Oral evidence

Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee

(Vets and Veterinary Services Sub-Committee)

on Wednesday 16 July 2003

Members present:

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

__________

Witnesses: PROFESSOR SIR DAVID KING, Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, and PROFESSOR JOE BROWNLIE, Head of Pathology, Royal Veterinary College, examined.

Q194  Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. May I welcome to this meeting of the sub-committee into vets and veterinary services Professor Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser, and Professor Joe Brownlie of the Royal Veterinary College. Gentlemen, you are doubly welcome not only because you are here but you volunteered to come and talk to the Committee. Some witnesses on some committees have to be dragged, but you came under your own steam and we are very grateful to you. It is obvious that you have been watching and reading our proceedings with great care. Nonetheless, we are pleased to see you and to have the benefit of your views. I wonder if I could begin by posing a question? This morning I woke up listening to Farming Today and the new Under-Secretary of State at Defra, Mr Bradshaw, was talking about animal welfare strategies and the role of veterinary professionals in that. In the introduction to the animal health and welfare strategy on Defra's website is the following phrase: "The strategy is aimed at managing the impact of animal diseases and improving the welfare of animals kept by man whilst protecting the economic and social wellbeing of people and the environment." That seems to cover just about every single thing imaginable. Sir David, I wonder if you believe we have the veterinary resource at our disposal to achieve that very broad brush picture?

Professor Sir David King: First of all, thank you for welcoming us and I hope that as volunteers we will be treated kindly. In terms of the veterinary capacity, I think Professor Brownlie is in a good position to respond to your question. In terms of the animal health and welfare strategy, I do have a few comments to make. First of all, the consultation paper produced by Defra is I believe a useful paper. It does set out the position of sound science, the fact that science has a strong role to play. It talks about proportionate action and in a sense this is a response to your question: we need to have a proportionate number of vets available to give us proportionate action. It looks at risk assessments. It is all good stuff but as always with these things the devil is in the detail and the detail is not in the document. What will transpire is action and the implementation. How do we transform the words into real action? I think there are some concerns. The reason I wanted to come was to perhaps express these. There are concerns, for example, arising from very large amounts of animal movements in the United Kingdom. The difference between the 1967 FMD outbreak and the 2001 was essentially down to this very large amount of animal movement. It had not really appeared on anyone's screen that this amount of animal movement had appeared in the system so we were not ready for it. There are two things here; looking out for qualitative changes in our behaviour which may lead to new risks but, secondly, this question of animal movements. Subsequent to the FMD outbreak, I have been maintaining close contacts with Defra precisely to keep track of animal movements and the threat that they still hold in terms of further epidemics. The key here is that, if there is a local outbreak of an infectious disease, can we keep it as a local outbreak or is it necessarily going to be a country-wide epidemic?

Q195  Chairman: One of the things that is quite difficult to get a feel for is the odds, if you like, on the range of other diseases, other than FMD, that could come along. In our earlier evidence sessions, one of the areas that the Committee has heard about is the role of vets, either public or private, in providing a surveillance operation on a farm. In other words, they are the eyes and the ears of the system to keep an eye on what is going on. There are a lot of diseases which people say could come here and therefore could spread in whatever way the epidemiology would suggest. Have you done any kind of risk analysis to underpin and inform further your concern about those diseases, their risk of coming here and coupled that with the question of animal movements?

Professor Sir David King: No.

Q196  Chairman: Do you think some should be done?

Professor Sir David King: Yes, but we ought to be a little wary of leaning too heavily on these risk analyses because the conclusions are as good as the input. The major problem with an epidemic of the FMD kind is that the initial outbreak is such an unlikely event that any risk analysis would tend to say zero chance of it happening. Your ability to come up with that first event, the arrival of the disease in the country, through any detailed risk analysis is going to have a large uncertainty associated with it. While the modelling is something I strongly support, we also have to be a bit wary of over-relying on that.

