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Avian Flu
11.27 am
Lord Dykes asked Her Majesty’s Government:
What steps they are taking to resolve the problem of H5N1 viral transmission to poultry in the United Kingdom.
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Rooker): My Lords, strict biosecurity requirements, wild bird surveillance and import controls are in place to minimise the risk of H5N1 being transmitted to poultry in the UK. With regard to the recent outbreak in Suffolk, we are currently investigating all possible routes of transmission. Defra’s interim epidemiological report into the source of the outbreak is available in the Library of the House.
Lord Dykes: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer, and perhaps we can all thank the veterinary services for the way in which they are manfully—and, I hope, womanfully—coping with this serious problem. Further to his Answer, will the noble Lord confirm that the origin of this contamination now appears to be clear and that it was definitely not wild birds? Will he also reassure the House that the Government are coping with the worrying stories that keep coming along of very poor live-poultry care in the East Anglian turkey-processing factories, sloppy hygiene procedures and misleading origin advertising? Are the Government able to deal with those matters satisfactorily as well?
Lord Rooker: My Lords, because of the investigations being undertaken, I am naturally limited in what I can say. But I can assure the noble Lord and the House that we have done thousands of surveillance operations, reports and investigations. They have been ongoing since the outbreak, as well as during the months beforehand, and they concern wild birds, dead birds and poultry houses across the country, but particularly in East Anglia. No evidence of H5N1 has been found other than in the Bernard Matthews plant at Holton. It appears that this is exclusively a Bernard Matthews Holton problem. There is no evidence of H5N1 anywhere in the wild bird, intensive poultry or free-range poultry populations in this country. I repeat: we have done thousands of surveillance operations, ongoing as I speak, with tests on dead birds, wild birds captured for that purpose and poultry houses. More poultry houses have joined the poultry register since the
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The Countess of Mar: My Lords, the Minister might agree that Defra cannot be criticised for lack of assiduity in tracing where the virus has come from. Does he agree that the answer to the question of where it came from is absolutely paramount? We must on no account say that we do not know where it has come from and are not going to look.
Lord Rooker: My Lords, we are not saying that. It may be that we never pin it down. The work to find that out is going on now. As we know from what we have published so far, the test results from the Veterinary Laboratories Agency at Weybridge identified the strain found in Suffolk as 99.96 per cent identical to the strain found in Hungary. The questions arise of how it got here and of how it got from one poultry house to another shed at Holton. One realises that once the virus was identified at Holton, all the birds were clearly going to be culled. It may therefore be that transmission on the site occurred in that way, but how it got in there in the first place is the subject of ongoing investigations. It is important that we tie down how it got into that shed to start with. Given that the strain is virtually identical to that found in Hungary, we must find out how it got from Hungary, and from where in Hungary. Inquiries are going on now with our Hungarian partners in the European Commission to find out more about the outbreak in Hungary in the first place.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: My Lords, does my noble friend recall a previous case when one dead swan was discovered on the coast of Fife? We ended up with ITN and the BBC doing their 10 o’clock and 10.30 news broadcasts fronted by reporters at—appropriately, in view of the name of the noble Lord who asked this Question—Cellardyke. Does the Minister believe that the media sometimes treat these issues with unnecessary alarm?
Lord Rooker: My Lords, I shall be careful what I say. One only has to read the press reports. The fact is that if people give out the maximum information to the public when these incidents arise, they help to protect public health, their own industry and their brand. The Government have given out the maximum amount of information we are responsible for, to reassure people and the industry. The industry and companies have a responsibility, however, to explain what they are doing. In this case, the press will report what they receive.
Lord Walton of Detchant: My Lords, has this particular strain of H5N1 been shown by research to be sensitive to the anti-viral agent Tamiflu? Tamiflu has been stockpiled in the event of any spread of the virus to the human population. Can the Minister give us any information about progress in producing a vaccine against the H5N1 virus?
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Lord Rooker: My Lords, I regret that I cannot answer those questions, but I shall seek the information and write to the noble Lord.
Lord Livsey of Talgarth: My Lords, given the Bernard Matthews company’s original claim that there were no links between Hungary and Suffolk when it has now been established that there were regular poultry imports to its plant from Hungary, will the Minister’s department take appropriate action to prosecute it for endangering human and animal health if biosecurity failings are proved there?
Lord Rooker: My Lords, I can only say that the studies and investigations by the State Veterinary Service, the Meat Hygiene Service and the Food Standards Agency are ongoing. Appropriate action will be taken as a result of the investigations. I cannot go beyond that. There are clearly major issues of public and animal health and other matters. There is quite a lot of regulation in this area, and the regulatory authorities’ investigations are ongoing.
Baroness Byford: My Lords, will Defra be able to finalise where this disease has come from? At the moment, the Government’s move within the industry is to share the costs of future animal disease outbreaks. If one cannot get to the bottom of how a disease has come in, it is not fair to expect the industry to carry the costs. While on the subject of costs, how is Defra going to continue to fund itself? It was announced yesterday that the department has asked the Treasury to put £305 million on one side to cover the deficit from the fiasco of the single farm payments.
