Agriculture: Farm Animal Disease

Lord Clark of Windermere Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, like my noble friend, I remember that outbreak well; I live up in Cumberland, where it started. We will take on board all that we learnt from the 2001 outbreak. If I may correct my noble friend, the cost to the United Kingdom was in the order of £8 billon, while the costs to the Government—to the taxpayer—were something like £3 billion. We will do everything that we can to ensure that such an outbreak does not happen again, but that if it does, we will react to it in exactly the right manner.

[Lord Clark of Windermere]

My Lords, as the Minister is well aware, many of these animal diseases are episodic and, thankfully, those such as foot and mouth occur perhaps only every 30 or 40 years. One of the problems is that lessons are lost with regard to the administrative experience and the backup necessary to deal with them. Will the Minister ensure that his department has in place a lesson-learning system so that, if ever we face foot and mouth again, we are prepared for it? This applies to the non-veterinary side.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, the noble Lord and I are both old enough to remember the 2001 outbreak. I can just about remember the 1967 outbreak—I was in short trousers—and other Members of this House who are older than me might also remember it. The noble Lord will also remember that there was a good report from, I think, the Duke of Northumberland into that outbreak from which lessons could have been learnt, and lessons could have been learnt from the 2001 outbreak. I appreciate that these outbreaks happen only rarely; I would have hoped that they would have been even rarer, but we will certainly want to continue to learn lessons on each occasion.