Q197  Chairman: Are you aware, in terms of Defra's science group, what their contribution has been to the development of the animal health and welfare strategy and indeed the veterinary surveillance strategy?

Professor Sir David King: They have produced the surveillance strategy report published in December which is available for consultation. Essentially, it is a good report but once again the devil is in the detail. One of the details I believe you have already discussed and that is to what extent are vets going to the places where they are most needed. The Heddon on the Wall case had not been visited by vets for a very long time. I certainly believe that we have to go a step further than simply having what might be called a random surveillance operation. What is good about that is the coordination of the surveillance activities of all the vets in the field, but I still think that if you have farmers with poor practice who do not call vets onto their farms you will not pick up the Heddon on the Wall type case. The question here is do we need to move towards licences to farm. Do we need to have random checks on farms? I am certainly more than hinting that we need more than just the surveillance procedures in this area.

Q198  Chairman: We have finished the foot and mouth disease outbreak, thank goodness. We are planning a strategy that we hope might deal with it. Have we allowed things to drift a bit in terms of putting in place the types of strategies that are needed to provide the best possible protection against another outbreak? We are talking about this; we are going through consultation and ministers are making speeches but there does not seem to be any end game in sight. Is that a worry?

Professor Sir David King: There is a problem and this is the essential reason I wanted to have a chance to talk to you. The problem is expressed very simply in terms of what happened following swine fever disease amongst the pig farming community in this country in the 1970s. The net outcome of that is that the pig farming community decided to operate a separate system from the marketing system and their pyramid system meant that during the 2001 FMD outbreak, apart from that initial outbreak at Heddon on the Wall, pigs were not implicated. We had a sheep and cattle driven epidemic. The pigs had been withdrawn from the marketing system in particular but that system which produced the mixing that spread the disease, so the pig farming community was kept isolated from this. The analysis will show you that the pig farming community was concerned to do this because each pig farmer would suffer financially if they were hit by yet further swine fever outbreaks. It could be argued that the same would not apply to sheep and cattle farmers who were subsidised through the outbreaks. My conclusion from this is that further action is required on animal movement controls. We looked at a 20 day standstill. That is now reduced to a six day standstill. Very good detailed analyses were done by Risk Solutions on epidemiological modelling, but it turns out that the standstill we had put in place was a second order effect. The primary spread of the disease was occurring through markets, something the pig farmers had understood. I am afraid that until we look carefully at the market procedure we will continue to have the optimal situation for spreading an epidemic around the country.

Q199  Paddy Tipping: It is clear that in an increasingly mobile world things are going to move. I was struck by the point you made about the risk analysis. Defra have done this report on imported meat and the risks associated with it. I think that some of the figures behind that are pretty suspect, which leads me to believe that if you want animal health and welfare and biosecurity the answer is not primarily import controls. It is about how you handle biosecurity here in the UK. That will be a blow to some of the interested parties. The NFU, for example, have been very strident about import controls. The reality, if I follow your argument, is that we need to concentrate at home. If we follow your argument right to the edge, are you therefore saying that cattle wholesale markets are a thing of the past and that one ought, for health and biosecurity reasons, to think about getting rid of them?

Professor Sir David King: I am very tempted to come to that conclusion. The pig farming community, by excluding itself from markets, has also managed to exclude itself from a major epidemic. There is a lesson surely to be learned from that.

Q200  Paddy Tipping: Have you had discussions with Defra about this?

Professor Sir David King: Yes. My views are well known up to Number 10 and I have also had the opportunity, through Defra's contacts with the farming community, of discussing this with groups of farmers.

Q201  Paddy Tipping: What feedback are you getting to these ideas?

Professor Sir David King: That the idea seems a bit radical.

Q202  Paddy Tipping: You are putting it politely.

Professor Sir David King: Interestingly, I know from talking to them there is a large number of farmers now who feel they can point a finger at local farmers who are poorly behaved and they themselves would like to see something done to protect their own means of earning a living. The question of better surveillance, better biosecurity, possible farming licences and the question of markets are real issues that need to be aired.

