HC Deb 08 January 2004 vol 416 cc499-508

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Charlotte Atkins.]

6.16 pm
Mr. Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)

I have a minor emendation, but in this case it cannot be laid at the Hansardistas in any way. When applying for the Adjournment debate, I should have added the words "in West Dorset" to its title because I wish to pose several questions about the situation in West Dorset rather than the wider issue of tuberculosis in cattle. I witness—somewhat to my embarrassment—a vast array of my Front-Bench colleagues in the Chamber whose interest is in the national scene, and no doubt they will interrogate the Minister on that in due course. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) has interrogated the Minister on hundreds of occasions and no doubt further discussions will occur.

I have initiated one or two Adjournment debates a year for the past five or six years about various aspects of farming in West Dorset—alas, I think that you have been forced to sit through one or two of them, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I think that it was three or four years ago when I first mentioned in one of the debates that my farmers were becoming increasingly concerned by TB in cattle. The Minister will be well aware that West Dorset is a dairying area, so it is not surprising that my farmers raised that issue.

In my experience, my farmers conform closely to what Sir Alan Walters described as the "taxi test". I recall working in No. 10 when the Treasury produced enormous reams of computer printouts to prove that there was no problem with the economy. Sir Alan Walters, the distinguished economist who worked for the then Prime Minister, contradicted that information. When the Chancellor of the day asked how that could be, Sir Alan said that he had recently been in a taxi and had inquired of the driver whether he had much custom. He discovered that the driver had not had much custom and decided that that was a better telltale sign of a recession than all the Treasury's complicated computer programmes.

In the same way, I have discovered over the past few years that if my West Dorset farmers register an issue as moving up their agenda, it is a good leading indicator—better, I suspect, than the information available to the Minister from his hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of officials and experts. That is what has happened. Whereas three or four years ago, in my regular meetings with West Dorset farmers, TB in cattle would be raised low down the agenda as we were about to adjourn for tea, it is now raised first or second. The salience of the issue has risen dramatically, and the reason for that is pretty clear: the prevalence of TB in cattle on West Dorset dairy farms has risen dramatically.

I know that the Minister knows the background to this, but it seems to me important to sketch it out briefly. My dairy farmers are in an extraordinary business, if I can call it that. They have recently achieved the remarkable feat of reaching roughly a zero per cent. return, which is a vast improvement on the past few years. No other business in Britain would survive on a zero per cent. return. It is really for love rather than money that West Dorset dairy farmers remain West Dorset dairy farmers. They have also been through BSE and foot and mouth disease.

If we hit what I insist on calling a serious problem of TB in cattle—a variant that leads to a full-blown crisis—I judge that it will be the last to affect my dairy farmers because I do not think that there would be any West Dorset dairy farmers after such a crisis. The Minister may think that that is somewhat overblown language, but I said some years ago that I thought that what was happening in the pig industry was likely to mean that there would not be much pig production in West Dorset by now, and there is not now much pig production in West Dorset; indeed, there is almost none at all. That is because people did not heed the warnings given then about what was happening to the pig industry as a result of differential regulation and effective dumping from Denmark, Holland and Poland.

Now we face the prospect, if something is not done, of the destruction of the dairy industry in West Dorset. I have to admit that, economically, that will not be terribly important. Britain's economy will not be destroyed by the absence of dairy farming in West Dorset. I have to admit also that other uses will be found for the land. I suppose that is nostalgia on my part, but I will be sad—distraught, in fact, as I suspect others in the country will be—if a land that has had cattle on it for hundreds of years turns into a land destitute of cattle. West Dorset society will change if dairy farming stops.

I accept that if that were the ineluctable result of forces of rationality, we would have to put up with it, but it is not. If it occurs because of a crisis of TB in cattle, it will be an avoidable result of an avoidable calamity, and I do not think that we ought to put up with calamities that are avoidable. Moreover, it is a calamity that we can see coming, and when calamities are both avoidable and foreseeable they really ought to be avoided.

