DEFRA Cuts: Government to press on with disease cost sharing

The government is to press ahead with plans that will force farmers to share the cost of combating animal disease – despite criticism from its own financial watchdog that DEFRA costings will make it difficult to do so.

“We’ll be making efficiencies in how we do things, but we’ve made no secret of the fact that the industry will need to share both the responsibility and some of the cost of disease prevention and control,” a DEFRA spokesman told Farmers Weekly.

An independent advisory group on cost-sharing is due to report its findings to the government later this year. The move comes despite a National Audit Office report warning that DEFRA records are not good enough to implement cost-sharing.

The department and its agencies spent £357m to tackle animal health issues during 2009-10. But the NAO said measuring the current level of expenditure failed to show whether it was money well spent.

“The department’s financial recording systems were not designed to measure the full costs of addressing specific disease risks in different farming sectors.” Neither were they set up to support a charging regime, the NAO report added.

But the DEFRA spokesman said: “Although DEFRA systems are not currently set up to automatically calculate these type of charges, we are confident that such costs could be accurately apportioned if necessary.”