Q203  Paddy Tipping: If I understood you correctly, you are saying we can reduce the period for travelling, the quarantine period, but in a sense there may be a case for saying we have to license farms that have livestock to give rights of entry for inspection. That will not go down well among some sections of the farming community.

Professor Sir David King: Those sections of the farming community that would like to avoid a 2001 type epidemic ever occurring again might welcome it.

Q204  Mr Wiggin: I do not agree with what Mr Tipping was saying because my understanding is essentially what you are telling us is that if I never take my daughter out of my house she is unlikely to get chickenpox. If I never go to China I am not going to get SARS. The point that we really are struggling here is that there was never an inquiry as to how foot and mouth got to Heddon in the Wall in the first place and perhaps that should have been done. Equally, should our poultry people be going to Holland where avian flu is? The answer almost definitely is not. They should not go abroad to where the risk is very high. That is common sense. The problem I feel you are dealing with is what do we do once the horse has bolted. How hard do we slam the door? Do you not think we really ought to protect at our ports and at our points of entry rather than blaming disease on a group of people who rely on the government to ensure that the standards of meat and infection risk that comes into this country are policed properly? They have failed.

Professor Sir David King: I am very well aware of your argument. Obviously, port of entry protection ought to be proportionate.

Q205  Mr Wiggin: You will not go any stronger than that?

Professor Sir David King: Proportionate means in proportion to the risk and also in proportion to what you can achieve by it. When you have a large amount of goods coming into the country in containers, it is really not always going to be feasible to protect the country from illegal imports of the kind that we believe lay behind the Heddon on the Wall outbreak. We have to do both, in my view. You have to do what you can at the port of entry, but you also have to look at the possibility occurring of the horse bolting. In that case, I think it must be absolutely clear that if we continue to have markets operating as they are now and not as they were in 1967- that is, with very long scale movements from the markets right across the country- we will always run the risk of a local outbreak being converted into a national epidemic.

Q206  Mr Wiggin: The pig example that you gave is only true for pigs that are going to end up being eaten. Breeding stock still does go through a livestock market. Indeed, Hereford Market does have a pig day. The problem is that essentially, when you are dealing with people's livestock and their livelihoods, they do really need to see their animals. Therefore, we cannot ever get away from the need for stockmen who inspect stock. The way we arrange for that to happen may be possible through a different format. I am not advocating a video, but if you buy one pig you can go and see it on its farm rather than bringing the pig to the market. I do not see how we are going to get away from that. Have you any suggestions?

Professor Sir David King: The pig farming community have shown a way. I realise that pigs are not sheep are not cattle.

Q207  Mr Wiggin: They still go to market.

Professor Sir David King: They still go to market, but only in the case of breeders and that is a very much smaller number. If you look at the tracings that were done throughout the FMD epidemic in 2001, you will see that it was proportionate to the number of animals going to market. That is what was causing the spread of the epidemic in that first phase, which sent it around the whole country.

Q208  Mr Wiggin: You do not think it is the fact that there is a ewe subsidy as to why sheep go through markets and are dealt with by dealers?

Professor Sir David King: No. I did refer to the fact that the pig farmers themselves would be financially suffering; whereas in the case of the sheep and the cattle farmer it was the taxpayer who stepped in.

Q209  Mr Wiggin: They still suffered.

Professor Sir David King: Let me give you a simple personal fact. Over a period of three months, my family home in Cambridge was robbed twice. As a result I got a letter from my insurance company saying, "You will have to put the following into practice if you are going to continue to be insured" and it cost me about £1,600 to have my house meet the demands of the insurance company. I paid that out of my pocket because I knew when the next burglary came along the taxpayer was not going to cover me. I raised my biosecurity level precisely because I knew I would suffer.

Mr Wiggin: Did you let your local MP know how unhappy you were with the policing?