Lord Rooker: My Lords, I expected that question, but I am glad it has come at the end. One should not believe everything that one reads. The issue relating to contingency from the Treasury is true, but it is not as bad as it appears at first sight, and is certainly not as bad as it was reported on “Farming Today”. We are dealing with a two-year issue, and we know more about it now. As of the end of this week, we will have paid out more than £900 million of £1.5 billion for this year. That is a success by any standards, and is a big improvement on last year.
On the first part of the noble Baroness’s question, we need to find out where the disease came from, if that is possible. It is our intention to do so, but we may never find out. Trying to share the costs of animal health with the industry is ongoing and we are having discussions about it. We should not let this one case drive the policy because it appears to be isolated to one company at one location. It is not widespread across the rest of the industry, and it is in the industry’s interest to ensure that biodiversity issues are taken incredibly seriously. In that way, the rest of the industry is protected. The issues that the noble Baroness raises will be the subject of ongoing discussions because we are in consultation with the industry at the present time.
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Business
11.38 am
Lord Grocott: My Lords, with permission, a Statement on occupational pensions will be repeated later today. It will be delivered by my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton, and we plan to take it after the eighth speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Jay, in today’s major debate.
Business of the House: Debate Today
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Rooker): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in the name of my noble friend Lady Amos on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the debate on the Motion in the name of Lord Hurd of Westwell set down for today shall be limited to five hours.—(Lord Rooker.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Housing (Tenancy Deposit Schemes) Order 2007
Docking of Working Dogs’ Tails (England) Regulations 2007
Mutilations (Permitted Procedures) (England) Regulations 2007
Welfare of Animals (Miscellaneous Revocations) (England) Regulations 2007
Decommissioning of Fishing Vessels Scheme 2007
Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations 2007
Environmental Offences (Use of Fixed Penalty Receipts) Regulations 2007
Local Electoral Administration and Registration Services (Scotland) Act 2006 (Consequential Provisions and Modifications) Order 2007
22 Feb 2007 : Column 1180
Representation of the People (Scotland) (Amendment) Regulations 2007
Scottish Parliament (Elections etc.) Order 2007
Post Office Network Subsidy Scheme Order 2007
Renewables Obligation Order 2006 (Amendment) Order 2007
Foyle and Carlingford Fisheries (Northern Ireland) Order 2007
Electricity (Single Wholesale Market) (Northern Ireland) Order 2007
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Rooker): My Lords, I beg to move the Motions standing in the name of my noble friend Lady Amos on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the orders be referred to a Grand Committee.—(Lord Rooker.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Bill
Lord Rooker: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That it be an instruction to the Grand Committee to which the Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Bill has been committed that they consider the Bill in the following order:
Clauses 1 to 8,Schedule 1,Clause 9,Schedule 2,Clauses 10 to 23,Schedule 3,Clauses 24 to 37,Schedule 4,Clauses 38 to 42,Schedule 5,Clauses 43 to 46,Schedule 6,Clauses 47 and 48,Schedule 7,Clauses 49 to 52.—(Lord Rooker.)On Question, Motion agreed to.
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Iraq
11.39 am
Lord Hurd of Westwell rose to call attention to the issues which Her Majesty’s Government face in Iraq; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I do not apologise to the House for bringing its attention back to the problems of Iraq. I believe that we are living through one of the worst setbacks for British foreign policy for many years. We are still living with that story, and we cannot be sure how it will end. There are two questions before us—when I say “before us”, I do not mean just before the Government, because these are matters for Parliament and for everybody. The first question is how we can bring this war to an end that is tolerable for us, our servicemen and, above all, the people of Iraq. The Prime Minister made a start down this new road yesterday. The second question is how we can learn the lessons from our mistakes so that we do not repeat them. In the time available to me, I shall concentrate on the second question about learning lessons. I shall develop the case for a proper inquiry into the preparation for and conduct of this war.
I would like to say a word or two first about the present situation as I see it. We are faced with the collapse of a state, Iraq, which has been rickety for many years, partly because of the brutality and corruption of its dictator, and made more rickety when undermined by the process of sanctions. In April 2003 we brought that rickety structure down to the ground. We shook it to pieces and then we stamped on the pieces. That structure, that state, has not been reconstructed, now three and a half years after the invasion. The test is simple; it is posed in the Baker-Hamilton report and bluntly answered. The report wrote:
“The Iraqi Government is not effectively providing its people with basic services: electricity, drinking water, sewerage, healthcare and education”.
The elements of a new state lie around. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, constantly tells us and will tell us again today, there are good people trying to do good things. An assembly has been elected, a constitution has been drafted, although it is agreed that it should be revised, and there have been elections—though I must say that the elections have been used by the people of Iraq rather, it seems to me, to register the tribe or sect to which they belong. Certainly they have not been able as a result of those elections to provide themselves with a valid Government, because the Ministers huddled in the green zone up until now have not shown themselves capable—maybe they have not been able—to administer a state.
