MEP backs EU demands for Britain to guard against another foot-and-mouth outbreak
May 31, 2002 12:00 AM
Liz Lynne, Liberal Democrat MEP for the West Midlands region, is backing European Commission demands on Britain to improve border controls amid warnings that lax record-keeping and poor border inspections could allow foot-and-mouth disease to return.
Their demands follow a team of inspectors finding a catalogue of serious failings, which it says is undermining the controls protecting Britain from contaminated food and animal imports.
Said Liz today "Britain needs another foot-and-mouth outbreak like a hole in the head. British agriculture has not yet recovered from last year's crisis and the whole country suffered from the countryside being effectively out of bounds. Yet we now hear that the Government is doing nothing to stop it all happening again."
The report, by European inspectors on nine ports and airports, details problems with hygiene, record-keeping and training.
Inspectors noted problems with the paperwork accompanying imports, warning that the systems to identify consignments were not complete in most of the ports visited. They said "vets did not always have a complete overview of which consignments are arriving, have arrived, or are in transit". Also, they said, there were too few qualified vets to make checks on imports, and training was "inadequate".
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