Contribution
My Lords, I remind the Committee that I am a small organic farmer and therefore have an interest in this. I also was the Secretary of State and Minister of Agriculture in the key area when we were trying to deal with BSE.
Looking back, it is amazing how we got through that period. Part of the reason was that we had a real reputation for protecting biosecurity here, so it was possible to get other countries to believe us when we said what we were doing and how we were doing it. As the person absolutely in the spotlight on this, I owed my predecessors enormously, because they created the circumstances in which it was possible to fight that battle.
It is very important, and I hope the Minister will accept this, because I honour him considerably and I think the Committee recognises what a considerable role he is playing. He can usually convince us that what he needs us to do is the right thing. I say to him personally: there is a problem if you have a Cabinet in which none of the people is a countryman or has a country constituency.
There are 9 million people who live in the countryside, and agriculture is one of our crucially important industries. Therefore, I hope the Minister will understand why we are very concerned that this should be in this Bill, because it covers a much wider range than doing the things that we might otherwise do in agriculture Bills and the like.
The truth is that, although the noble Lord and my noble friend have concentrated on the gangs and the people who make a lot of money out of it, one problem with biosecurity is that it is sometimes breached almost accidentally by individuals. You can bring really serious diseases in by bringing in a ham sandwich in the wrong circumstances and dropping it. I would just be frank about that end of it. We also know that there is considerable activity in bushmeats—in other words, meat which itself is illegal, as a matter of fact, but therefore has gone through no protective system at all—and the effects of that are really serious. We do not have to go into the details of some of the human diseases which have been spread by the use of bushmeats.
I recently had to spend a lot of time trying to get the Government of the time, a Conservative Government, to take seriously the problem of the growth in the number of wild boars in our forests and the fact that African pig diseases can get into that whole community and then threaten the entire British pig industry. I can tell the Committee why it was so difficult: it was because you were talking to people who did not appear to understand, first, that pigs have two litters and produce an awful lot of piglets, which can very soon get out of hand. They did not understand how close these wild boars were to the pig industry, and they had never really seen a wild boar—as somebody who had most of the lawn dug up by one, not all that time ago, I am quite strongly affected. I say merely that I found it difficult to explain to people how serious this was, why it mattered and what the effects were if we did not get it right, so I beg the Committee to support this change.
I know that the Minister wants to control the Bill, and one does not want to expand it, and I know that the Government are very concerned about that, but it is our only chance to remind everybody of the importance of biosecurity. The challenge is getting worse and worse. It is not just animals but, as my noble friend remarked, it is also about plants, invasive species and huge costs, and I end on that issue.
If we let this get out of hand, the cost to the national Exchequer will be enormous. We need only look at what we are trying to do about Japanese knotweed and all kinds of invasive species—we know what the monster wasp is likely to do, and we think of the American crayfish. I could go through a whole series of things that we would then have to deal with. Many people will know what we had to deal with with the escape of mink, for example. The control of our borders is crucial for biosecurity reasons, but it is crucial also to the Treasury—and, if I may say so, I have never found a department less understanding of how crucial it is to them. They ought to remember the cost of foot and mouth and the cost of BSE and all those diseases. Just think of what bird flu is doing to us at this moment. Therefore, I beg the Minister to take this very seriously.