The purpose of our Ministry of Defence is to lay down plans for things that may not happen, and the Ministry has good plans, I believe, for a wide range of contingencies that may not occur. However, this Minister's Department has a long and sorry history of not having plans for things that are almost inevitable. It is only once they occur that the Department realises that the crisis with which it is ineptly dealing is one that, if it had dealt with it some years before, might have been only a problem and possible to tackle with a great deal less public expense and discomfort. We are in exactly that position now.

The national figures are clear, and West Dorset reflects them. We have seen something like a 500 per cent. increase in the prevalence of TB in cattle over the past five or six years. There was a period last year when that was being disguised by the fact that a backlog was being cleared. It has now been cleared, and yet this year we see a vast increase compared with the position some years ago. For my West Dorset farmers, the same bumbling approach to testing that was perfectly tolerable five or 10 years ago still applies. There is a not very effective test and a large number of inclusive results, and farms are then closed for 60 days, with huge, consequential losses for the farmers.

From what my West Dorset farmers have said, there is no sense of urgency or crisis in the Department. I do not mean that people are not working hard, or that they are not coming into the office and leaving late. I do not mean to imply that there are not any experts—there are many experts. I do not mean that business is not continuing as usual—there is nothing that the National Audit Office would declare to be a gross inefficiency. However, it is as if people were sitting around just before the second world war and producing a Spitfire every few weeks. That would not have provided a sufficient defence in the battle of Britain. People have to change gear and produce Spitfires at the rate that Lord Beaverbrook managed to achieve. At the moment, the Department is not in war mode on TB in cattle in West Dorset. It is in peacetime mode, but my farmers are fighting a war. It is poor that there should be such a discrepancy.

The Minister is about to conduct a long-term review, which I applaud. Vaccines are expected in due course, but I am told that it may be about 10 years before they are produced. When I first heard about the vaccines, however, I was told that they were expected in 10 years time. People whose experience is greater than mine tell me that, 20 or 30 years ago, effective vaccines were expected in 10 years time. I do not know whether there will be an effective vaccine in 10 years time. In some respects, I hope that there will not be, because there will nothing to vaccinate in West Dorset, as there will not be any dairy farming in 10 years time if things carry on as they are at present. There may not be many badgers to vaccinate either, as they are dying in large numbers in West Dorset. I regularly come across dying badgers on the road as I drive down to my house. They are not dying a pleasant death, and neither, I suspect, are the cattle. This is a very unpleasant business.

The Krebs experiment is under way. I should be aware of that fact as I was an early proponent of that experiment. I had meetings with the people concerned, including Professor Krebs, and argued vociferously with some of my farmers five or six years ago that they should sponsor the Krebs experiment. In my naivety, I said that it would produce conclusive results. Without such results, Ministers would not have the backing for the action that they wanted to take. Just as I supported field trials for genetically modified crops, so I supported the Krebs experiment because I believe that the power of science is considerable. I was gulled into supposing that a simple set of controlled experiments emerging from the original Krebs report—it is not terribly complicated to have assign three different areas of the United Kingdom and treat badgers in three different ways—would expedite a set of concrete results. I do not know exactly what has gone wrong or why the selective cull has been halted. I do not know what the difficulties have been, but as the Department is not on a war footing, any difficulty is likely to have deterred it from proceeding. In any event, the Krebs experiment was meant to be complete by 2003, but it is not.

I know that the Minister was not in post when the experiment began, and has not been in post for most of the period during which it was conducted. He is not personally responsible, but the fact is that this is a shambles. I very much doubt that he will want to give us a cast iron guarantee that the Krebs results will be available next year, the year after, or the year after that. Krebs is an interesting commodity—the experiment, I mean; we must not blame Professor Krebs—but when it has been completed and the Department has eventually considered it in its long-term review and come up with a solution, there will be nothing to solve as there will be no cattle in West Dorset, which is an absurd result.

