot from what happened over here. They have funded vets to come across and they have taken back all they learned and gone through it with a fine tooth comb. They are looking at setting up a reserve. The Americans have done the same. The New Zealanders are doing the same. The Canadians are doing the same. I have just spent the weekend with them discussing this whole subject. Your Committee here is sitting and there are committees sitting in other countries. Reports are being drawn up on the same sort of problem, the rural vets' issue, surveillance and disease control. These are common areas and we are certainly playing our part in trying to discuss it with our colleagues, to try and come up with some helpful solutions.

Q10  Paddy Tipping: While you are here, there are public good issues that the public ought to be paying for in some way. We need to work out a mechanism. There is also a set of territorial cover issues that again are public good issues that need to be paid for in some way by the government.

Mr Jinman: That is absolutely right and there is also benefit to the industry, which is a third strand. Quite rightly, the industry should pay for that. In many of the areas we are talking about, the industry itself has a problem. It is moving away from subsidy as we get decoupling. Perhaps one of the points here is that, where you have decoupling, you have modulation and maybe part of that modulation should be cost compliance and involvement in animal welfare, which is the suggestion within the EU rules. Now of course the OIE also has taken the same sort of view and has a committee looking at that. We are linking welfare with infectious disease.

Q11  Mr Drew: Looking at disease surveillance, following foot and mouth, would you give me an appreciation of whether disease control is better now in this country or is it very little different or is it possibly worse in that we are looking at a lot of pressure on people in the veterinary profession?

Mr Jinman: The jury is out still, looking at this whole subject. Part of the reason for that is that the government has put forward its plan for the next foot and mouth outbreak and how to control it, but it has not run yet any full scale exercises. It has run one or two in-house but it has not run them like the Americans have. The Americans have done two. The Australians have done one and New Zealand has also. Admittedly, the Australian one is a desktop one but it has not got down to the grass roots. Nobody has yet. That takes time. One of our concerns is that we are seeing a considerable number of veterinary surgeons leaving rural practice. We are well aware that there are pockets of the country now where there is difficulty in finding a veterinary surgeon to cover at night in the farming area. Indeed, we are losing some of the expertise in those areas and we are having difficulty getting younger members in. One of the things that we need to do is some proper, statistical work on it. The timescale between your request for information and coming here was a little short to do what I would deem proper survey work. I note that in Australia there was a proper commission that looked at it and indeed in one or two other countries they have settled down and looked at this in a proper, statistical way. The perception undoubtedly is we learned a lot. We would be able at this stage to pick up on where we were but it will not take many years before we will find ourselves in difficulty. Possibly in manpower terms there might be difficulties but I would stress that one of the problems during the foot and mouth outbreak was not the lack of vets. It was the lack of manpower control. It was management that was lacking. We had good people sitting around waiting for jobs to do and going places where they need not. There were a lot of lessons learned there in management terms. We could probably have managed with fewer vets, properly trained, doing the job better.

Mr Padgett: It is the management that we really need to get sorted out. There were many vets inappropriately used and that to a degree disenchanted many of the veterinary surgeons in practice. Arguably, also there was the possibility that we did not necessarily have the expertise being used in the field to deal with the outbreak at that time. As we sit here now, the LVI review is hopefully going to address how that manpower is going to be used in the future and I hope it will address how we are going to draft people in from practices with the relevant experience to be used in the most appropriate manner.

Mr Jinman: We are slightly concerned that we see adequate staffing of veterinary surgeons with practical knowledge within DEFRA. We are aware that there is not a problem in the field service per se, but there is in London, getting them into the centre. As the planning strategy builds from the centre, it is crucial that the input is there. We are certainly working whenever we are asked with government to try and assist in that regard because the expertise we built up with our members during that time was colossal.

Q12  Mr Drew: Clearly you are a key part of the national surveillance programme. Are there occasions when you could be put in an invidious position in that the national surveillance programme is all about the state asking you to early notify; and yet you are employed by individual farmers to see to the welfare of their animals. Disease is not at all a black and white issue. It is shades of grey and yet to be effective we know speed is of the essence. How do you advise your members and how do you try to cope with this growing conflict?

Mr Jinman: This is a question that is often raised within Europe because we are unusual. The LVI system whereby a practitioner changes his coat and is immediately a member of the government service has always been seen as a difficulty. On the whole, we would say we have never had great difficulty in that regard but in one or two of the industries, particularly where we are dealing in poultry and pigs, the confidentiality issue does arise and it has to be considered as to how it can be best dealt with. There has been some consideration with the influenza problems at the moment and this sort of issue is being raised As a generality, I do not believe that it is a great problem. I do market inspection. I see the farmers on one side of the fence as the client who I would know normally. I go round there with another hat on and tell them off if they are doing something wrong. On the whole, it is built on trust and respect. As long as that is there, it is usually the other farmers who will come and tell me if something is wrong. They will say, "Go and look at pen 63," hint, and I go and do it. The farming world is very responsible in its own way. It wants to make sure that it is acting properly. We found during the foot and mouth outbreak that, because of the amount of advice we were giving on the phone and the number of contacts we were making, we were getting to the point of calluses on our rear ends and elbows as we were listening to the farmers day and night, trying to help them. We were the key point of contact. The local vet still remained the key point of contact. There was no difficulty if somebody rang up and said, "We think we may have it. What do we do?" It was a very simple answer.

Q13  Mr Drew: We are talking about non-notifiable diseases as well?

Mr Jinman: Absolutely.

Mr Padgett: Yes, set against any potential conflict of interest of course for the benefits of the relationship. The local knowledge of a veterinary surgeon on that farm is formidable. Things that can be picked up while the veterinary surgeon is on the farm may not be necessarily picked up by any independent association that might be developed. Secondly, by DEFRA's own knowledge transfer work that has been going on through various sources, farmers have identified that they find the veterinary surgeon the most valuable source of veterinary advice and also will take certain advice regarding notifiable diseases and disease control from their veterinary surgeon over and above taking it from DEFRA. They can talk around the subject. They trust that person. They will then accept much more what the private veterinary surgeon is saying.

Q14  Mr Drew: I wonder what your views are on NADIS, the National Animal Disease Information Service? Is this bedding in well? Is it potentially going to make a significant addition to the armoury of information?

Mr Padgett: NADIS potentially provides one part of a very comprehensive surveillance system. What NADIS provides is information about what the individual veterinary surgeon is seeing on the farm. At the moment, it has had a relatively small number of veterinary surgeons involved. I know a number of them and I have just been invited to be one of the contributors in the future. I am learning a little more about the system myself. The one potential problem is that it is anecdotal at the moment and that creates data capture problems. That is where it needs substantial help with development to ensure that all the data capture is uniform across the country. It has the potential to provide some form of regular monitoring of what is going on in terms of conditions in particular on the farm which are affecting animal health, not necessarily notifiable.

Q15  Mr Drew: It sounds as though you welcome this.

Mr Jinman: We welcome any scheme. It has limitations until such time as it is more fully adopted and standardised. It is clearly sensible that some sort of scheme that can record this information is put in place. There have been various other attempts and various other units. Even getting the nomenclature the same across them so that you are clear what you are defining in any particular condition is crucial. There is still a little way to go but, yes, we welcome anything of that sort.

