I am not going to give way.
The Commission found that there were missed targets on rapidly removing cattle with TB, and on the follow-up of missed tests. It found numerous shortcomings and
“weaknesses in cleaning and disinfection at farm, vehicle, market and slaughterhouse levels, exacerbated by lack of adequate supervision”.
All those problems increase the risk of TB spreading between cattle.
David Fisher, who was a DEFRA-funded TB inspector in Wales until 2011, has said:
“It is an open secret that isolation of [TB] reactors and inconclusive reactors is rare.”
He has said that DEFRA’s database showed that, in 2009, there was 20.8% non-compliance on bovine TB
issues. There was only one instance that year of a dairy farm being checked for compliance with an isolation notice.
I welcome the fact that DEFRA has indicated that new rules and a crackdown on cattle movement, and increased TB testing, will take place from 1 January 2013, with restrictions on farms where a TB case is identified, but I support Mark Jones, a vet and executive director of the Humane Society International UK, who has said that Ministers should wait and assess the impact of tighter biosecurity measures. As has been said, in Wales, bovine TB has fallen since the badger cull was stopped in Wales and tighter measures were introduced. He says:
“There is some evidence…that TB in cattle is coming down. There needs to be time to see if there has been an impact, before going ahead with a massacre of badgers…It is cattle, not badgers, that are the main transmitters of bovine TB so it is utterly outrageous for badgers to pay the price for farmers’ failure to abide by proper biosecurity measures.”
I could not end on a better note than that.
12.28 pm