Perhaps I may put forward one suggestion to the Minister. If this plague gets out of hand, the national milk supply could become endangered. It may be sensible to consider vaccinating milk cows, mostly Friesians, and not subsequently cull them. They are all fully registered. There are now wonderful records of all of them.
None needs to go into the export chain.
It is pretty poor quality meat which is seldom exported anyway. Secondly, many small farmers are not entitled to unemployment benefit. Using their compensation for laying off long-serving staff will nibble away at their capital. I have two suggestions. First, the Government should consider reintroducing the redundancy rebate system to help with redundancy costs.