Animal Health Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 5:00 pm on 25 July 2002.

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Photo of The Earl of Erroll The Earl of Erroll Crossbench 5:00, 25 July 2002

On the issue of the use of the word "susceptible" or "suspect", I notice that new Section 36A to the 1981 Act, as set out under Schedule 2 to the Bill, refers to the power of the Minister to "specify sheep genotypes", and says:

"The Minister may by order specify sheep genotypes which, in his opinion, are more susceptible than other sheep genotypes".

That suggests to me that it is a matter of degree and that, therefore, all sheep are susceptible but that some are more susceptible than others. If all sheep are susceptible, they must all be dealt with under whatever provision applies—which I gather probably means slaughtering the lot.

It seems to me that the use of English is rather like my experience with my English teacher, who hated my saying "nearly unique" or "almost unique". Because it is a matter of degree and because there can be nothing that is not to some degree susceptible under certain conditions, I suspect that you cannot possibly use the word in a case like this where we are dealing with legal language.

Being an IT man, I should like to make a quick comment on the removal of computers. I have not read the provision in this respect, but it is very dangerous to remove people's computers along with the data. Nowadays one is reliant on e-mails and on the Internet for marketing data, and so on. It is very easy to take an image of a disk drive and remove the data on the computer, and thereby leave the user with the computer and the other information. There are programmes like Drive Image that will do that quite simply and easily. I do not see why modern technology cannot be used to solve the problem.