Foot and Mouth Disease

Lord Roborough Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, I refer the House to my register of interests, including as a dairy farmer who remembers well the terror and isolation experienced by all livestock farmers during the last foot and mouth outbreak. Can the Minister explain to the House what lessons have been learned and what would be done differently, were this dreadful disease to reach our shores, to prevent a repeat of that terror and the awful scenes of burning carcasses that tormented our entire country?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right when he says that the mounds of burning carcasses tormented our country. I do not think any of us who were around at the time will ever forget that. He asks about lessons learned. In addition to regularly exercising our disease response capabilities, lessons identified reviews are undertaken at the end of any outbreak in order to identify and evaluate where improvements to disease response capability processes and organisational structures for managing an outbreak of exotic notifiable disease can be made. This is something we always do.

Following both the 2001 and 2007 foot and mouth outbreaks, extensive inquiries and reviews were undertaken. That led to some critical changes coming in, including, for example, the introduction of a ban on swill feeding, standstill periods for cattle, sheep and goats of six days and 20 days for pigs, and improvements in livestock traceability. These were all implemented in response to the recommendations of those lessons identified reviews and they are critical in order to prevent infection—in the case of swill feeding bans, for example—because we need to minimise any implications of the disease coming to this country again.