Government accepts Foot and Mouth criticism needs to implement measures, says CLA

The CLA today reacted to the Government’s response to the Independent Review of the 2007 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak.

CLA President Henry Aubrey-Fletcher said: "We are encouraged that the Government has accepted criticism over its handling of the Foot and Mouth outbreak to a degree, but what’s really needed is a ’foolproof’ system in place to prevent this from happening again.

"In the report, the Government outlines its library of draft licenses. However, it would make a lot of sense to make such licences available to the industry now to prevent any dispute during an outbreak. This would avoid the ridiculous situations we had where it was perfectly legitimate to walk 300 cows across a road four times a day to milk, but if one of them calved it was illegal to fetch the calf in with its mother.

"The CLA is offering to work with Defra and Animal Health to produce something more efficient."

The CLA President also said that The Cattle Tracing System is becoming increasingly impractical. "The Animal Movement Licensing System faces a severe test because of the introduction of electronic tagging for sheep - EID, and Government should show commitment either by funding an upgrading of these two, or by giving greater priority and funding to the Livestock Partnership," he said.

He added: "While we wouldn’t want a situation where it was impossible to farm within a certain radius of Pirbright, it seems that it would make more sense to introduce strict enforcement of regulation within the plant, rather than creating zones outside it.

"It would be far more effective to have very strict precautions on the Pirbright side than to try and control a zone around it."