Q16  Mr Drew: Do you think vets will welcome this degree of information sharing because the notion would be that there would be early capture of a disease outbreak that would then work its way up the system through all the different means of communication so vets would be aware in different parts of the country.

Mr Jinman: That is one way it will happen but it is also happening all the time through the journals and letters written about a particular disease. If you look back historically, for example, at BSE, it came out of a practitioner talking about this new disease that he had come across. When various others said, "Me also", we realised we had a problem. The same with digital dermatitis. A practitioner wrote a letter in to The Veterinary Record and made a comment about it and others soon started saying, "Me also." The system exists as always in novel disease. The advantage of some of these recording schemes is they give better information of the trends of the growth of those particular problems.

Mr Padgett: The outputs must be of use so we can put them into place back on the farm in terms of improving the health situation of the stock.

Q17  Chairman: Is there not a slight problem here? If we go to foot and mouth and we look at a farmer who does not want to have much official or professional help, not running a particularly well organised farm, there is a vulnerability there for disease and problems to occur in the area where your profession is going to be the least likely to be invited in. You are telling us a story here that there is a danger. If we have lots more visits from the vet, we would be on top of every possible new occurrence in terms of disease but does not the foot and mouth outbreak tell us something different?

Mr Jinman: It is a nice idea. If you have knowledge of the farm and knowledge of what is going on, you have a much better idea of how a disease process might be generated and how it might be promulgated around the area. We also have the opportunity of visiting that farm to educate.

Q18  Chairman: You can only go where you are invited.

Mr Jinman: Yes, at the moment this is true. This is one of the questions that arises at the present time if you look at the EU directives in this regard and with regard to animal welfare. There is the suggestion that perhaps farms should have a statutory visit as part of their being. It is one of the peculiarities of our food system that as soon as you take an animal into an abattoir it is inspected all the way though, many times. As it is produced into a format that is consumed, it is still inspected. If it goes into a restaurant in the City of London, it is inspected in the process, but nobody looks at it from the moment of its inception to when it arrives at the abattoir.

Q19  Chairman: What is your view? Should we have a statutory inspection system?

Mr Jinman: I think we have to do a risk analysis and look at a cost benefit analysis on that. We are aware that the EU may well make this recommendation on welfare grounds and I think we are looking at it here as a profession. We are interested in animal health, animal welfare and public health. There is a duty upon us in all three areas.

Q20  Chairman: You were talking about the fact that you had been in discussion with vets from other countries. Are there examples of where a statutory inspection scheme works in countries of high animal welfare and low disease?

Mr Jinman: I would have to have notice of that question.

Chairman: Would you like to have that as my notice and perhaps send us a note?

Q21  Mr Wiggin: Do you think there are sufficient vets to undertake any enforcement activities such as potential farm level good hygienic practice audits?

Mr Jinman: I think there are sufficient. We have been in a period of time when there were not. The Royal College will talk to you about numbers but there is evidence to suggest that we are going to have an output from the colleges which is going to be higher than it has ever been. We also have numbers of vets coming in from Australia and New Zealand. 15 per cent of vets of New Zealand output at any one time are overseas and a high number are here. We also have European colleges with the equivalence of qualification and ability to move across. I would ask you to refer that question to the Royal College for specifics.

The Committee suspended from 5.30pm to 5.41pm for a division in the House

Q22  Mr Wiggin: One of the things that occurred to me as I was walking to the division was that we were talking about how many vets there were. I struck me that there are an awful lot of very qualified people -- I think it takes at least six years to qualify as a vet -- doing things that you were talking about earlier, examining sheep at Hereford Market, which I know very well. Do you think this is the right way to use the rather precious asset that vets represent?

Mr Jinman: I think you are right to question that and we would also look at what we are doing. One of the questions earlier on was saying: where are we going to move to. The point we made on the foot and mouth disease was there was a feeling that in some of the areas we were asked to work it was really a misuse of expertise. Surveillance is the key point here with regard to markets. There is no question that the right set of eyes are those of a veterinary surgeon. It is the best opportunity to look at a group of animals at one time in one place. It is probably the best place you can have. It is a bit like primary school. In other words, one sneezes and everybody gets it in the class. It is much the same in the sense that if you are bringing animals in from all sorts of places and putting them together we do not even have to look at the diseases that we regard as being notifiable but the ordinary diseases. Also welfare. It is a great point for communication, for talking about problems with farmers, not necessarily taking them to court. It is more a case of education. Going back to your numbers game, there are plenty of vets available. How we use them is going to be partly in the market place. In other words, if there is financial return, it is private industry; it has to have a financial return. It is going to work in that area and undoubtedly, when you look at the bill for foot and mouth disease or for BSE, one is bound to say that it might be better to pay a little money into the insurance premium for having a vet in some of these places and the public purse would be better protected on that basis.

Q23  Mr Wiggin: How should the government move towards herd health planning rather than what happens at the moment which is you expect to get a phone call from someone with an animal that is unwell, which is the fire brigade type response you mentioned?

Mr Jinman: The good farmer is already doing that. During foot and mouth, one of the revelations for all of us, particularly for government, was the number of farmers, where they were and where the animals were. It came as a complete surprise: the vast number of sheep in different places and many of them we visited as vets had never seen a vet at all. They carried on farming in their own particular way but there was not a requirement for anybody to come and help or improve them because they were making a return which they considered was reasonable or whatever, or they felt they could not do anything about it. This was a key area of change, of note, that we had to move on to. On dairy herd health, the schemes that my colleagues have been involved in generating are extremely good and are already showing benefits. The problem lies in the marginal areas where farming has huge problems in terms of return. As we move away from subsidy to support, we are going to have to question how we achieve that. My suggestion in the paper we have written to you is to look at this modulation question and see where there can be cross-compliance. I appreciate it may be only a once a year visit. That is a valid argument but we think it is better once a year than not at all.

Mr Padgett: On the herd health side, it is a developing philosophy and the crux of it is a strategic look at how one can plan the health of herds on an individual basis from a practising vet's point of view and also on a local basis, again from the practising vet's point of view. You can get a degree of local veterinary surveillance to see what is going on in your area, to see what you need to plan against, etc. There is also a national aspect. Any information that is gathered by strategically looking at the diseases that are going on on a farm and the conditions on a farm has the opportunity to release information for a national type structure. The proper, strategic risk based management of health on the farm is the way we are trying to look forward, instead of the fire brigade service. Arguably, it is already broken by that stage. Let us try and prevent it being broken.

Q24  Mr Wiggin: When we looked into bovine tuberculosis under David's chairmanship, one of the problems was that one of the government solutions was an increase in biosecurity performed by the farmer which, quite honestly, is going to be different according to the set-up in each individual case. It was difficult for farmers to buy cattle that had not already been tested. One of the problems was that it was very difficult to get a test because vets were so busy. This shortage that I touched one earlier was illuminated by that. Who pays? That is what we come back to. Everything you have said about herd health makes perfect sense but there is a bill for that and, at the moment, that is going to be picked up by the public purse. What you were saying earlier on I am sure is right. Perhaps we should invest rather than end up with a hefty bill when it all goes wrong. Is that fair?

