Agriculture, Fisheries and the Rural Environment

Earl Cathcart Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Earl Cathcart (Con)]

My Lords, no doubt I will be proved wrong but I am sure that everything has been said about the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, by now. So I just wish him a very happy and well-deserved retirement. I shall miss him.

As a farmer and egg producer, I will talk about the egg industry—a great success story, achieved without grants or subsidies. Last winter we had a number of outbreaks of bird flu. We were required under a veterinary order to keep our hens housed to protect them from the threat of the virus. This lasted for 18 weeks, two days. If birds are housed for more than 12 weeks, the producer loses his free range status and can sell his eggs only as barn eggs, at a fraction of the price of free range eggs, so that continued production becomes unviable and unprofitable. So I thank my noble friend, Defra and the British egg industry for persuading Brussels to extend the 12 weeks to 16. If approved, this will greatly help producers.

My main point concerns the current rules for the cleaning and disinfection of sheds when there is an outbreak of bird flu. Many EU countries perform only one cleanse and disinfection operation; for example, Holland has never had a further outbreak following the one cleaning-out operation. The German process is much swifter and cheaper than ours. Britain does the operation twice. The first is paid for by Defra, which sprays the shed with disinfectant, which dampens down the virus. The second operation is paid for by the producer and can cost anything from £5 to £10 per bird. So for a 16,000-hen shed such as mine, this can cost anything from £80,000 to £160,000, depending on how the contaminated muck and water can be dealt with.

What incentive is there for a producer to spend up to £160,000 cleaning his shed when in a normal year his flock might make a profit of £70,000, so that it will take him two and a half years to recoup the cost? If he does nothing and waits for one year, he is allowed to restart production without needing to do the expensive second clean because the virus is considered dead by then. We should not forget that it is not just the £160,000 for the cleaning; he has also lost his hens, which has cost him £65,000, and when he restocks after cleaning, he will have to buy new hens, at a cost of a further £65,000, plus consequential costs of feed and labour of about £35,000, before he starts generating any profit. He could be £325,000 out of pocket. So why would he want the cost of cleaning if he could avoid it by doing nothing?

However, this inactivity by the producer would be a disaster for the British egg industry as Britain would lose its bird flu-free status for a whole year. There would be no exports of eggs or meat; there would be zones around the producer for the whole year, with all the restrictions on movement, whether of laying hens or hens for meat; and jobs might be lost. The decision not to carry out the cleaning operation would affect the whole UK poultry industry in the most disastrous way. Could we have just one cleaning and disinfection operation like Holland does, and could Defra pay a proportion of that cost, which might just encourage the producer to carry out the cleansing operation?