Veterinary Personnel

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

We should all be very grateful to the noble Lord for his involvement in creating the new courses across a number of different universities. I shall certainly take his suggestion away and make sure that, across government, there is an understanding of the very real need to get more veterinary surgeons in this country trained in our universities and functioning in our veterinary profession.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, numbers have fallen sharply, with the number of registered vets from the EU being less than one-third of the expected figure. A large proportion of public health veterinary work was done by vets from European countries. The real problem is not the number of UK students graduating, but the fact that they want to work not in public health but in private clinical practice. What are the Government going to do to rectify that?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Working in an abattoir or assessing the viability of products of animal origin is not necessarily why everyone goes into the veterinary profession, but they are important professions and part of it. We are working with the royal college to make sure that it is a career people want to go into. We are working with the Food Standards Agency, which is now going to recruit 25% of official veterinarians itself, rather than going through a third body, to make sure that we can career-manage them to stay in the profession and prosper in it.