Mr Jinman: Yes, I think that is fair. This is where we do have to look at what is the cost to the industry and the benefit to the industry. It is quite right that the farmer pays in that particular regard but when the bill is going to be picked up by the public I think it is fair and reasonable that the public should look at it. I would also suggest that if the public are funding a fair amount of the support into farming, equally, it is not unreasonable for that payment to be demanded in that way through the system and there is a quid pro quo on that.

Q25  Mr Drew: Whatever one's view of the SVS, the numbers of vets within the service seem to remain reasonably static. I thought I had the message that on the back of not just foot and mouth but BSE and swine fever disease there was a need to increase the number of vets in the SVS; yet, that does not seem to be happening. Can you map out for me the relationship of people in private practice, working with the SVS? I will give two riders. One, there does not seem to be a very high appreciation of the skills across the board in terms of the SVS and that is a perception problem. Secondly, in terms of a crisis, you talked earlier about the management problems of how LVIs are managed. I wonder if those strains would get worse over time, given what we have been through, rather than better.

Mr Jinman: I think it is quite a difficult one to look at. At the present time, the practitioner in his role as a local veterinary inspector is working as an extension of the state service. That is the system here. The number of full time officers is far lower than it would be in France or Spain where there is a full time system of employment. Numbers vary. At the present time, they are slightly higher, I think I saw the other day in a parliamentary answer, than they were a few years ago, but many of those are short term contracts. My understanding is they will come to an end in the summer with a probability at least that they may not continue. The numbers probably will come down again rather than go up. There is going to be a reliance upon the practitioner. We have set out for some time the feeling that we must have a partnership. It is a partnership between the state, the private practitioner and indeed the farming community when we are dealing with farming based problems. We are also very conscious that the next disease problem might not be in the farming sector. For example, the West Nile virus is one of the possibilities and that is in the equine sector. We have to ensure that DEFRA, in whatever form, has, uses and knows how to use the expertise that is already in existence outside its own boundaries. This does mean partnership meaning exactly that we are involved in the process of understanding how they work with us. That needs your public funding. I do not think there is any question of that. Equally, one is conscious that in this country we have six million cats, five million dogs, I have forgotten how many rabbits and so on. In other words, the pet animal sector is a close binding of the human being with the pet. We now have schemes by which pets go abroad and we are already seeing some interesting diseases in this country which we have never seen before. Those are being recorded in the laboratories and by the practitioners. This is reality and we know that the problem is there. Again, it demands that the practising vet works in harmony with the state. We want to foster that and we are trying to build that relationship. We would see that public funds will have to go into that, but we are prepared on the back of that to be audited, educated and work with it as is required in that particular sector. One of the interesting things about foot and mouth disease was that recruitment into the veterinary service went up because more people found out what happened within the state service, because it was a little more opened up, and it appealed to them as a career.

Q26  Mr Drew: It is a bit like wars, unfortunately. You could be recruited for the Armed Services.

Mr Jinman: Exactly. It may be equally as ephemeral or whatever.

Q27  Mr Drew: One final question is the issue of I suppose how you would build, or rebuild, confidence in the SVS given that when I talk to representatives from the SVS they are willing to admit that there is this tension between themselves and private practice. If you had to do three things to help the future wellbeing of the State Veterinary Service from a consultancy point of view - we are asking for free consultancy here - what would they be?

Mr Jinman: I think openness is the first thing that comes to mind. In other words, we want to see systems whereby we can be involved in the process. It is a highly hierarchical business and we saw that during the outbreak; considerable knowledge was in the ground and was not being used to the level it should have been because there was no confidence in the end product. Therefore there were two groups: one in the mainstream thinking they knew best and those on the ground who also thought they knew best, and that is never a good recipe for fighting any war. It requires, therefore, for us in peacetime to make sure we put the structure together. I am not sure I would say there is a particular tension between the State Veterinary Service and practitioners. We work together a lot of the time but it does require two-way communication and that is building slowly. It also requires a fundamental understanding that we are in business in practice and, as such, finance has to be at the right level if it is going to work. We are perfectly prepared and very happy to do it but we are at the end of the day having to earn a living, so figures that are sometimes quoted are unrealistic as to the likelihood of getting vets involved. I would suggest again one of the consequences of Competition Commission may well be that we are going to see fee structure rise anyway and therefore it is something which may have an effect - we just do not know at the present time, but certainly think it is very likely that may happen - and that may equally have some effect on how we build that up in the future. We do seem to have a slight difference between different departments governing how they see the role of the vet and how they see the way forward, and there is a certain tension there which is not easy for us to assist in.

Mr Padgett: The three things that I would pick are increasing communication, backwards and forwards; increased inclusion of private practice in which the decision-making is going on, not so private practice decides or demands what is there but so it can sometimes understand why certain decisions are being made. Those would be two of my three.

Q28  Chairman: Do you think our State Veterinary Service is a good one? How many marks out of ten would you give it?

Mr Jinman: Judging it against what criteria?

Q29  Chairman: Well, it has a certain number of statutory duties which it has to perform; it also has to relate to you in private practice; it has to manage the LVI network - is it any good?

Mr Jinman: The answer would be like the headmaster's report, "Could do better", and I think therein lies the key: as in the headmaster's report one always knew that meant that probably there was a fair amount of areas in which improvement would be looked for.

Q30  Chairman: Where would those be?

Mr Jinman: I think the predominant one would be the communication one, the inclusiveness. You cannot have a "them and us" with disease. It is like the nonsense in my particular county of dealing with foot and mouth disease. I am on the border with Wales and one minute I am trying to deal with the Welsh Assembly and a Welsh body with regard to it and the next I am trying to deal with an English body that is dealing with London. The disease does not notice the boundary; the disease has no idea; the farmers have no difficulty because they have holdings and fields on both sides. The reality is you have to have a centre of policy for a country and a group that will work across all boundaries and work together. Co-operation, communication, then we can work forward and do a good job.

Q31  Chairman: Is the SVS big enough for the task it now has to do?

Mr Jinman: I think with the present challenges that it has it is questionable whether it is. It is having great difficulties coping but I would be more concerned that perhaps within the SVS - and I am being cautious here of separating out vets within it from others who are involved - one of the biggest complaints is that when papers and laws are written they do not have a sufficient practical input. I know some years ago, admittedly when I was talking to somebody with regard to market legislation, and I asked the person if he had ever been in the market when he had written the legislation the answer came back "No". It seems to me that we have to ensure that the people writing the paperwork have had some practical experience as much as we should have of the difficulties they have in writing that paperwork,, that is cross-fertilisation as much as anything else in each of our areas of expertise.

Q32  Chairman: Finally, you mentioned again your international contacts. Is there a State Veterinary Service outside the United Kingdom which has particularly impressed you?

