Volume 9: Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
Part 2: Scotland
11. Comment
Concluding remarks

11.54 Our general conclusion, having reviewed the way in which BSE was handled in Scotland, is that there were no special features of the disease that would have justified a separate set of policies there. It was appropriate that MAFF and DH should be in the lead. Professional advice needed to be analysed coherently and consistently as an aid to decision-making, and applied throughout the UK.

11.55 However, with separate administrations for health and agriculture and in some cases separate legislation, coordination of action was bound to be a problem. So too was the timing of public announcements. Both Mr Gummer and Mr Hogg saw consultation with, and briefing of, the administrations outside London as a process that threatened successful departmental management of sensitive public information. ¹ The Scottish Office, for its part, often felt excluded from the real debate and obliged to scramble through the necessary consultations and other action at the last minute because it was given little notice. All this was compounded by the travelling distance between Edinburgh and London. Lord Lindsay told us:

. . . very often I think Lady Denton and myself would have a fax in from MAFF in the morning saying: 'This is a Parliamentary statement which is going to be made this afternoon, we want it cleared within a matter of hours.' We were very often halfway up a farm track 500 miles from London and a long way from our own officials and offices. ²

11.56 We see these as endemic problems and consider them in relation to all the 'territories' of the UK in the final part of this volume. As such, they perpetually need attention, in particular if there is a further polarising of national centres of interest.

11.57 Given the coordination difficulties, we believe that the process of bringing in provisions in parallel for Scotland and the rest of Great Britain was in the main competently managed and that the people of Scotland were not served any less well than those in the rest of the UK. However, it was undoubtedly the case that this coordination was much assisted where it was possible to introduce a single statutory provision.

11.58 We considered the converse question of whether Scotland had valuable information and insights to offer to the rest of the UK. Did anything specifically prevent this?

11.59 An obvious and authoritative focus for professional Scottish knowledge and expertise was the CMO and his team. In Scotland there were a number of centres of excellence dealing with animal diseases that might have been sources of advice. Apart from the ad hoc contacts with the CJDSU and the NPU, both of whose links were mainly with the Department of Health and CVL respectively, this expertise was not harnessed.

11.60 We noted that traditionally the CMO quarterly gatherings are informal and that they do not offer collective judgements to Departments. It was not part of this Inquiry to examine all the ways in which the collective force of CMO wisdom can be brought to bear. We note that concerns over BSE appear to have been discussed in this forum on many occasions. That collective concern, however, does not seem to have been conveyed to Ministers or indeed to senior policy-makers in Departments. This was a weakness in the way the informal arrangements worked.

11.61 We have considered whether Scotland, like Wales, had other combinations of knowledge and skills to offer that could have assisted UK-wide policy-making. It does not appear so. The general approach appears to have been to follow what was suggested in London and to deal with the fall-out. As we have noted on the handling of the SEAC papers, this approach was not fruitful. No arrangement or wish appears to have existed between DAFS and SHHD to consider and interpret the SEAC material with a view to making a proactive contribution to the debate. Dr Kendell's description of totally separate realms of departmental interest on human health on the one hand, and farms and abattoirs on the other, is replicated in the poor liaison arrangements that existed between the two Departments. Within DAFS itself, we were surprised by the avowed lack of knowledge of those dealing with animal health policy about the meat slaughtering and processing business and about food safety generally. All these are matters which may have been rectified since the period with which we are concerned. We believe it is important that they should have been.

Scottish Office Ministers

Scottish Office Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries Department (formerly the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland)

Scottish Office Health Departments