BSE, the cost of a crisis : thirty-fourth report, together with the proceedings of the Committee relating to the report, the minutes of evidence and appendices / Committee of Public Accounts.

  • Public Accounts Committee
Date:
1999
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: BSE, the cost of a crisis : thirty-fourth report, together with the proceedings of the Committee relating to the report, the minutes of evidence and appendices / Committee of Public Accounts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    38/68 (page 12)
    [Mr Steinberg Cont] other Members of Parliament were telling you and the community was telling you, but it took you six months to realise what was happening. It seems an incredible situation. (Mr Packer) I think circumstances were rather different, Mr Steinberg. It is true that there was a backlog, that was inevitable given the circumstances in which the scheme had started. It was also true that there were assertions that the backlog was very high indeed. It was of course in the economic interests of a large number of people to claim the backlog would be very large, in the hope that Government would for example come forward with a further subsidy schemes, and that possible argument is mentioned in the report. We always suspected that the backlog was a lot less than observers with an interest were claiming, and the evidence bears us out, because when we registered animals—and we are now on paragraphs 2.47, 2.48 and 2.51—328,000 animals were registered as being ready for immediate slaughter on 21st October 1996 yet when the backlog had been completely eliminated before Christmas of that year, 182,000 of those animals had not come forward for slaughter. In other words, they had been registered speculatively which is what we had always suspected would be the case in any event. So the facts I think bear out not that we were credulous or not looking, but that we were looking in a rather more informed way at the facts than a number of commentators who were vocally putting their views into the media. 45. That is fine but I had practical information from actual farmers and presumably if I had this information the Ministry would have the information as well. They were saying they could not get the cattle to the abattoirs. (Mr Packer) It is true there was a backlog, that is undeniable, but it is also true the backlog was nothing like as large as some people were claiming. 46. CanI move on then. Very much as a layman and reading the report over the weekend—and it makes very interesting reading—it kept bumping into me that there were so many mistakes being made all the time. For example, I picked up that with the advanced payment scheme for the processing and payment of claims mistakes were made, there was a loss to the taxpayer, and it appears the inefficiency of the Board and the Ministry just was not helping the crisis. After reading this report, I am not surprised there were so many angry farmers. I actually got another letter from a farmer who wrote to me in January 1997 and the farmer said, “Not only do we have the aforesaid problem but we also have a telephone problem, trying to get sense either from the Ministry of Agriculture or the Intervention Board. It is like getting blood from a stone. One day my husband rang the Intervention Board helpline and he spoke to Tracy. After 20 minutes he gave up because she did not have a clue what she was talking about. He asked to speak to someone more senior, only to be told by Tracy she did not know who was more senior.” It just goes on and on and on. Farmers themselves could not get the information they wanted and it seems it was a catalogue of errors, untrained staff and just no help to the industry at all, and no wonder it seems to have gone from one crisis to another crisis. comment on that? (Mr Trevelyan) We were facing major difficulties in every area in the period May, June, July, August 1996. If you recall, Mr Steinberg, there was no scheme under the title “30 month scheme” in April. My department had its budget tripled overnight, our staff went up by over 30 per cent. We had to mix newly recruited staff, many of them working in an industrial area like Reading or Newcastle with very little country background, we had to train them up to even them with our own more experienced staff. During that time there was clearly a good deal of uncertainty amongst the new staff as to how to answer the queries, and the queries which were coming to us, as the NAO Report records, were at a very high level, we were getting more than 800 calls a day on our helpline, and you can imagine the atmosphere in the office receiving them. I think we have to come back again and again to the fact that the industry was in crisis, the Government was reacting to the crisis, and we were taking on new staff, putting in new systems, generating new schemes at a very great rate, and it is not at all surprising to me that there was a period in which new schemes were not taking effect. You mentioned the difficulty in farmers getting cattle off the land in the summer of 1996, we were well aware of that, and the report mentions in paragraph 2.49 the measures that we took at the Intervention Board to ensure that by the winter, before the winter fully set in, that those cattle could be cleared from the land and of course the farmers compensated. It had a welfare function and of course it had an economic function in that only when the cattle were cleared from the farm could they receive their 30 month payments, their compensation for not taking them to market. That whole process required our staff to be trained up, required a system to be put in place, but it also required us to overcome the major pinch point which was that we could not slaughter the cattle unless we could render them. The security of the scheme had to be absolute. We had to be quite clear that the cattle once slaughtered would within 24 hours be disposed of and marketable.’ The only way to do that was to ensure they were rendered. So we were refusing, quite clearly and quite plainly to everyone, to take cattle into the scheme until we could ensure we could render them within 24 hours of slaughter. That security we were able to make available, nobody has suggested we were not, but it took time to organise and Figure 14 shows the rate at which we were able to open up a totally new outlet for cattle on totally new terms where the state was the buyer, the state was the processor and the state was involved in storing the end product. A completely different system. If somebody had told me in even March 1996 that was where we were going to end up by September 1996, I would not have believed them, but that was where we were and of course it took time. But the fact is, and the NAO recognises it, the job was done. The important thing is that it was done effectively. Can you ' Note by Witness: Once slaughtered the cattle would within 24 hours be disposed of and unmarketable, not marketable.