So the country is fragmenting all the time. The biggest fragment, the Shia fragment, is fragmenting within itself. Only the Kurds in the north enjoy a reasonably peaceful autonomy, which of course was not created by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but by arrangements made after the Gulf War of 1991. Elsewhere, into the gap where there ought to be orderly government have poured the forces of
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Al-Qaeda is now established in Iraq for the first time. It was not there in 2003; it is there today. The death toll is formidable. We concentrate—and this is perfectly natural—on our own service casualties, at just over 100, and the Americans do the same. The estimates for the number of Iraqi civilian dead vary hugely because there are no valid figures, but the number killed since the invasion is in the wide bracket of 50,000 to 150,000. The United Nations figure for last year alone is 34,000 Iraqi civilians killed. They were not killed, of course, by American and British troops but in the presence of American and British troops, who have been helpless to save them, although they were dispatched to rescue Iraq from its problems.
In these circumstances the number of Iraqis who leave the country is not surprising. Two million have left and others leave as soon as they can find somewhere to go. We are talking of course overwhelmingly of professional people, who can get out and find something to do elsewhere. A total of 1.8 million are displaced within their own country as a result of different kinds of ethnic cleansing.
Are those the signs of a country slowly reviving under our care? Are they not rather proofs of a country still losing blood? That is why the critics and opponents of that war, that invasion, are now in the majority in this country, as in the United States. It does not follow that those of us who have always opposed the war believe in immediate withdrawal. We are where we are. We should not, in my view, have joined the Americans in the invasion, but we did and we cannot leave them in the lurch. That is why I welcome what the Prime Minister announced yesterday about the drawdown of British troops, of which Ministers have spoken in this House and elsewhere for some time.
The Government should not deceive themselves. They should not be unrealistic or try to persuade us of something that is unreal about what we will be leaving behind, whether in Basra or in Iraq as a whole, as the American and British troops in the end withdraw. We shall not be handing over cities and provinces to stable institutions based on democracy and the rule of law. With luck—I underline, “with luck”—we shall leave behind in Iraq something like a larger Lebanon, maybe just holding together, though subject to outbursts of sectarian violence, maybe just avoiding a civil war, though very far from reconciliation. That is an Iraq totally removed from the country that we aimed to create through our invasion. It is an Iraq that now, so far from serving as a model and inspiration to the Middle East, is regarded by its neighbours and everyone in the Middle East as a dark warning.
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Against that background the case for an inquiry into these matters seems overwhelming. Two sets of arguments were used initially to support and justify the war. One set was based on the threat to our security. That set of arguments broadly collapsed when it was found that there were no weapons of mass destruction. The second set of arguments was that it was our duty to rescue the people of Iraq from their brutal dictator. If we look at the results of that attempted rescue, they do not justify the invasion.
How was that double miscalculation arrived at? The first set of arguments about weapons of mass destruction has been investigated and analysed to a considerable extent. We have the Hutton report and the report by the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, on the use of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. The noble Lord said, prudently, in his report that he and his colleagues did not regard his report on the question of the use of intelligence as the last word. An inquiry will need to look again at his serious, though soberly stated, criticism of the use of intelligence.
However, in a way, the noble Lord urged us further. The paragraph in his report on the machinery of government perhaps lay a little outside his terms of reference, and he did not pursue it, but he blazed a trail for us. Very significantly, he criticised what he called,
which make informed collective judgment more difficult. That is the noble Lord’s language; it is the kind of language which we are used to in our polite discussions in this House, but the crude profession of journalism very reasonably summed up his criticism as the criticism of sofa government. That aspect—what has gone wrong with the machinery of government—should be at the heart of an inquiry. The centralised direction of foreign policy, the sidelining of the Foreign Office and the consequent ignoring of experience inside and outside the Foreign Office, the tendency to listen to messages that those who are listening wish to hear and to sideline the others, and the tendency to take decisions informally without full and proper consultation are all allegations that need to be tested in an inquiry. Something went dangerously wrong at the heart of the decision-taking processes of our country.
American democracy has now woken up and is more vigorous in these things than our own. We now have across the Atlantic an outpouring of books and interviews, and we are only at the beginning of it. Now that we have a Democratic Congress, this process will continue. None of us could have mastered it all, but I have tried at any rate to follow some of the key things that have been published. One thing is common to them all: little or no attention is paid to British views or the British contribution to planning. I am not talking about our armed services and what they do, because I think that their contribution is understood; I am talking about the planning, the assumptions made at the beginning, and the thoughts on which the whole thing rested.
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There is almost universal silence on any contribution made by the British side. Can one imagine an American history of the American part played in the Second World War that did not pay attention to the views of Winston Churchill, or an American history of the Reagan presidency that ignored, for example, the contributions made at the Reykjavik summit, which I remember, by my noble friend Lady Thatcher? We are junior partners to the United States. Both Churchill and my noble friend were junior partners, and knew it. We seem to have lost that art, which is not an easy one, of being a junior partner, and we must somehow recover it.
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