Animal Health Bill
8:55 am
Mr Colin Breed (South East Cornwall, Liberal Democrat)
I, too, welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Illsley, and look forward to serving on the Committee under your chairmanship.
I confess that it is difficult to find words to express my opposition, and that of other Liberal Democrat Members, to many of the clauses in the Bill. Many of those arguments were rehearsed on Second Reading. We recognise that the Government must take action, given what they now know and following the absolute devastation of foot and mouth. However, the Bill is premature. Had measures such as import control and movement restrictions been taken beforehand, we could have looked at it with more sympathy.
The measures are draconian in their intent and extremely serious for many people, not only farmers, who live in rural areas. They are also unfair, unjust and unreasonable. The proposals on rights of appeal go much further than is necessary, and those on powers of entry bring a whole new meaning to the term ``forced labour''. The Government's intentions may be appropriate, but the methods by which they are trying to enact them are draconian. We must give the Bill very serious consideration, because it has great implications for many people. I hope that the programming resolution allows us sufficient time to do that.
Liberal Democrat Members feel that it is fundamentally wrong to mix up compensation and penalties. There are specific compensation scales, and there should be scales of penalties. To confuse the two is not helpful in terms of the possibility of being judged guilty until proved innocent. If there were evidence of large-scale abuse, there may have been some justification for the Bill, but only a small number of people are involved and even within that small group many could be defined as passive delinquents rather than bioterrorists. We need to get the proportionality of some of these measures right. I hope that we shall have sufficient time to debate the ways in which the Government want, properly, to introduce regulation in the light of the foot and mouth crisis.
Finally, we welcome the intentions behind the scrapie regulations, which form part of the aims of the new Department. However, I noticed that although scrapie was to be eradicated, BSE was only to be reduced. That is strange, given that we have lived with scrapie for a couple of hundred years and BSE was so devastating.