Schedule 1 - Adjusted compensation
Animal Health Bill
3:35 pm
Mrs Angela Browning (Tiverton and Honiton, Conservative)
We do not need the Minister to tell us that we in the west country are slow. We could teach him and his officials a few things about agriculture in our region.
As I was saying, the Western Morning News reported that the ``Department of Agriculture'' is investigating claims that the bloodstained overall of a Ministry slaughterman was discarded in a country lane adjacent to a farm field in Pennymoor, near Tiverton. The point is that disposable overalls--it is pretty clear where they came from--covered in blood were discarded in a part of my constituency that has not been infected. That is a biosecurity issue that should be taken very seriously. In the light of DEFRA's comments, the newspaper claimed that DEFRA was investigating the matter, but in fact it has done absolutely nothing. Mr. Harris, who found the overalls, was advised to contact the local DEFRA office and that the overalls would be collected and examined, but nothing has happened since. He was told to double-wrap the overalls in plastic and put them in his deep freeze--he has duly done so--so that DEFRA could collect them. He has heard nothing. DEFRA is not in the least interested in this serious breach of biosecurity. I hope that it is not out of order to point out that, on Monday, Mr. Harris asked me to tell ``that Margaret Beckett'' to go and look in his freezer.
I cite that example in the hope that, when he leaves this Room, the Minister will immediately telephone the DEFRA office in Exeter and demand that it do what it told the Western Morning News it would do more than a month ago: send someone to Pennymoor to investigate that breach. If not, he will have to go and look in Mr. Harris's freezer himself. This is an important matter, and the Minister must recognise that incidents such as this need to be investigated and sorted out. I hope that he will do so.
Officials have breached biosecurity and that issue must be properly addressed. It is not a question of playing ping-pong with blame. The Minister knows that if farmers commit serious breaches, he has statutory powers to bring them to court, and I would be the first to support him wholeheartedly if he did so. The Bill makes a financial consideration in terms of a presumption of guilt in relation to the farming community, but gives us no reassurance about breaches of biosecurity by other people, including Ministry officials.