DEFRA wins victory in TB compensation case

The Court of Appeal has ruled against Devon farmer David Partridge, who claimed that DEFRA’s bovine tuberculosis valuation system was discriminatory and unfair.

Appeal court judge Lord Justice Lawrence Collins overturned the High Court decision made last July that ruled the compensation scheme violated European equal treatment rules and ordered DEFRA to fundamentally rethink it, to make it fairer.

Mr Partridge’s lawyers had argued that DEFRA’s compensation scheme positively discouraged biosecurity efforts to stamp out bovine TB, rewarded poor animal husbandry and left farmers of well-bred and highly productive cattle seriously under-compensated.

But with vast sums of public money at stake, DEFRA appealed, fearing that success for Mr Partridge would bring hugely increased compensation bills and a potential avalanche of payout claims from farmers in respect of “long-since slaughtered” animals.

It defended the purely administrative “table valuation” system – which paid compensation on the basis of the “average” market price of slaughtered cattle, based on age, breed and other factors.

And Lord Justice Collins accepted DEFRA’s agreeing that the true value of any animal once it had tested positive for TB was the salvage value of its carcass.

He ruled that owners of “high-value” cattle were not being discriminated against and added that the DEFRA scheme was “objectively justified” as a measure to stamp out widespread over-compensation under the old system.

Mr Partridge brought the case with backing from the NFU after he lost a number of animals to slaughter in 2006 and received about £1000 per head – one third of their individually-assessed market value.