Mr Jinman: I am impressed at the moment not so much by the particular state service but by the degree of consultation and usage and co-operation that seems to be developed. The plans that the Australians are putting together seems to me to have been a very sensible way forward. I am also impressed by the immense amount of time and effort the Americans have put into the Home and Security Bill. The veterinary profession is highly sought after in terms of its views and input into that. There is no consideration of this boundary between human medicine and veterinary medicine because when disease strikes who knows which it is going to harm? Look at the SARS virus at the present time; look at the influenza question in Hong Kong. We are dealing with pigs one minute, chickens the next, and humans the next. Who would have thought that BSE would have been involved in variant CJD? The barrier between human medicine and veterinary medicine must be broken down in the minds of all concerned, whether it be in government or outside. Disease is disease, in whatever form.

Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much for getting our inquiry under way. You cannot withdraw anything you have said but you can add by means of further submission, and I think you very kindly indicated there was more you wanted to say. Please do not feel restricted; the Committee would be very happy to receive any further papers or thoughts from you. Thank you very much indeed.

Memorandum submitted by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR ROGER EDDY, Senior Vice-President, Council Member, MISS JANE HERN, Registrar, and DR BARRY JOHNSON, Past President, Council Member, Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, examined.

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 per cent 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 pushing out 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 ten 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 per cent 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 per cent. Now that is a remarkably low figure. Only ten years ago I used to do some lecturing at Bristol Veterinary School in the final year and at that time over 50 per cent 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.

Q40  Mr Wiggin: Just to finish on this, the one point you did not mention was the income of graduates afterwards. Are the people looking after the small animals earning more than the people who look after cattle? Is that one of the reasons?

Mr Eddy: The BVA are best placed to answer that but certainly in the city areas the small animal practices seem to offer higher salaries than in rural mixed practices. You earn a lot more as a new graduate in London or in Birmingham than in west Wales or Lancashire, where I know they are very mean!

Q41  Mr Wiggin: The problem is then, coming back to Heddon-on-the-Wall, that because farmers are going to have to pay more to have large animal vets to service their sector the price is going to get even higher, and we will see more and more farmers retreating from using vets at all.

Mr Eddy: It is a vicious circle, you are right. As practices contract and other practices travel larger distances, it is going to cost more, yes.

Q42  Mr Wiggin: So how does the government address this?

Mr Eddy: The government has to address it because if they are really going to be successful with their animal health and welfare strategy and their surveillance strategy, which we all believe are very important issues for the next ten years, they will not work if there is not a private practice infrastructure in the livestock areas, so it has to be addressed and it is not helped by reports from the Competition Commission which, if enacted to the full, will have an effect in reducing the profitability of farm animal veterinary practice. You may know that the College was opposed, when the Chief Veterinary Officer came to us in the autumn, to lay TB testing which I believe your Committee supported in the TB report. We are opposed to them at the moment moving to lay TB testers - not because we are against the use of para professionals - we have a distinct policy on supporting increased use of para professionals under veterinary direction - but the change to lay TB testing must be managed through the veterinary practices because, if it goes straight over to lay TB testers, again in these marginal livestock areas the practices will just disappear. 50 per cent of income in farm animal practice in Northern Ireland, Scotland, parts of Wales and even parts of England, is from LVI (?) work so if that went to lay TB testing then those practices would almost disappear.

Q43  Mr Drew: This is more of an observation but I would hope you might just respond to this quickly; there is this myth that there are less farmers out there in terms of pure numbers because what has happened is we have seen the growth of the hobby lifestyle farmer. Now, with the best will in the world these are quite a serious concern because, as we know, anyone can go and buy a sheep - they do not have to have any training whatsoever and they can get, dare I say, some subsidy on that sheep! My concern is, and I would welcome your quick response to this, how you prepare people within the profession who are largely going to be dealing with dogs, cats, budgerigars and so on but who may possibly be brought in by someone with their smallholding to deal with a sick sheep, given that there is this decline in the large animal sector and that those people who are dealing with that side of things are unlikely to be called in to deal with these sick animals. There is a bit of a contradiction in the way in which your profession is going but it has, if you like, to face up to the reality of what is going on out there in whatever world it is.

Mr Eddy: We are heading for two types of livestock keeper. We have the professional, commercial, livestock farmer, who is moving along the lines of health plans and preventative medicine which needs to be developed and encouraged so it is more widespread, but that does not take on board, as you say, the hobby farmer - and there are thousands of them. We addressed this in the Royal Society inquiry on infectious diseases because we saw that these livestock keepers were equally at risk of contracting an exotic disease. Look at all the pet pigs that are kept, those Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, which we know are being fed table scraps - in other words, uncooked swill. Swine fever could develop in those animals and those people would not know, so those are a real risk. This is why the Royal Society came up with the recommendation, which we would support although we would not support licensing, that all keepers of livestock - whether it is pet goats, pet sheep, pet cows, pet pigs, whatever - should be registered on a DEFRA database and they should have registered the name of a veterinary surgeon and they should submit some form of health plan at least once a year. Now that health plan does not have to be as elaborate a health plan as you would expect from a commercial farmer with 300 dairy cows and so on, but at least there would be a contact, and that contact would educate and help train these people to identify notifiable, infectious diseases and what they should do about it if they see signs.

Dr Johnson: You asked what would happen - well, what would simply happen is that the small animal practice would refer them to a large animal practice, just simply to have the equipment and expertise. Trying to handle a 200 kilo Vietnamese pot-bellied pig with a small black bag is just not an option, so they would send for a vet from a large animal practice to travel some distance in order to see it.

Q44  Mr Drew: The worry is if there is a disease outbreak that is where the pressure of time --

Dr Johnson: I think some of us have discovered, both in foot and mouth and going into other areas to help the TB crisis, that there are enormous numbers of these animals and there is no veterinary input into them whatsoever, so we could have an emerging, notifiable disease developing and nobody would have any idea until it developed into the larger lifestyle units.

Q45  Mr Wiggin: Are you seriously suggesting that the two chickens I have in my garden should be registered? Is that what you want to see?

Mr Eddy: I am seriously suggesting that certainly foot and mouth and swine fever is susceptible. The chicken situation probably is not because the poultry industry being so integrated they can deal with most of the notifiable diseases and exotic diseases within the confines of the industry, and they say themselves they are not too concerned about the backyard flocks. I have heard that said from the evidence given by the Poultry Veterinary Association to the Royal Society inquiry.

Q46  Chairman: I have never seen a member of our Committee look so relieved!

Mr Eddy: Certainly the goat will have to be registered!

Mr Wiggin: I have not got a goat!

Q47  Mr Lazarowicz: On that point, I was interested in what you said about the numbers of animals, livestock, being kept as pets. What kind of figures are we talking about? Have you any idea at all?

Mr Eddy: I do not think anybody knows. There was an anecdote that before foot and mouth one vet in Essex said, or somebody counted, that there were 300 holdings in Essex which had foot and mouth disease susceptible livestock on which there was no veterinary input. DEFRA must have some data on this from the Cumbria foot and mouth experience. I know they came across large numbers of holdings with animals on with no veterinary contact. Now, they must have in their data system somewhere a foot and mouth database, and I think Dr Johnson knows more about that.