I am not a world expert on these matters. If I were, I would seek employment in the Department. However, it employs enormous numbers of experts who, presumably, know what to do about the problem. I hope they know what to do about it. The National Farmers Union has made 16 recommendations, so it appears to have an idea of what to do. The National Federation of Badger Groups has made a large range of recommendations, some of which, interestingly, overlap with the recommendations made by the NFU.

As in each of the crises that we have faced, which we have not dealt with nationally with distinction, the Department has set up an advisory group. There always seems to be an advisory group, and the advisory group always has a chairman. At this stage in the development of the crisis, before the shambles is fully revealed and the nation mourns the results, the chairman of the advisory group always complains that nothing is being done. True to form, that is what we find in the present case.

Professor John Bourne, the chairman of the relevant advisory group, appeared on "Farming Today" on 20 December and his remarks were illuminating. He was asked what he thought about DEFRA and he said: What I get totally frustrated about is … we've been working within the ISG"— that is, the independent scientific group— for five years … we have seen data coming through and we have been trying to get it translated into policy and that hasn't yet happened. When the interviewer asked: Why in your view are they"— that is, DEFRA— still talking and not making policy? Professor Bourne said: I find the … I just don't know. I find it quite extraordinary that they haven't moved more forcibly in this respect". So the chairman of the advisory group in DEFRA is in accord with my West Dorset farmers in his view of the speed with which the Department is not moving on an issue that is currently a problem and will shortly be a full-blown crisis. That is not satisfactory.

I hope that the effect of this tiny debate focused on the tiny part of the United Kingdom that I have the good fortune, in all respects except its current state of dairy farming, to represent will enter into the Minister's mind the idea that I wish to plant there—that long-term reviews are of no use. Waiting for Krebs is of no use. Waiting to see whether, at a later time, the Department should move on to a war footing is of no use. We are facing something that is operating as an epidemic operates—on the basis of geometric progressions, but arithmetic activity will not resolve the problem. What is needed is a change of gear to match what nature is doing to us.

I do not know what the solutions are, but they need to be rapid and effective, otherwise the Minister will face what, if we inherit Government, I as the then Chancellor will face—a mighty great bill for dealing with a ghastly crisis that need not have happened, and which could be prevented from happening now.

6.32 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr. Ben Bradshaw)

I congratulate the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) on securing the debate. He ended with a rather refreshing and candid admission that he did not know what the solutions were. The problem with tackling a disease as serious and as long running as TB in cattle is that if I, or previous Ministers from either side of the House, had known what the solutions were, they would have been implemented there and then. I might try to tease some of the solutions out in a little more detail as I reply to the right hon. Gentleman's debate.

I agree that TB in cattle is the biggest animal health problem facing agriculture at present, particularly in the parts of the world that the right hon. Gentleman and I represent. I reread Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" over new year, which reminded me of the historic importance of the dairy industry in Dorset and West Dorset, which he mentioned.

It is right that the problem is at the top of the agenda. This is not the only debate on it that we have had. There have been a number of debates on the subject in the Chamber and in Westminster Hall, and there has been scrutiny in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which has produced reports on it. I begin by reassuring the right hon. Gentleman that I take the matter extremely seriously. We are trying all the time to move forward with solutions to the problem. I always welcome constructive suggestions, wherever they come from, whether from the farming community or from wildlife groups. Where they agree, all the better. Unfortunately, on too many of the difficult questions that we face, they do not agree.

I do not accept that the Government's approach has been bumbling. The issue is extremely difficult and complex, and involves a number of scientific questions that are still not perfectly understood. The Government are determined to tackle it, and a sign of that determination is the fact that we have spent £74 million of public money on TB in this financial year, and we expect to spend a similar sum next year.