Q210  Mr Drew: The one thing you have not mentioned is the insurance based models. I have been dealing with a group of academics who maintain that long term the only way you will get any sensible purchase over animal disease is when farmers, rather than relying upon a compensatory system when things go wrong, are encouraged to prevent things from going wrong. The best prevention is when they are directly responsible for having taken on an insurance policy. I know the government did look at this and Elliot Morley has given us evidence on more than one occasion. I am linking it to our inquiry on vets because that is what we are really talking about in as much as one of the precursors to that would be your animals are regularly checked and they have veterinary certificates and so on. Is that something that you would advocate and have talked to the government about?

Professor Sir David King: Yes, it is. The government is also looking at a levy or insurance and I would go one step further. Biosecurity arrangements would determine the level of levy that you would be charged. I would take it one step further and say, if you want markets, the level is ten times what it would be if you can operate without markets. In other words, provide incentives down the levy line. There are all sorts of radical ideas we could come up with. Whether they are capable of implementation or not is another matter.

Q211  Mr Lazarowicz: Are you satisfied with the progress that has been made on contingency plans for foot and mouth disease and the other exotic diseases which have now been increasingly identified as threats?

Professor Sir David King: We are back to the animal health and welfare strategy document. Here, the question for me is the following: during the foot and mouth disease epidemic, I formed a science group of people that included Professor Brownlie as one of the members. We met every day during that epidemic and I reported into COBRA in the morning and in the evening. We kept very close tabs on what was happening. We were able to give advice at Prime Minister level right down directly, unfiltered advice, and I think that for any system of containing an outbreak of this kind that is what you need: broad based advice, not only brought in from the department concerned, but also brought in and challenged by experts outside the department.

Professor Brownlie: You started off with the aims of the website. One is all for grand aims. Whether you achieve them or not is another matter but you need to have a vision. I do not criticise that vision. What is the problem is that there is risk from introduced diseases, either the ones we know or the ones we do not know yet. We do not have the expertise to understand or deal with them. I think it is very important to understand that with globalisation of trade and movement the risk is worldwide. Foot and mouth did not come because it came from here; it came, very likely, from the Indian sub-continent where we have plane loads of people coming in every day. I think we are unwise to think too parochially. We have to think on a wide scale. The way to increase our chance of responding to disease is by having the expertise. If we have the expertise in the country, we are in a better position to deal with it. The expertise is all very well in research centres, which we do have to have, but it needs to feed out into the practitioner because the practitioner is going to be the first person to see that. The man who can distinguish porcine circa virus from swine fever is a smart man. If we do not do that, we are confusing an exotic disease with an endemic disease and allowing it to move on. One of the most important aspects in surveillance is going to be having enough expertise to cover the areas which you need to cover. We could discuss further what expertise is and how we are going to make sure we have that but in the livestock sector there are some real concerns about where this expertise is coming from and the way it is being supported.

Q212  Chairman: I was hoping you were going to tell me where the deficiencies were in the expertise.

Professor Brownlie: All right. This is a private meeting. It is only just reported to the world, I guess.

Q213  Chairman: It is only private as far as the broadcast is concerned, but it is between us. You carry on.

Professor Brownlie: If you look at the veterinary schools, they have the prime objective of delivering the next generation of veterinarians who are able to deal with disease and with the conditions they see in practice, the next generation of veterinary surgeons. They need to provide the role models that inspire the students to go into the various compartments in the veterinary profession. We know those are quite wide but one of the ones that seems to be less attractive, or is reputed to be less attractive, is livestock farming. That is not entirely true. All the vets' schools devote a considerable amount of time to teaching livestock medicine and surgery but there are only very few teachers who are truly inspiring and those are the ones that make the impact. You do need role models that will impress upon the students that livestock farming is a worthwhile and very important career. If you are going to have the role models and the expertise, you are going to have to allow them to be research active because good teachers need to have a research base. Students need to see their role models delivering to the BVA conference, being the top person in the British Cattle Veterinary Association, at the points that students are seeing that they are leaders. The funding into livestock research is problematical. Coming back to your question, where are the deficiencies, I think it is in the research base. We now have a great deal more investment into exotic disease, into blue tongue, foot and mouth, but the endemic diseases are being left behind. They are equally important, if not more important, for the practitioners. Where you have a competence to deal with endemic disease, you have a competence to deal with exotic disease as well because you have that base of competence. Those are some of the issues that are required by having a truly powerful and valuable surveillance programme.