Dr Johnson: Yes. It comes down to what you call "pet". Do you call 20 sucklers pets? Five sheep? One goat? Clearly these are not productive farms but there are a lot of these small holdings which are great worry to us.

Q48  Paddy Tipping: One of the themes of discussion today has been about promoting a wider animal health strategy, a kind of change in focus. What is the College's view on this, and what are you doing to promote that?

Mr Eddy: We have been very supportive of the DEFRA move in the whole area of consultation on the animal health and welfare strategy as well as the surveillance strategy, and of course they should really be interlinked. Having developed your animal health and welfare strategy then you attach your surveillance, and perhaps they should be looking at the animal health and welfare strategy first. But it is desperately important to develop that and agree priorities, agree what needs to be dealt with, what diseases perhaps can be left on the back burner, and how you are going to deal with new incursions of exotic diseases because next time it will not be foot and mouth. It could be Western Isle fever, Blue Tan - any amount of equine diseases - so we have to have a strategy which is going to take into account the risks from a whole range of developing new and emerging diseases, as well as the endemic diseases. My model for dealing with endemic diseases is that I believe that DEFRA should, through its surveillance strategy, develop strategies for surveillance, for measuring the incidence of a whole range of endemic diseases, and then talking with the industry as to how one deals with those diseases. A number of European countries now have eradicated infectious bovine rhinotracheitis (IBR); BVD is being eradicated in a number of European countries; leptospirosis has been tackled in some countries - many of our partners in the Union are totally free of bovine TB - so our track record on many diseases in cattle is not that good in many respects in this country, and I believe that the role of DEFRA is to identify the incidence and the prevalence and then talk to the industry on financing - not publicly but how the industry should finance - disease control or eradication, if appropriate. If our European partners go down the line of eradicating these highly infectious endemic diseases and we do not, then they are going to use that as a barrier to trade.

Q49  Paddy Tipping: There is a lot in that but let's pick up on a couple of points. We are being told that in the more marginal areas the number of visits are getting less and less. How can we have a national surveillance strategy against that background? What is your prescription? What should we be doing?

Mr Eddy: We have to ensure the continuing maintenance of veterinary services in these marginal areas, and we have addressed two or three issues there, and I would hang my hat on the Royal Society recommendation which is at consultation from DEFRA at the moment in the context of biosecurity, and that is that all keepers of livestock should have some form of health plan. That would be a start and would create a market for health plans for those livestock keepers who are not commercial farmers. If you have a health plan running at the moment, then you would not need to be a part of that exercise. That would create a demand and keep veterinary services in those areas.

Q50  Paddy Tipping: And the issue then is how you fund that, because what you are saying to us is by regulation you have a need for a health plan. Would it be the keeper - him or herself - paying, or is there a public goods consideration here, that the public purse ought to be paying?

Mr Eddy: I do not think the College has a view one way or the other. I could give you a personal view which is that there is no reason, I believe, that the livestock owner should not pick up the tab; it should be a part of his responsibility. If you keep livestock, animals, you have a responsibility to look after those animals and to do what is necessary - it does not matter whether it is a dog or a cat or a cow or a herd of cows. You have a responsibility to ensure optimum welfare, and in terms of your other fellow keepers of livestock, your neighbours and so on, you have a responsibility to be aware of the dangers from infectious disease. So my personal belief is that the keeper of the livestock should pick up the tab.

Q51  Paddy Tipping: If we move towards the notion of an annual audit, to have a whole farm approach and a method of support that is radically different - and all these things are conceivable - some people would then say perhaps the public purse ought to be picking up the tab.

Mr Eddy: You can take this on. Another role is going to be the HASAP approach in the area of food safety which is being talked about in the European Commission at the moment and which I am sure you are aware of, moving some of the controls and checks from the abattoir back to the farm - which make sense because at the moment all sorts of material can go into the abattoir by which time it may be too late. Now some of that could be an argument on the one hand for public health and public safety and therefore the tab should be picked up by the public purse. I have heard a counter argument as well that it is up to the supplier of the product to ensure that that product is safe and fit to eat and so on, therefore it is their responsibility to pick up that bill and to ensure its safety, and the College would not have a view on who should pay for that and what should happen.

Q52  Chairman: Picking up on the question of who pays for what, the impression I have so far is that there are plenty of vets around and if they are managed properly then we can have the kind of surveillance system we want and health plans we want, but if any of the elements we have talked about in the animal disease chain go wrong, particularly in the large animal sectors, the nation ends up by paying a very big bill. It was £4 billion plus from foot and mouth. It is quite difficult to get the balance in what you are saying as to whether what we need is a better managed veterinary service. In those areas where in the case of large animals it goes pear-shaped you have the lack of fit between farmers who cannot afford to employ your services but, on the other hand, if there is a disease outbreak it is the public who pick up the tab. How do you resolve these two seemingly irreconcilable positions?

Mr Eddy: It is important that we do some analysis as to whether or not we killed far more animals than we needed to in 2001. We have written to the Committee on that issue, and I firmly believe that that does need to be investigated - that if we had a similar outbreak, would we do the same and make the same mistakes again? That is one issue. The other issue is that on the 2001 outbreak, on 19 February when it was first picked up in Essex the disease was already present on at least 57 farms incubating away from Scotland to Cornwall and all the counties between because of the market situation and because of a farmer who had never had a vet on the premises, so some of the suggestions we have been talking about, like some form of registration of livestock keepers, some form of recognition, that they must have a veterinary contact, hopefully would either drive some of these keepers out of business, because I do not think they are supported by the farming industry, or it might mean that one might be able to get through to some of them that the veterinary contact is a valuable aid and disease would be detected long before it was spread across the country.

Q53  Chairman: Is our State Veterinary Service the right size for the job it has to do?

Mr Eddy: The problem with the State Veterinary Service's size is that in a national disease, even if it is 16 outbreaks of swine fever in East Anglia which stretched the State Service beyond its size at the time and they had to call on help from the private sector, you cannot staff the State Veterinary Service to cope with a foot and mouth outbreak because for most of the last 34 years they have had nothing to do, so you just cannot do that. But we were concerned at the Lebrecht review on the State Veterinary Service seven or eight years ago which reduced the number of divisional officers. There used to be 73 regional divisional officers in the State Veterinary Service 15 years ago and at the beginning of foot and mouth there were 23. They are a very important level of management within the State Veterinary Service, the divisional veterinary officer and the local divisional veterinary managers. They closed a number of divisional offices so the poor guy in the north of England in Carlisle has to deal with all the farms in Cumbria, Northumberland and County Durham, east coast to west coast - an impossible task. In our part of the world, Somerset and Dorset have merged and Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, so Gloucestershire has to deal with farms down in Salisbury and East Wiltshire and so on. So there are huge areas that they are asking these divisional managers to manage, and I think with that you lose the local knowledge and the local contact.

Q54  Chairman: Picking up on that, there is a circular argument here. Earlier we heard evidence that suggested that there was not enough large animal experience, enough practice experience in the State Veterinary Service, and we have just heard we need perhaps a different structure at divisional office level and more of them. How do you start to manage those key elements to ensure that, firstly, private practice has enough people with the right experience in the vulnerable areas and, secondly, that that experience gets passed into the State Veterinary Service in such a way that you have a structure that when the chips are down means it works properly?