It may be helpful to the House if I outline some of the measures that we have adopted in the past 12 years, which I hope indicate that we are not just sitting around on a non-war footing, as the right hon. Gentleman suggested. As he acknowledged, we have reduced the backlog of overdue TB tests, following the foot and mouth outbreak. We have also imposed automatic restrictions on herds with TB tests three months or more overdue, again aimed at reducing the risk of spreading TB. Back in February, we announced a review of the TB strategy. We announced a scientific panel to review the randomised badger culling trial and associated research in April. There was a consultation on a proposal to permit trained and competent non-veterinarians to perform skin testing of cattle. There has been consultation on the rationalisation of compensation payments for animals slaughtered for disease control purposes. In December, we published the vaccination scoping study of the independent scientific group on cattle TB, of which the right hon. Gentleman may well be aware. As he also said, in November Ministers made a decision to suspend the reactive culling element of the randomised badger culling trial, and I shall explain later exactly why we made that decision.

We must bear in mind that, distressing and serious as the problem is in West Dorset, Devon and other parts of the country that are badly affected, only about 3 per cent. of the national herd is affected by TB restrictions at any one time. Our major priority at the moment is to try to prevent that geographic spread before we control and reduce the existence of TB in the areas where it is already a problem. I hope that some of the short-term changes that will come out the current consultation will be in place soon, and they will be aimed primarily at trying to restrict the further spread of the disease, which I hope most hon. Members will agree should be any Government's priority.

It will take a bit longer to reach agreement on the longer-term strategy, but we are committed to taking measures that we think will be helpful and necessary, and I hope that we will receive the co-operation of the farming community, the veterinary profession and wildlife groups.

As I have said, we have reduced the backlog on TB testing, and I pay tribute to the work of the state veterinary service, which has done a terrific job in achieving that during the past few months. The movement restrictions on herds with tests three months or more overdue from the start of October has also acted as a powerful incentive to get things done more quickly, and data from November shows that of the overdue tests, 48 per cent. are less than one month and 90 per cent. are less than six months overdue, which is a considerable improvement on the previous position.

There has been some debate and controversy on the lay testing proposal and no decisions have been made at the moment, but there is an argument for suggesting that in order to speed matters up and reduce costs, it may be a good idea to allow lay testing for the simple procedure of the skin test. We are still assessing the feedback from the consultation, and I hope to be able to make an announcement on that to the House shortly.

I suspect that the comments that that right hon. Gentleman quoted from Professor John Bourne on "Farming Today" were in relation to the gamma-interferon test. I have regular contacts with Professor Bourne and he has not made the general point to me that he thought that we were fiddling while Rome burned, but he has had a concern about the speed with which we have extended the gamma-interferon test. The main reason for that is that it has been quite difficult to get farmers to take part in the pilot, partly because they worry that if it is more sensitive it will lead to more breakdowns and more herds being subject to restrictions. But we are making progress. We now have 77 farms that have agreed to take part in the pilot, and we are working hard to increase that number all the time.

Earlier this year, an Audit Commission report raised concerns about some of the compensation payments made in Wales, which were not necessarily close to market values. As the Government, we have to be responsible for the proper use of taxpayers' money, and we are thinking about how we can ensure that farmers receive the full market value for their slaughtered cattle, as they should. The right hon. Gentleman was right to highlight the difficulties of the dairy industry, particularly in recent years, with the milk price. It is right and proper that farmers should get the full market value for their cattle, but there is disturbing evidence that in some cases, they have been getting considerably more than that. I would like to know why, and to see what we can do to ensure that that does not happen in future.

As for a vaccine, I was not around in politics 10 or 15 years ago, as the right hon. Gentleman was, and I do not remember Ministers in the then Conservative Government saying that a vaccine was at least 10 years away. There is no doubt, however, that although a vaccine would be a holy grail solution, it is not going to happen in the short term, as the vaccine scoping study published in December made absolutely clear. This is not because we are not committing enough resources to the issue. Among the first questions that I asked my scientific advisers when I was appointed were, "Can we speed this process up? Is the problem that we are not spending enough money on it?" I was reassured that that was not the case. The fact is that we cannot force the speed of scientific research. We are also carrying out some very useful collaborations with the Irish and New Zealand Governments on aspects of vaccine research. I hope that, in the medium and long term, vaccines for either cattle or badgers will help us to tackle this disease. The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, however, to say that there is no point in raising expectations in the industry that a vaccine solution is just round the corner.

