Food, Farming and the Environment

I will gladly do that. The hon. Gentleman should bear with me a little; I shall come to regulation and I will tell the House about the latest situation. I turn back to the issue of skills. We continue to support apprenticeships in agriculture, horticulture and animal care, and about 4,500 young people enrol in them every year. We are supporting the fresh start academies, which are a really good idea. They give business skills to those who are currently farming and those who want to come into farming, and they offer mentoring to new entrants to the farming industry. The initiative is one of the most successful undertaken. We must also work together on animal diseases. Last year, the industry and DEFRA, working extremely closely together, ran a successful campaign of vaccination against bluetongue across England. That was genuinely impressive, and I pay tribute to all the farmers who vaccinated swiftly. There was a very high take-up of the vaccine—between 80 and 90 per cent.—in the south and east of England, although the rate was not so good further north. The result was that the UK was free from circulating disease; indeed, the only examples of the disease resulted from imports. That makes the point that farmers importing animals from parts of Europe where bluetongue is found have a responsibility to ensure that those animals do not have the disease before they are brought into the country. That joint action was cost and responsibility sharing in action. That is a better way of doing things and a model for the future. That is why we are consulting on the responsibility and cost-sharing proposals that we have produced.