Mr Eddy: The problem with the last 15 years is the shortage of United Kingdom graduates, we know that, and the State Veterinary Service has had the same problems as private practice has had in recruiting. Whereas I think twenty years ago the State Veterinary Service insisted upon experience in practice before they would take them on, more recently they have taken on relatively recently qualified graduates because it was all that was available, if you like. I would suggest that when we move into a situation which we are predicting over the next five years or so of the graduate numbers and the demand of people coming more into balance, some of these problems will be resolved simply because of the increased numbers coming out of the veterinary schools.

Q55  Chairman: Is the State Veterinary Service an attractive or unattractive place? The State Veterinary Service is not the resting place for vets who never made it in private practice, is it?

Mr Eddy: You said that, Chairman!

Q56  Chairman: I ask the question because I want to know. I give you an example: the Crown Prosecution Service has often been criticised because it is said not to have the same calibre of legal advice as, if you like, in private practice so is there a parallel with the State Veterinary Service?

Mr Eddy: I think it is true to say that historically the State Veterinary Service was seen to be a resting place for those who had brucellosis and those who could not make it in private practice. It was not totally made up of these people: there are some very competent members of the State Veterinary Service, particularly in the policy areas and Weybridge and Tolworth as it then was and now in Page Street. Interestingly, a comment from the Chief Veterinary Officer made to us a few months ago - and I think the BVA made this point earlier - was that following foot and mouth a number of people who were working on foot and mouth realised in fact that epidemiology and population - medicine, disease control - is quite an interesting area of work, and the State Veterinary Service are up to full complement at the moment - perhaps they need to have more in terms of being allowed to have more but they are up to full complement - and they have I am told recruited some quite high calibre people who have come in because they have realised that it could be an interesting area of work. Perhaps you could say that is the problem of State Veterinary Service in that it has not marketed itself before, but we needed a war to recruit the soldiers so whether that will continue time will only tell.

Q57  Chairman: Can we finally move to the question of the Competition Commission inquiry into veterinary medicines? The message I am getting from you is that their recommendations could well harm the finances of the profession to the extent that simply selling professional services to people with animals without the back-up of being able to sell treatments and medicines, etc, along with them could be the final nail in the coffin of things like large animal services? Is that too overdramatic a summary of the situation?

Dr Johnson: That sums it up, particularly in marginal areas where the large animal people are in small practices as opposed to the large areas we come from where the process of drugs and supplying them at very competitive rates is the norm. In the marginal areas it is more difficult for the one man large animal practice buying small amounts - he can only supply those and make a profit out of them, which subsidises going to see the pot bellied pig.

Q58  Chairman: But the NFU, who are coming to give evidence in a minute after you, question this. They welcome the Competition Commission's inquiry into this issue. They like the idea of cheaper medicine because we started from the point of view of livestock farmers who are not making any money, so is it not a circular argument? If you have cheaper medicines, you put a bob or two back in the farmers' pocket so they can pay a bit more for your services?

Dr Johnson: Have you ever seen farmers who do not want something cheaper?

Q59  Chairman: Well, we all want it cheap but what is the best way of funding your service? Should it be a question of being cross-subsidised from the sale of veterinary medicines, or should we have profitable veterinary practices because there is lots of work and profitable farms because they are getting it at good value for money?

Dr Johnson: You could have both because if people are supplying medicines they have a right to make a profit in the same way as you buy sweets or cars, and if you go down the route of these small marginal areas of buying medicines on dot com systems, then that will remove the percentage of profit that those practices now make.

Q60  Chairman: Do you think there should be a menu of charges so that farmers can see what is what? In other words, the cost of the medicine and the cost of the treatment?

Dr Johnson: Absolutely, and most practices have always done that - putting out the cost of the drugs, the cost of the visit, the cost of the consultation, the hourly rate. Those are freely available.

Q61  Mr Lazarowicz: Will you be modifying your guide to professional conduct, in case the Competition Commission places some restrictions on the veterinary surgeons publishing the prices they charge for medicines? Would you consider changing your code of practice?

Mr Eddy: There are a large number of admirable recommendations from the Competition Commission and a number of them we have no problem with at all, and if they want us to put a notice board up with ten commonly used medicines and their prices we have no problem with that. We are going to be changing our guidance on advertising in the next review of the guide, and we have no problem there either. The problem we do have, and again this is really the BVA but it affects all those in practice, is being told that you cannot charge for work that you are doing, and that we found rather odd.

Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for your contributions. You are not able to take away that which you have said but if, as a result of our questioning, there are further points you want to send to us to emphasise points in your existing evidence or additional points we would be pleased to hear from you.

Memorandum submitted by the National Farmers' Union

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR TIM BENNETT, Deputy President, MR NEIL CUTLER, Chairman of Animal Health and Welfare, and MR PETER RUDMAN, Veterinary and Public Health Adviser, National Farmers' Union, examined.

Q62  Chairman: We welcome the National Farmers' Union. Mr Bennett is a regular appearer before the Select Committee or the Sub-Committee so he needs no introduction. He holds the office of the Deputy President of the NFU. Mr Bennett, would you care to introduce for the record your colleagues?

Mr Bennett: Thank you very much, Chairman. I have Neil Cutler on my left who is a dairy farmer from Hampshire and is Chairman of Animal Health and Welfare Committee, and Peter Rudman who is our animal health specialist.

Chairman: Thank you very much for coming. I would like to move to Bill Wiggin for questions.

Q63  Mr Wiggin: What complement of permanent veterinary staff should the State Veterinary Service require, do you think?

Mr Bennett: In a sense that is a difficult question for farmers to answer. From the farmers' perspective what we want is a very good State Veterinary Service with very good links to the private veterinary service. In a sense those links will determine the number of full-time State Veterinary Service people, and I think this link to the private veterinary service is critical in determining the size of the State Veterinary Service. More important from our perspective, looking back over events, is that the State Veterinary Service is clear about its role and the management and the administration. We would have some big questions about the ability to manage disease outbreak and the skill of people to manage disease outbreaks that was mentioned earlier - you have people managing large areas and large numbers of people. Also, frankly, in terms of administration, if you look at TB we would have some question marks about the way the control strategy is being administered.

Q64  Mr Wiggin: How much responsibility should the State Veterinary Service have for non notifiable diseases?

Mr Cutler: There is really an area of co-ordination, which is the point of where we start from. Our view is that we have to define the animal health and welfare strategy first, then the role of the State Veterinary Service within that, but if we have an integrated approach, specially the bottom-up approach that has been talked about before in terms of herd health planning on farms, where private vets do some element of the surveillance and there is a flow of information through the system, then there is a co-ordinating role for the State Veterinary Service for elements that are not within their statutory remit that could be very useful, because at the same time the private system within an integrated system is providing information that they have a statutory responsibility for, so you have a trade-off in that if we have an integrated system the private sector can provide some of the information that the state sector requires, and at the same time can be useful on the elements that they do not have a statutory responsibility for but can have a co-ordinating role on.

