Volume 15: Government and Public Administration
4. Integrating professional advice into policy-making
The Chief Veterinary Officer (CVO)

4.7 The Chief Veterinary Officer was the Grade 3+ chief adviser on veterinary policy for the whole of Great Britain ¹ and was based at Tolworth in Surrey, just outside London. The CVO also had 'substantial responsibilities for implementation of policies', ² including control measures for animal diseases. The arrangements in place for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are described in Volume 9 of this Report. A Regional Veterinary Officer (RVO) was head of the SVS in Wales and supervised the implementation of the animal health and welfare policies of MAFF and the Welsh Office. In Scotland, the advisory and day-to-day management roles rested with an Assistant CVO, who reported to the CVO at Tolworth. ³ Northern Ireland had its own CVO.

4.8 The CVO had professional and line management responsibility for the SVS. When the Central Veterinary Laboratory (CVL) became an Executive Agency in 1990, the CVO no longer had line management responsibility for its staff, but he retained a significant say in its work both as head of the SVS, which was a main customer for the new Agency's services, and because he retained the budget for disease surveillance work undertaken at the CVL. ⁴

4.9 The CVO was the leading presenter of government policy on animal health matters to the UK agricultural industry and its various representative bodies. Moreover:

The importance of the CVO's role in presenting Government policies to the media and the public cannot be over-emphasised. ⁵

4.10 'As the main contact point on veterinary matters with other countries', the CVO represented the UK in a wide range of international fora including the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Office International des Epizooties (OIE), and dealt extensively with the European Union. ⁶ In exercising this responsibility, he consulted the ACVO for Scotland and the CVO for Northern Ireland. A former Minister for Agriculture, Mr Waldegrave, told the Inquiry that '. . . the CVO's office . . . carried considerable prestige in Europe', attributing this in part to recognition that the CVO was not 'just A N Other administrative official'. ⁷

4.11 The CVO published an annual report (Animal Health) surveying developments in this field during the year and the work of the SVS.

4.12 During the period 1989-96, the CVO or a deputy attended the regular meetings between the Permanent Secretaries of MAFF and DH, instituted by them to facilitate joint policy formulation and consideration of matters of common interest. The CMO or an appropriate Deputy CMO also attended. The CVO had direct access to the Permanent Secretary at MAFF and to Ministers if required. ⁸ Mr Meldrum, told the Inquiry that:

. . . with all of these Ministers I believe I established a very close working relationship. [One] had to establish and did establish a very special relationship between Ministers and the CVO and I am sure with several other officials such as Permanent Secretaries and so forth. There was no difficulty. There was openness, frank discussion, reliance upon the judgement of each. And we worked as a team. ⁹

4.13 Mr Meldrum also emphasised that, as CVO (from June 1988), he could give MAFF Ministers his own views, even if these had a different slant from the advice offered by the Permanent Secretary. ¹⁰ An example of this was when he disagreed with the advice given by DH and the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) to Ministers about breeding from the offspring of BSE-infected cattle. ¹¹

4.14 Mr William Rees, the CVO from 1980 to May 1988, told the Inquiry that when dealing with DH: ¹²

. . . it would be normal for the contact to be made Permanent Secretary to Permanent Secretary. ¹³

This reflected the difference between the CVO and the CMO in terms of their respective civil service grades, the latter being more senior. Mr Rees's attempt to establish an informal working relationship with the CMO by means of working lunches was unsuccessful. ¹⁴ Mr Meldrum said that when he became CVO, he and Sir Donald Acheson (the CMO) 'tended to discuss important issues by letter'. However, he added that:

Soon after Dr Calman was appointed [as CMO] we had a meeting at his request where we established the guidelines for our working relationship, and Dr Calman stated that he would be happy to meet with me whenever there was a need to do so. I took him up on this invitation on a number of occasions. I tried to give Dr Calman as much warning as possible of any new findings even though they may have been extremely preliminary and were not subsequently confirmed. ¹⁵

4.15 Mr Meldrum told the Inquiry that Ministers were content for him to make public statements. Indeed, he could remember only one occasion on which the Minister decided that he would himself speak instead of the CVO. 'But on technical issues I tended to speak both at press briefings and also in public.' ¹⁶

4.16 In one respect, the post had less freedom of action than the CMO. In response to the question 'You have said the Chief Medical Officer has an independent status. Am I right in understanding you did not regard yourself as having an independent status?' Mr Meldrum replied:

Not to the same extent that he did; that he quite clearly was required in accordance with the work that he was doing, and I assumed with the conditions under which he was appointed, he had a requirement that he would advise the public independent of government. Therefore, if he felt that there was a food safety issue that arose, he would make that information public even though it might cause difficulty for both his Department or other Departments. I, on the other hand, did not have that totally independent status, and coming back to the last question that you asked, if there had been an issue of substance where my view was different from the view of the Minister at the time, I have no doubt I would have discussed it with him and we would have agreed what I would say. ¹⁷