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Damning report on farm disease18/03/2003The Government has been criticised for the way it handled the world's worst foot-and-mouth outbreak. A report by the Commons public accounts committee said the Ministry of Agriculture was guilty of a serious misjudgement in assuming that the risks of an outbreak were low, and consequently failing to plan for the scale of problems it faced. MPs noted that the department, headed at the time by Nick Brown, now Minister for Work, had contingency plans which focused only on agriculture. In the event, the 2001 outbreak caused most damage to the tourist industry - which incurred £5bn of losses. The report criticises the Government for: Being too slow to impose a national livestock movement ban; Closing footpaths to walkers; Burning diseased cattle in huge fires; Lacking a clear policy on vaccination; Failing to call in the armed forces quickly enough to clear the backlog of slaughtered animals. That last lesson was learned during the 1967/68 outbreak but, says the committee, seemed to have "fallen out of the collective memory of the department". The epidemic - which is believed to have started in the North-East - resulted in 3,912,700 animals being slaughtered nationally. Of those, about 376,125 were destroyed in the North-East and North Yorkshire, costing the region £200m. The MPs also noted that the department's systems for paying compensation to farmers whose animals were destroyed had inadequate cost controls. Farmers received nearly £1,400m in compensation and other payments, with the assessed values of animals tripling during the crisis. The report noted that the department allowed farmers to select and appoint valuers themselves. Similarly, the report said, the department found itself in a "weak negotiating position" and having to pay a premium to get clean-up work, such as the cleansing of farms and the construction of disposal sites, done quickly. The department has been withholding £90m from companies in respect of invoices where it has so far been unable to verify that the work claimed for has actually been carried out. • Back
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