The decision to suspend the reactive culling element of the randomised badger culling trial was taken because farmers could not wait until 2006 for the outcome of the Krebs trials, as was made clear to me by farmers in Devon, among others, when I was first appointed. Ministers cannot pre-empt the outcome of a scientific trial; we cannot jeopardise the authenticity of what that trial will discover. I made it clear to Professor Bourne when I was appointed that if there were any significant interim findings before 2006, I wanted to know about them, because if they were important, we could make policy decisions sooner than that date. However, we had no control over the fact that the interim findings that were dramatic were perhaps not the ones that I, or most people in the farming industry, were expecting. That is science.

There was no doubt, however, about the advice that I was given by my scientists, including the chief scientist in the Department. The research was peer reviewed, and it has since been peer reviewed and published in December's issue of Nature. It found that, in the reactive culling areas, the impact of the culling had been to increase the incidence of TB breakdowns in cattle by 27 per cent. No Minister faced with that figure could sit back and say, "Well, we're just going to carry on and see what happens." The farming industry would have been up in arms, and would have said that we were continuing with a policy that was making the problem worse, and the badger rights people would have said that we were continuing with a policy that involved the unnecessary killing of badgers and was also making the problem worse.

We had no choice but to abandon the reactive cull. That does not mean to say that we have ruled out badger culling as a long-term option. The proactive culling is continuing, and I have also said to Professor Bourne that I want to know about any significant data that emerges from that before 2006, which would enable us to make an earlier policy decision.

Mr. Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)

I thank the Minister for giving way, and draw to the attention of the House my interest in livestock farming, which is recorded in the Register of Members' Interests. The implication of the abandonment of reactive culling is surely that there is evidence that badgers are implicated in the spread of the disease between themselves and cattle. That is an advance, and something that farmers have suspected for a long time.

Mr. Bradshaw

Yes, there is a certain amount of truth in what the hon. Gentleman says. There has always been a reservoir of TB infectivity in wildlife, and in badgers in particular. What we have never had is hard scientific evidence relating to the nature of the spread, or the role that badgers play in it, compared with, for example, cattle-to-cattle spread. That is what has fuelled the argument between the industry and wildlife groups. The latter claim that this is all about biosecurity measures and that farmers should bear the main responsibility for ensuring that their cattle do not get infected, while some—although not all—farmers blame the badgers and advocate a badger eradication policy.

The hon. Gentleman is right. The abandonment of the reactive cull has finally shown that there is a connection, although we still do not know the extent. We also know that a reactive culling policy, which many people in the industry prematurely advocated that we adopt before the outcome of the trials, makes matters worse. Those events show that the trials were important, that following the science is important and that it is important not to bow to demands from either side to take premature action. Doing that may give the appearance that one is acting urgently, but it could make matters worse. We have to do the right thing.

We will not only continue to watch carefully the data coming from the proactive trials, but will examine carefully the results of the trials being conducted in Ireland, which we expect to be published fairly soon. They are slightly different in that the Irish have conducted something more like a badger eradication policy over a wider area and they have used snaring, which is a more effective way to cull badgers. We are keen to learn best practice from any other country, because we accept that this is such a serious issue.

In summing up, I hope that the right hon. Member for West Dorset is at least a little reassured that we take this situation extremely seriously. The issue was certainly top of my in-tray when I was appointed about six months ago and, apart from fisheries, I have spent the most time on it, supported by a good team who have been working hard to get the consultation out, to get a new long-term strategy adopted and to make changes in the short term, which we hope will help to prevent spread to further areas and begin to contain and reduce infection and herd breakdowns in those areas that are already affected.

I return to the candid way in which the right hon. Gentleman finished his speech: in the absence of a solution, this problem will be difficult for some time. There are no magic solutions. We are as keen as anyone else to solve the problem. We do not take the situation lightly as it is serious for farmers and for our Department, which is having to spend a considerable amount of money on TB that we would rather spend on—

The motion having been made after Six o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at fourteen minutes to Seven o'clock.