Q214  Mr Lazarowicz: We are looking very much at the governmental side. We have of course now the division between policy and delivery with the chief veterinary officer no longer being responsible for the state veterinary service but being responsible for policy and directly responsible for delivery. What effect will that have on future notifiable disease epidemics?

Professor Sir David King: I do not have a strong comment to make on that. It reinforces the CVO's position in policy but removes him from the operations area.

Professor Brownlie: Anybody who is driving policy needs to have the best input of expertise into allowing him to understand policy. I know there is a new document out and they are talking about further independent scientific panels. I would refer back to the foot and mouth panel that Sir David put together. It was put together with experts from all round the place. There were modellers; there were people from Defra; there were people in the cattle industry; there were people with scientific and vaccine interests. It was a very dynamic affair and I hope that the expertise in the country- and it is quite considerable- is pulled in to help make good policy.

Q215  Mr Lazarowicz: On the delivery side, Defra is conducting a review of its relationship with the local veterinary inspectors. To what extent do you think the current SVS structures hamper the country's ability to deliver a reaction to veterinary emergencies and to deal with routine tasks as well?

Professor Brownlie: As you are fully aware, the LVIs are an extension of the SVS. They allow further expertise or manpower into surveillance and into operational matters. They are a life blood for some practices. I guess this is what the review is. It is not giving sufficient continuity and sufficient expertise that Defra might want in the future. There is no career structure, as I see it, for livestock veterinarians or LVIs to do further training for career progression. There is a lot of opportunity that you see in the medical system that you do not see in the veterinary system. Livestock veterinary services need a lot of support and guidance to make them more expert and more appropriate for future needs.

Q216  Mr Wiggin: Can we talk a little bit about what mechanisms are in place to encourage partnerships between farmers and vets and the public and private veterinary sectors and what needs to be done to ensure that partnerships are strong enough to deliver the government's surveillance strategy?

Professor Brownlie: I think this is an exciting moment in the whole business of partnerships. Everybody is talking about them and I hope at the end of the day the right partnership comes out and that this is life long. It is quite clear that some areas of the country have very considerable strength in private practice. Defra have contracted their services and would benefit strongly from this partnership. I was in the foot and mouth outbreak and I was working in Cumbria, on the front line with several other people who had experience of foot and mouth. That partnership could have been much stronger. It could have been better utilised and I would think that lessons have been learned.

Q217  Mr Wiggin: In what way could it have been stronger?

Professor Brownlie: Some of us who had more experience were not utilised more effectively and I think we have all learned a great deal from that time. I hope the partnerships will see that we have expertise in many areas of the country but not all, which is a problem. This could supplement but it needs to be directed. It needs to be properly coordinated and supported into Defra to make it a stronger force.

Q218  Mr Wiggin: To what extent should the strategy concentrate on notifiable diseases?

Professor Brownlie: Notifiable diseases have been the major responsibility and concern of Defra. Foot and mouth is certainly one of their major responsibilities. If we are going to have a strategy for animal health and welfare, we have to include endemic disease. There are a lot of serious endemic diseases that cause a great deal of problems. If you take a national perspective, we are talking about UK productivity and disease is an important issue here. It is cost effective to get rid of or control disease for the national good and the veterinarians must be in a position to do that.

Q219  Mr Wiggin: What you would agree with is that farm surveillance is very important. I was going to ask what appropriate mechanisms are in place to gather farm level surveillance data and how could that information be shared with vets?

