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Defra's Animal Health & Welfare Board: Letting the outside in

Proposals today by Defra to create an Animal Health and Welfare Board represent a fascinating move to open out policy making.

Proposals today by Defra to create an Animal Health and Welfare Board represent a fascinating move to open out policy making. But they need to be managed carefully if they are not to lead to the interests of producers coming before those of the public.

Defra has had a rocky year in meeting "responsive external engagement", one of seven fundamentals of good policy making recommended in our recent report, Making Policy Better. The reversal on forest policy after a mass public campaign and poor handling of its new approach to sustainable development suggest a department out of touch with both public opinion and what used to be known as "stakeholders".

A new way of bringing in external views

So it is intriguing that Farming Minister Jim Paice went on Farming Today this morning to announce not just a new consultative or advisory group, but a new policy board to make "direct recommendations" on animal health and welfare policy. The new group will mix outsiders with insiders. As the press notice says:

"The Board will be made up of around 12 members, 5 senior Defra officials including the Chief Veterinary Officer, and 7-8 external members including the chair. The external members will have experience and knowledge of kept and farmed animals, animal and veterinary science, and animal welfare, and could be farmers, veterinarians, animal welfare experts."

What are lacking are any more general representatives of the public interest. Final decisions will remain with ministers. This is a new way of bringing in external views – and a different model to more conventional consultation. What will be particularly interesting is if they put new issues on the department’s agenda. It will respond to criticisms that Defra does not have enough people who understand farming (though the Defra Ministerial team is pretty strong in that regard). But it will be interesting to see who comes forward – and how far they regard themselves as individuals rather than as representatives of bodies or groups. It may even finally point to a way forward on the thorny issue of to cull or not to cull (badgers, not quangos) which successive Defra Ministers have put in the too hard box.

Why there needs to be caution

The civil servants on the board will need to manoeuvre carefully to avoid ideas coming out of it that ministers find too uncomfortable. But the biggest problem is the implicit assumption of alignment between the interests of those who keep animals and the public interest. This seems to forget the rationale for the creation of Defra in 2001. Firstly, there was a loss of confidence in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food after the BSE crisis (which was created by a regulation relaxation on meat rendering as part of a Thatcher regulatory bonfire), when the department put producer interests before public health. That led to the creation of the Food Standards Agency to take decisions away from ministers too influenced by the farm lobby. The death blow was the disastrous handling of foot and mouth in 2001 – and in particular the failure to balance the interests of the rural economy versus the farmer interest in controlling disease. Defra was supposed to be able to take a more rounded view of the interests of the whole community – and to make sure farmers did their part in protecting the environment. Ministers and civil servants will need to be vigilant to ensure that these new arrangements, with their strong producer bias, are a step forward– and do not turn the clock back to the bad old days of "producer capture."

Keywords
Farming
Publisher
Institute for Government

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