Clause 1 - FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE
Animal Health Bill
2:45 pm
Mrs Angela Browning (Tiverton and Honiton, Conservative)
The Minister shakes his head, but much of today's debate has been based on the premise that a risk assessment will be made, and that when push comes to shove and the Minister has to seek guidance, it will be based on veterinary advice. By excluding those conditions and making them ``of no importance'', the Minister has made it difficult for anybody else to measure the transparency of a given risk assessment. I hope he agrees that it is essential to the wider public, especially those who own the animals, that a risk assessment and its formulation be transparent. If those conditions are excluded as ``immaterial'', one wonders what will be left that is material on which a judgment could be made.
As with many other Bills that have passed through the House in the past four years, we are being asked to enact legislation on the basis that important decision making will be at the discretion of Ministers. We are being asked to trust them to do the right thing and show fairness and proportionality. A little earlier, the Minister prayed in aid the fact that he would not advocate unnecessary slaughter. I want to remind him, however, of his track record on mass slaughter. In March 1996, the Animal Protesters' Bulletin published an article about BSE by the Minister, who was then Opposition spokesman on agriculture and rural affairs, in which he concluded:
``Calves for export are not currently included in the European ban as it has not yet been proved that BSE passes from cow to calf. If this is proved, then the slaughter of the whole UK herd is inevitable.''
We now know—as we knew then, because it was identified in the trials that went on before the Government came to office—that there is indeed maternal transmission, but at such a low rate that there is clearly no need to slaughter the whole national herd. However, that was the Minister's judgment at that time.