Clause 1 - Foot-and-Mouth Disease
Animal Health Bill
10:30 am
Mrs Ann Winterton (Congleton, Conservative)
Not for a laugh. I shall tell the Minister about a serious case involving the contiguous cull policy in the parish in which my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Mr. Winterton) and I live. A suspected case in sheep which was later found to be only a welfare problem—a minor foot condition—led to three very valuable dairy herds being threatened with the cull. I cut out The Sunday Telegraph article by Christopher Booker that explained what was and was not legal and gave it to the three farmers in question, one of whom is my own producer-retailer, saying, ``The decision is entirely up to you; I am not trying to persuade you one way or the other because the responsibility is yours.'' They were convinced, because of biosecurity, housing and the topography of the land, that their herds were in no danger.
I am grateful to Mr. Booker for giving the advice on which the three farmers were able to stand up against the MAFF vets and officials, and their herds are alive to tell the tale. [Interruption.] No. There was a lot of argy-bargy. The Minister was not involved in what happened on farms, so he did not really know about it—how could he have done? He is a very distinguished Minister, and he was tied up in policy making and meetings here. He should hear about the experiences of people who went through it, which were exceptionally difficult. They were bullied, but they were convinced that they were right to resist. In the case of the three farmers—I do not say in every case—they were right, thanks to Mr. Booker having given them the information that they needed to stand up against the slaughterers. Incidentally, they did not even hear directly that those people were coming on the Monday; they heard it indirectly, on the grapevine. I do not know how the Minister would react to that, but I would be absolutely livid. I would feel ill treated and ill served.
Mr. Booker asserts that the Government were guilty of breaking the law through wholesale breaches of the Welfare of Livestock Regulations 1994 by those carrying out the slaughter. As someone who comes from a farming background and knows all about caring for stock and the practices of farmers in my constituency, I found some of the scenes that we saw on television shocking. I do not wish ever to see such scenes again, and we must take action to ensure that we do not.
None of this takes into account slaughter that is mistakenly proposed or enacted by DEFRA. I heard about a case when I went up to Cumbria, where, as the Minister may know, the land often includes so-called blind lanes with a stone wall on each side. DEFRA officials turned up to slaughter on the farm in question, drove the sheep into a nearby blind lane because it was convenient to carry out the slaughter there, and only afterwards found that that land belonged to the farm next door, so that farm also had to be slaughtered out. That is just one example of the many examples in Cumbria where things went wrong.
Clive Davies, a Gloucestershire farmer whose 255 cattle were mistakenly culled due to a ``clerical error'', stated that, under the DEFRA slaughter rules,
``you became a statistic. It becomes a rollercoaster. There is no stopping it.''
Such views are expressed by people who were affected by mistakes, and they have every right to do so in strong terms.
In another example, a vet and two soldiers were sent to a farm in Great Broughton in Cumbria, where they slaughtered 200 ewes and 300 lambs, claiming that they were inside a 3 km cull zone. They also killed a pet pig belonging to the farmer's young son—we have just debated that subject. The soldiers later discovered that they had got the wrong grid reference and should have been slaughtering 100 miles away. Where was the organisation? Was DEFRA in control? What was going on?
These draconian proposals will provide little spirit of confidence between farmers and DEFRA. In introducing stronger powers, the Minister and others must consider what happened before and how the farming community feels about the future. It would be better if they withdrew the whole Bill right now, went back to the drawing board, consulted widely and introduced any necessary extra powers in the light of the conclusions of the inquiries by the Royal Society and Lord Anderson.