Professor Brownlie: How could it be improved, I think, because there is a lot of data that comes in from farms that does not necessarily go through the SVS. A lot of private practices have a great deal of information. If you look at a specialist practice for pigs and chickens, there is a huge amount of data there that I do not think enters into the system. The veterinary schools have data that does not enter into the system. There is a real opportunity of having much better surveillance if we can incorporate that data. There is a cost implication of that but there is an opportunity to have wider surveillance than just what is arbitrarily put through the SVS for inspection.

Q220  Mr Wiggin: You are saying almost every disease should be notifiable?

Professor Brownlie: No, I am not saying that, but I think data on diseases should be unified and for the common good.

Q221  Paddy Tipping: You were telling us about veterinary colleges and the need for role models. You were saying there needed to be more large animal work and more work with livestock. You went on to say this is not very profitable and we need to do more research here. Could you expand that a little and tell us how you would do that?

Professor Brownlie: There are one or two layers there. One is for the livestock academic, to encourage you to make progress personally yourself. Reward and the elusive chairs that are given to people really come on the back of teaching and research activity. It is extremely difficult to get funding for endemic livestock disease and I think that is a real fault in the system. Defra offers only directed programmes so if you are not part of that directed programme it is not easy to get funding. If you wanted to know how long foot and mouth survived in cow pats, the Wellcome Trust are not going to fund you. BBSRC are not going to fund you, but yet it might be an important, relevant piece of work. If you want to know about the spike protein on the new corona virus and what its three dimensional structure is, you could go to a number of places to get funding. One hopes that in the future we are going to support livestock research and role models in veterinary schools. There should be opportunities for funding for them. Whether it is profitable or not is another matter. In the veterinary schools, we teach large animal veterinary medicine and surgery. They have a lot of exposure to large animal veterinary practices and a certain number go into large animal practice, but it is often very hard work. It is not as attractive as a small animal practice where they have more free time and it is less demanding. We have to look very carefully at how we support it more and make it more attractive. There are areas of the country where it is difficult to have livestock skilled veterinarians to provide a service.

Q222  Paddy Tipping: I wonder how far we can intervene into this academic environment. We have had a number of major outbreaks which in economic terms have cost the public a great deal of money. On a second level, all of us are saying we need to be more proactive. We need to build the health of the national flock and yet we need to train the next generation of vets. You mentioned funding streams into universities from Defra. Do we need to be more directive about that? Is there a place for saying if we want these public cuts delivered we, the state, have to pay for them?

Professor Brownlie: Yes. There is a big initiative at the moment for 25 million that is funded by Defra. It is open to veterinary schools. I do not think Defra initiated it. I am delighted they have done it but I think it was initiated from the Wellcome Trust and the Selbourne Committee, but it is there. If I get funded, I will think it is wonderful but if I do not I shall feel very disappointed. The Royal Veterinary College then will not be part of that funding stream. They have asked for funding from the veterinary schools and they have put it to open competition. That is very laudable and the best will win. It is for five years. If you are going to make a real impact into veterinary disease or any disease, it cannot just be for three or five years. It has to be a longer term programme. To some degree, one could consider that the funding is fragmented. There does not appear to be a unified consideration of where the country needs its funding. It is really where the best research attracts the funding.

Q223  Paddy Tipping: How do we intervene more positively to get the rewards that we want, a longer funding stream and more funding but a clearer idea of the research we need?

Professor Brownlie: If the country needs research, it has to pay for it and direct it. Some of us are free spirits in university. We do what we can where the funding is available but we are almost indicating that Defra should be doing all the funding. There are other funding streams. Perhaps one needs an overall view for the national good, particularly for livestock.