Q65  Mr Wiggin: That is how you would like to see an integrated communication system between the State Veterinary Service and the farmer?

Mr Cutler: Yes.

Q66  Chairman: Picking up on that line of questioning, one of the reasons why the Committee are very interested in this area is the ability of the State Veterinary Service to manage, in the first instance by prevention of and where necessary by reaction to, the outbreak of a severe animal disease. From your practical point of view, do you think we have got an State Veterinary Service that is up to it? Is it properly organised to deal with those two challenges? If not, what is the message to the government to get it right?

Mr Bennett: Again, coming back to the administration, if you have a State Veterinary Service that has a controlled disease it needs to know where the animals are so it would be quite useful if it were at least known where all the keepers of animals were and what sort of animals they had. In a sense, for the State Veterinary Service to be able to do the role and what is envisioned, they need to know where the animals are.

Mr Cutler: We found it very disappointing, for example, that the British Cattle Movement Service was set up as a mechanism for disease control specifically in BSE but at the moment does not appear to be performing that function, and is not able to be used by the State Veterinary Service or by private vets in a particularly efficient way. You have a separate database system, and we see it in TB controls all the time. There is a huge amount of very out-of-date administration there. There is a lot of handwritten forms when the information should be able to be downloaded from the BCMS - there is a lot that is very archaic within the system. It is not a question of absolute numbers; it is a question of defining the role first and then finding out how to make it work better.

Q67  Chairman: Perhaps I might just ask you, Mr Cutler, whether you would care to jot down and expand on some of the archaic nature of the some of the things you do have to put up with, particularly if it inhibits the quality and the effectiveness of the way the State Veterinary Service operates. Let me move to the economics of State Veterinary Service services, because there are some important issues as to whether, particularly in the livestock sector, it is generating sufficient revenue - nay even profitability - to employ veterinary services perhaps with the frequency that is needed to do all the business about planning animal health disease, surveillance and so on and, on the other hand, having a strategy to deal with some of the threats to the livestock sector. It does question whether farmers themselves in the livestock sector are adopting different plans now as to when they use their vets. All of this is a circular argument because it does affect the experience of the veterinary profession in operating in the large animal sector. Would you like to comment on some of the stresses and strains in that area and what it means in reality to our veterinary services?

Mr Bennett: In terms of agriculture and facing more competition and being competitive around the world, obviously one has to make sure that all input costs are economical and reasonable. What you find with veterinary costs as a farmer is that on top live management you have to use your vet in a very professional manner. If you are getting top live performance from your animals, in whatever sector, and you have a good relationship with your vet you are more likely to be profitable but it is this professional relationship. What we have to do is add to this professional relationship so that it is a partnership in developing a strategy. I looked at the spending by farmers for the government's farm business survey, and the percentage they spend on vet and medicine costs in terms of percentage of their variable inputs is much the same as it was five years ago, so farmers are looking at costs and what they are spending but what I cannot do is break down the difference between drugs and professional services.

Mr Cutler: We have looked at how health planning can be integrated into an animal health strategy and talked to farmers and the basis of a health plan through farm assurance, for example, is often seen as an imposition because the benefits are not being sold to them. It is interesting that in the previous evidence members of the veterinary profession talked about there not being demand. Part of it is because they have not created demand by selling the services and showing the benefit, and I think there is a need to develop the strategy within the veterinary profession and the information to be able to sell the cost benefit to farmers of a health plan. At the moment it is all seen as a cost rather than a benefit in lots of ways yet, as has been referred to, the top producers know the benefit; they have worked it out for themselves. What we need is more tools to demonstrate the benefit of the planning and the preventative approach.

Q68  Chairman: On this area of questioning can I just ask whether you think there are enough vets presently available with large animal experience? Are you finding any messages of shortages of services that your members would like to buy from the veterinary profession?

Mr Bennett: There is a failing out there, particularly in certain parts of the country, and to be honest in areas where there is very heavy workload in terms of TB testing there is sometimes difficulty in getting adequate veterinary services, and what we cannot judge is whether that is because we are catching up in terms of TB and trying to get on top of the disease, particularly post foot and mouth. My suspicion is that there are probably plenty of vets about and probably enough good large animal vets about. There is concern about that but what is important is that it is people with the right skills. The professional industry we have is developing more and more but what farmers will want are professional services because they are in that sort of area where you have to be professional to survive and they will want to pay for the services of good professional people, and we are worried about the supply of that for the future.

Mr Cutler: There are some very forward-thinking vets who are developing methods of selling their services. It takes time but I think that cultural shift from recognising that you are sort of service provider to recognising that you have knowledge and you are selling that knowledge effectively is where we want to get to. At the moment they are a fire brigade profession that has the knowledge and when people ask for it they will sell it for a price, but it needs to be turned around so that they are actively selling a positive service that will provide an economic benefit to their customers.

Q69  Paddy Tipping: I would like to pursue that. In the more marginal livestock areas, let's be clear, there is not a lot of money and profit around, and we hear that the number of visits is getting less and less. Now that has implications for disease surveillance. How do we ensure that we get national disease surveillance?

Mr Cutler: That is a difficult question in those marginal areas, and there is still room for development. One can look at the different livestock sectors, and effectively pigs and poultry are almost there, in terms of having specialist vets who are providing health planning and broader advice like feeding advice and housing advice. It is there to a certain extent within the dairy sector and it becomes less and less as you move into pigs and sheep. There is still room to develop the sale of services to sheep farmers but in a way we need the economic information as to what the benefits could be, and these are not particularly broadly available. If it then shows that there is no way that the industry can afford it then we need to look at other mechanisms to fund it - to fund the surveillance or annual visit. As a farmer I do not feel we actually have that information yet. It may be there but it is not in the form that it can be used, and I think that is more to the point.

Q70  Paddy Tipping: One of the things I picked up during this afternoon's discussion was this phrase "whilst you are here we will have a look at so-and-so". The professionals have been saying to us that they have an educative role in terms of biosecurity or animal health or food safety. Is that a service that they should be selling?

Mr Cutler: Certainly with biosecurity I do not see that it should be separated from a health plan. Biosecurity is part of a health plan; it is about prevention. Now, there are broader issues about biosecurity affecting the wider community as well and so there are some costs or benefits that accrue to the individual producer and there are some that accrue to the broader region or whatever. Again, in separating out the cost and the value and the benefits it would be useful to perform some of these exercises to see where it can be achieved from the market and where it can be achieved or where it needs to be effectively subsidised.

Q71  Paddy Tipping: But is not part of the vet's role to pass on knowledge to you and your stockmen, and who should pay for that?

Mr Cutler: Again, if that relationship has changed and the vet is seen as a professional adviser who has provided information and benefit, then that educational role can be provided in that way.

Mr Bennett: The farmer will pay for professional advice that aids his business. What we are about here in terms of animal welfare and disease is to prevent, and if your prevention policy is good because you have very good professional advice you get a return on your money. Perversely I have to point out that if you are good at prevention it sometimes means you spend less on vet services because the vet has been successful, and I think that is important.

Q72  Paddy Tipping: Tell me about NADIS? Does it work? Is it effective?

