Britain risks being unable to cope with a repeat of foot and mouth, a leading scientist has suggested.
Professor Keith Gull, a microbiologist at Oxford University, said a DEFRA u-turn threatened Britain's ability to react to future animal disease outbreaks.
The warning came after it emerged that DEFRA had scrapped a pledge to fund a major redevelopment of the Institute of Animal Health (IAH) in Surrey.
The IAH laboratory at Pirbright was at the centre of the 2007 foot and mouth outbreak, which was traced to a leaky drain at the site.
The independent Anderson inquiry recommended that the IAH laboratory be redeveloped into a National Institute for Infectious Diseases. But DEFRA said costs had risen and the project was now too expensive to implement.
Professor Gull, who also chairs the IAH governing body, said the decision left “a big question mark over our ability to react to future outbreaks”.
Unless the laboratory was redeveloped, it would remain vulnerable to the organisational problems that contributed to the 2007 outbreak, he suggested.
“DEFRA has avoided the conclusions of the Anderson report and has gone for a short-term solution,” Professor Gull told The Observer.
“It has failed to learn the key lesson, which is that a more integrated, long-term approach is needed.”
DEFRA was to contribute £60m towards the new building and move around 70 employees there from its Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) in Weybridge, Surrey.
But a DEFRA spokesperson said: “It is no longer necessarily the best option, and the budget agreed in 2005 is predicted to nearly double.”
DEFRA would contribute £5m of the estimated £10m cost of providing a temporary laboratory and would continue to be a major customer for IAH's services. But VLA virologists would no longer move to Pirbright.