Q224  Chairman: One of the things I am still not quite clear about is this relationship. You said first of all we need inspirational teachers to get people interested in livestock, large animal work. On the other hand, during the evidence that we have had so far, it is quite clear that small animal work is the bit in the veterinary profession that is interesting. It is the bit that pays well, where there is demand and where people are moving from large animal work into, leaving the playing field rather vacant of players in the very area where you are saying if you have the right strategy manned by the right people we have a chance to have good defences against any kind of major disease outbreak. What I am not clear about is how, against the background of pressure on livestock prices which is the generator of wealth for the farmer, you make enough surplus appear in that model to say to the farmer, "It is a good idea to have contingency work done by the veterinary profession rather than call them in when the fire has broken out." I do not quite see how we intervene. Should we be paying for the good to be bought or do you have to approach it in a different way. I am not quite clear where you are at on that argument.

Professor Brownlie: I am not clear on the answer. The partnership has to be both academic practice and the funding agencies. There has to be funding into areas to bring the work that we need to be supported. It has to be attractive. The future of practice will not just be castration and TB tests. The future of practice will alter. I am not sure who is going to put the whole thing together.

Q225  Chairman: We are talking about a strategy which involves the government, the scientific community and the veterinary profession. Who do you think ought to put it together?

Professor Brownlie: Defra.

Professor Sir David King: The responsibility does lie with the government and therefore with Defra but at the same time we are dealing with the market place. Necessarily, people are looking at how to optimise incomes as well as get job satisfaction. Professor Brownlie did point out that career progression in the large animal side of the profession is not really well developed and that is an area that I think government could well look at.

Q226  Chairman: In the same analogy, you mentioned you had upped the game to give yourself greater protection, hopefully reducing the odds of a third visit of an unwanted person to your house. Mr Tipping made a very salient point about the cost of £4 billion-odd for us not having had a good strategy in place with all the component elements. It is a question of how much the nation seeks to invest to avoid potential bills of £4.5 billion every so often, is it not?

Professor Sir David King: That itself is a very complex question and that is what we are trying to grapple with. Your question encompasses the whole thing. If we then look at how we respond, yes, it was many billions of pounds but it is 1967 since we had an outbreak of this kind. What is the effective investment we should make in avoidance, looking at it as a once in 25 year event? My own feeling is that we should try and eliminate events of this kind if at all possible but the response has to be proportionate and in relation to the question we are now discussing we also need to decide to what extent it is a shortage of large animal vets that makes us vulnerable to an outbreak of that kind. This is where you come back to surveillance and we can create a larger demand in this area if there is a bigger demand on the surveillance set-up. In other words, if it is not just random visits or visits called in by farmers on vets that produce the surveillance but that there is some more directed scheme of surveillance.

Q227  Chairman: Have we to approach it from the point of view of a change in the way that vets are trained in terms of the job they do, because for those of us who are occasionally the purchasers of vets' services in the small animal field it is when your cat is not well. You take it round for some nice person to sort out. In the context of work on a farm, I still think there seems to be an emphasis on, "Please come in. I have a problem", as opposed to the veterinary expertise adding value in terms of what goes on on the farm. Give me a flavour, Professor Brownlie. Are vets taught to do both because if you are going to make it more profitable for the farmer to call the vet in, if the vet can come and look at the strategy for animals, the nutritional side of it and this type of thing, farmers might say, "It is worth having a vet in", but you do not often hear that in terms of the work of vets.

Professor Brownlie: There are two areas here. One is the undergraduate training, which is I hope to encourage and fascinate the curiosity of veterinary undergraduates in veterinary science and, on day one of the qualification, to have a core competence in a range of skills to allow them to operate in the veterinary sector. It is becoming clearer to the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons that there is a need for further postgraduate qualification and training so that you can go into one sector or the other. In livestock, this is being led to some degree by the British Cattle Veterinary Association's health schemes. They are requesting that people go on courses to train in how to give health programmes. That is encompassed with individualising health care for farmers but it includes nutrition, disease, breeding programmes, for the postgraduate veterinarian. I think the veterinary profession is aware that there are changes and is examining these. You are right to say that there is a need for further training and wider training and I think that is underway.