Mr Cutler: It is a very useful guide and those that are involved are enthusiastic about it. I have heard criticism that it is not strictly scientific and statistically relevant in all cases because there is an element of subjectivity in the reports, but certainly those that are involved in the reporting are very enthusiastic. It shows what can be done within the private sector because it has been subsidised by the drug companies and not by the government as far as I know, and is a good model that could be developed further, but I think it has a way to go. Farmers use the information but I am not sure it is as broadly understood or recognised as it could be. Farmers' Weekly Interactive shows the results and it is a question of how many farmers are looking at Farmers' Weekly Interactive!

Q73  Mr Drew: We have touched on this already so I am not going to spend very long asking you to elaborate but on the health and welfare strategy of the government, at one end we have the farmer who has now been asked to produce these health and welfare plans, and standing next to the farmer is the private veterinary practitioner. Outside the private veterinary practitioner we have the State Veterinary Service and superimposed on that DEFRA officials and so on. Is that a happy continuum, or should there be really much more devolution down to the farmer and the veterinary practitioner to be the driving force of this health and welfare strategy?

Mr Bennett: Briefly, Neil has been heavily involved in working on this strategy but the strategy will not work if the farmer is involved right from the early stages of a strategy like this. You need to feel completely involved in the process and in how you control disease and how you prevent disease, and I think that lesson has been learnt from foot and mouth disease because most farmers did not know what the contingency plan and the strategy was on day one, so I think that is a lesson that has been learned. But do not underestimate the industry. It was the industry who started farm assurance to make sure the consumer was happy with our end of the supply chain, and it was the farmer that developed farm assurance schemes and health plans, so we have a role to play here because we identified this some time ago and we have great potential if it is done in the right way and sold in the right way. Some farmers I know and some sectors in particular are nervous about this concept, but I think we as farmers could deliver this and are a key part of delivering the strategy, because we already have some ideas how to do it.

Mr Cutler: We went to look at the French Groupment system which is effectively a co-operative, regional or department-based system that is run as farmer animal health co-operatives who work with the vets on the strategy in that local region and buy into it because of that - they can see a local benefit. For example, the Dijon department we looked at first were TB free, so they had no TB testing but they all agreed that anything imported was tested. They were brucellosis free and they were working at BVD and IBR at that stage. They could see a benefit of selling the local product as being free of those diseases but also, of course, disease control is so much more effective if you can do it over an area. Now I think it would be ambitious for us to get to that stage very quickly but the key to a strategy that will work is to have farmer involvement at the bottom believing that it is of value to them. We need to adapt that, so the important thing is to get the health planning showing an economic benefit as part of the strategy.

Q74  Chairman: Why is it ambitious to hold back from doing that here?

Mr Cutler: I think it needs to evolve. It does not need to be seen to be being imposed, let's put it that way, because if farmers feel it is being imposed from above they will not buy into it. They will buy into it if it seems a genuine benefit from ground level and enthusiasm can be built from the ground up. That is one of the areas we would like to develop.

Q75  Mr Drew: One way to do it is to make it one of key components of the CAP reform - that you would pay farmers to have a health plan and you would say that as part of that health plan they would have to have regular checks with their own vets and these would have to be both registered and published, and this would clearly hopefully drive up standards. Is that not a good way? It is not imposed; it is an incentive, and you get paid for doing this.

Mr Cutler: The balance is how much of it can be sold as an economic benefit to yourself and paid for yourself, because there is an element of benefit there and, again, the work has not been done yet to develop the models where perhaps a vet can come on to a farm with the software that says, "You have put in your farm details and, for these diseases, if you get them, it will cost you this and this is the prevention strategy". That is the sort of thing that demonstrates the savings and production gains that can be made. So there is an element that can come out of the market effectively if it is marketed correctly; there is an element of incentivising that could be useful; and there is an element of regulation that could be useful as well, and it is finding the balance between them that will cause the strategy to progress from the bottom up.

Mr Bennett: In terms of cross-compliance, that is fine for those that claim support and in return for getting that support there is an issue of cross-compliance, but of course there are many thousands of farmers who do not claim support and we are in an animal disease and welfare strategy and we want to capture all of those. Our judgment is that for what I would call the professional farmers building for the future we are already well down the road that Neil has described, and we have to find a way of taking all of the industry that way.

Q76  Mr Drew: Do you include within that hobby farmers? Because this is where it will break down. I saw you look askance at the back at the points I was making but I know you would be sympathetic in that if you have someone with two sheep next door to you who is letting them run amok those animals could be just as liable to disease. Where and how do you draw the line?

Mr Bennett: Firstly, we need to know who are animal keepers and where they are kept purely for disease purpose in case there is a major outbreak, but we are constantly being told as farmers that we have to keep our business biosecure. In terms of poultry units it is a little easier but for a cattle keeper like myself, if I have next door to me, no matter how well-fenced, animals who are not monitored and who never see a vet they are a potential risk to my business, so to me it is pretty obvious that we need to know where anyone is who keeps animals. That is to the benefit of the state. For the benefit of me as an individual these people need to act professionally if they keep animals otherwise they should not have them.

Mr Cutler: I am afraid I think the court is out as to whether chickens ought to be included in that. My mother-in-law tells me that in Norfolk Bernard Matthews made sure that no one kept turkeys around. He basically said "Get rid of your turkeys, we will provide them for free at Christmas", and for years she had a free turkey from him for disease control purposes. They did not want people to keep them.

Q77  Chairman: Is this an offer from the NFU of free chickens at Christmas?

Mr Bennett: I think the best offer I can make is that chickens should be included but we will not insist on passports for them!

Q78  Chairman: We will move from generosity to matters of commerce, in conclusion. You heard me raising the question of the Competition Commission report with our previous witnesses. Do you really think that it would have a measurable impact on the economics of the livestock sector? If you do, which is what your evidence suggests, what would be the effect thereafter on the demand for veterinary services?

Mr Bennett: We believe in terms of the world we live in today that we need very transparent supply chains on inputs and outputs, and I think in terms of the veterinary profession it is no different. We have to be able to make sure that we are operating in a world that is transparent and clear. Funnily enough I regard the ability to have more competition in terms of drugs as an opportunity for the veterinary profession because I believe that what has been holding it back is that on the back of the Competition Commission it has to go out and sell its excellent professional services. As a farmer I want to be able to pay for good professional advice and I want to know what I am paying for. For any other profession, be it accountants or any other profession, I pay for the work that they do, and so I am not as pessimistic as some of those who have given evidence about this. If you live in a transparent world and are given choice professionals who offer good service always come out on top, so I think this is a storm in a tea cup. We live in this transparent world, we have to live within it with everything we do, so does everyone else.

Q79  Chairman: On that optimistic and hopeful note, may I thank you most sincerely for your patience and your evidence, and as always, if there is anything else you would like to say to the Committee in the light of what you have heard this afternoon or any subsequent evidence sessions, do feel free before we produce our report to let us have your further thoughts.

Mr Bennett: Thank you. We will probably come back to you on your suggestion on administration.

Chairman: And free chickens! Thank you.