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Animal Health and Welfare Strategy for Great Britain
Chapter 7: Ensuring a clearer understanding of costs and benefits
Preventing animal diseases has obvious welfare benefits as well as being cost effective. All animal owners must play their part in preventing disease but to make sure this happens the costs and benefits involved need to be clearly understood.
7.1 Principles of Government decision making
The following principles for Government decision-making will be used when considering future policies.
All Government decisions on animal health and welfare will:
be consistent with Government's reason for intervention;
be based on sound science and evidence (including veterinary advice and surveillance) and guided by the precautionary principle;
lead to proportionate action through an assessment of costs and benefits;
be based on risk assessment;
be made in partnership with key stakeholders;
promote long-term sustainable development, including a sustainable food and farming industry;
be consistent with EU and international obligations; and
seek to promote British interests in the EU and internationally;
Science Science is both a driver for policy responses and forms part of the evidence base for ensuring that policy options can be effectively determined. Assessing and providing the science capability is, however, quite complex because of the breadth, depth and sometimes speed with which it is required to deliver. Thus Government requires a science base that gives expertise that can be trusted, but which is flexible and responsive to the varying demands that may be placed upon it. This science base ensures that animal health and welfare policy is based on sound scientific evidence which will lead to improved public delivery of Government policies. |
There are always competing calls for the use of public resources, and a wide range of interests in society who will be affected, positively or negatively, by Government action. It is the role of Government, in consultation with those potentially affected and wider public interests, to seek proportionate interventions which strike the right balance on behalf of society.
Regulatory Impact Assessment A Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) was produced to cost the introduction of new EU proposals for the management of sheep and goats. The RIA indicated that if a manual system recording individual animal was introduced as proposed by the Commission additional costs to the UK sheep and goat industry would be in the region of 89 million. This estimate was effectively used by officials, industry and the European Parliament to lobby the Council to reconsider the Commission's original proposals. Significantly revised proposals that improve identification and tracing arrangements, but which place a far smaller burden on the sheep and goat industry, were adopted at the December 2003 Agriculture Council. |
7.2 Understanding costs and benefits
Understanding the costs and benefits of any Government decision is essential for intervention to be implemented effectively. Government and all those affected need to understand clearly why the steps have been taken. A new regulation, for example, will be delivered most successfully if the reasons why it is needed and its requirements are known.
Government has invested 11.5 million since July 2001 in support of the National Scrapie Plan, with a further 10.5 million over three years committed by the Welsh Assembly Government to extend the plan in Wales. Government spent 74 million in 2002/03 on the TB control programme. In 2001/2002 spend on animal disease compensation totalled 1,086 million. Mastitis results in a loss per year of between 137 and 244 million to the dairy industry (Reading University)
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A clearer understanding of the costs and benefits of Government intervention is only one part of this strategic outcome. Animal owners also need to understand the cost and benefits of their own actions, particularly to inform their own decision making. So the costs and benefits of any health and welfare measures need to be established if best practice is to be understood, accepted and adopted. Government is often best placed to promote the development of best practice within industry, and co-ordinate research into animal health and welfare. Livestock owners are more likely to adopt higher standards if practical information relevant to their circumstances is provided that clearly explains the cost and benefits.
There are areas of research where Government is better able than others to invest at a meaningful level or useful scale and then disseminate the results. There is also a role for Government in sponsoring and promoting collaboration between industry, interest groups, itself and research establishments to identify priority areas. Industry must play a more prominent role in identifying research needs for a sustainable livestock sector, and be prepared to support that research.
Of a research budget of 150 million per annum around 40m will be spent on animal health and welfare research. 16 million is spent on TSEs. 7 million on TB research. 6 million on exotic diseases. 3.5 million is spent on welfare. Other programmes cover food borne zoonoses, research for the Veterinary Medicine Directorate, alternatives to chemotherapeutics, emerging diseases and the Veterinary Training and Research Initiative.
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Government will work with stakeholders to commission studies to increase understanding of the costs of disease and the benefits from its prevention and control. It will develop practical and relevant case studies to demonstrate advantages of animal health planning for each livestock sector. Government will work to facilitate and encourage farm health and welfare planning. But the key stakeholder groups, particularly the livestock sectors and farm assurance schemes need to champion this issue themselves and encourage a culture change and the adoption of these beneficial practices.
7.3 Sharing the costs and benefits
Achieving the aims of this strategy will benefit all those with an interest in animal health and welfare. It is therefore not for the Government alone to incur all the costs that achieving the strategy entails. These costs should, over time, and where appropriate, be much more fully shared.
In most industries, in which there is a possibility that a failure within the industry will impose substantial costs on people outside the industry, there is an expectation that the costs of failures will mostly be met by the industry concerned." Anderson Inquiry on Lessons Learned from Foot and Mouth Disease |
Given this is practice in other industries, in farming where both animal owners and taxpayers bear some share of the costs of prevention and control of diseases, the present position is favourable to the farming industry and costly to the taxpayer. Granted that the farming industry is characterised by a large number of small businesses, it remains the case that in principle the taxpayer should really only be expected to pay for genuine public good. The distribution of costs should not only better reflect where the balance of responsibilities lie for managing the risks, but also take account of those who benefit from measures to manage them.
Animal owners should individually and collectively take responsibility for managing animal health and welfare risks. For example, the need for farmers to maintain good biosecurity is not, and never has been, optional. Taxpayers cannot be expected to pay for the animal health and welfare costs and risks to farmers which affect their own businesses. When Government intervention is only or primarily in the interests of the farming industry, then it is right to expect that the costs should be borne by industry. This already happens in some European countries in the event of certain disease outbreaks. As part of the ongoing search for best practice under this strategy we will examine international practice to assess the relevance to circumstances in Great Britain.
Moving towards a more appropriate balance between the taxpayer and industry for the costs of animal health and welfare cannot happen overnight and will inevitably require full consultation. It will be necessary to establish and agree a number of guiding principles to ensure a consistent approach including how incentives, such as rewarding best practices, can be used in any schemes. Government will be considering the economic impact on industry of any cost sharing and cost recovery proposals in relation to any future decisions. Delivering and enforcing animal health and welfare standards, including incentives and sanctions are discussed in more detail in the following chapter.
National Fallen Stock Scheme The National Fallen Stock scheme is being set up by Government and the livestock industry to help farmers comply with Animal By-Products legislation. Government has offered around 20 million pump priming funding for the scheme's first three years of operation. After this period, the Scheme will be run and financed by the industry. |
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