http://www.boston.com/dailynews/204/world/Blair_halts_payments_for_clean:.shtml

Blair halts payments for cleaning stricken farms due to apparent high costs, orders a review

By Associated Press, 7/23/2001 19:26

LONDON (AP) Prime Minister Tony Blair has halted payments for cleaning up farms affected by foot-and-mouth disease over reports that costs are far higher than in other countries, the government said Monday.

The move effectively stops the cleanups until a review that Blair ordered is complete.

A leaked memo, published Monday in The Daily Telegraph, said cleanup costs in some cases were 10 times as high as for similar projects in other European countries.

''We need to ensure that we are not taken for a ride,'' Britain's food minister, Lord John Whitty, said at a news conference in Leeds. ''We have a responsibility to ensure money is well spent, but none of this undermines the urgency we have in stopping this disease.''

The memo refers to the secondary cleansing and disinfection that is done some time after an animal is slaughtered, not to the cleanup that takes place directly afterward.

The average cost of disinfecting farms in England and Wales was $146,000, and the cost of the whole program was estimated at $1.1 billion, according to the memo from the government center set up to fight the epidemic.

Richard Burge, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, an umbrella body of rural groups, said any significant delay in the cleanup of infected farms could be disastrous for small farmers.

He argued there is no need to review the costs and possibly revamp the program.

''The cleanup is, curiously, being done far more cheaply in Scotland,'' Burge said. ''So the government could simply ensure the immediate uptake in England of the guidelines and procedures already in place there.''

Since the first case of the highly contagious disease was confirmed in February, Britain has reported nearly 1,900 cases.

-- Anonymous, July 23, 2001