Professor Sir David King: Your question is absolutely spot on. Training needs to include the biosecurity arrangement. The single animal care that you refer to is the emphasis on the training and it is also why many people become vets. They want to do just that. Biosecurity is one aspect of it. I would like to see the training including an understanding of epidemiology. In other words, group animal behaviour and the spread of disease through animals. I would like to see more understanding developed in undergraduate courses, this core competence, to include epidemiological modelling. To what extent does computer modelling match with the real behaviour when disease spreads? I would also like to see it include molecular biology, an understanding of how improvements in antibiotics etc., can lead to better animal welfare. There is a range of modernisation which I would focus around group animal behaviour that, in my view, does need to be substantially improved in that core competence area. I do not think we disagree on that.

Q228  Paddy Tipping: Going back to surveillance, I wondered whether those skills need to be cascaded down because a team of vets, with the best will in the world, cannot survey a whole flock. Going back to the Cambridge police analysis, I wonder whether there is a need for some community safety vets officers, a second tier. To pick up the licensing of animals, if one were to look into the future, I do not think it will be very far. I think the CAP reform, the way we want to pay farmers, will eventually lead to some kind of annual, regular visits to farms. One would need rights of entry and the rest of it, but presumably one could pick up some of these issues through an annual visitation, a registration scheme of this kind. Is that your thinking? If it is, what are your colleagues in Defra saying to you because I suspect, having listened to the discussion for about an hour, that there is some tension between the views you are putting across and colleagues in Defra.

Professor Sir David King: Surely not.

Q229  Paddy Tipping: But it is about handling tensions, is it not?

Professor Sir David King: Precisely. My job is trans-departmental and coming in on issues of this kind. You raise some very good issues and I really do match in quite strongly with what you are saying. The vets' ability to pass on the knowledge to farmers must be a key factor. Getting the farmer to behave better on biosecurity, to understand animal disease is going to give enormous added value. I feel like saying one aspect of markets is that that is where farmers get together and if we could imagine a society without the markets perhaps we could replace them with get togethers where vets give upgrading courses on surveillance and biosecurity measures. The other side of it is the para-vet, the veterinary nurse and the role that they may play. I do not think anything I would say would remove the value of the vet.

Q230  Mr Drew: The issue that we have all been lobbied on is prescription only medicines. I know with the best will in the world that this is not really something you have had any influence over but, in the same way as we have been heavily lobbied by community pharmacists over the potential damage to their business by opening up medicines for human beings, the parallel is there when you are talking about what could be happening for vets for larger animals. There was a letter to the Chairman and I was talking to Colin Bream and he said, "Make sure you raise with David King the issue of the nice idea that we are going to have a future for animal control but you will not have much of a future if you do not have people prepared to go into the veterinary practice for larger animals". Vets do see this starkly at the moment. Their argument is the only reason they stay in there is that they are able to subsidise aspects of their business. I wonder what your reflection on their comments is.

Professor Brownlie: I am aware that there is some subsidy to veterinary fees that comes through medicine. If you remove that, one has to increase the veterinary fees per se. That could have a Catch 22 to it in that veterinary fees might be considered high by some farmers, particularly the farmers who one is trying to get to, and there would be some reduction in that. I think the way forward is to make sure that, if veterinary large animal practice is important to the nation, some way of funding that should be evident. Otherwise you will lose veterinary services from some areas of the community. In the high density cattle areas, there are some extremely good practices and their costs to their clients are quite high, but the profit of those clients is even higher because good veterinary services will provide good profit. It is in the other area that we are most concerned about. We have a national strategy here. If that leaves some areas poorer, then there is a problem.

Chairman: Gentlemen, may I thank you most sincerely on behalf of the Committee for coming and giving your views? They have been very stimulating indeed. There may be one or two other questions that we might write to you about and, if I may extend the same courtesy to you, after you have digested the exchanges today, if there is anything else you want to submit to our inquiry we would be very pleased to hear from you. Thank you again for volunteering to come.