Defra Animal Health consultation (Horse Tax)

[Ciss]

The official response of the Lead Body for Performance and Sport Horses and Ponies can now be found on http://www.bef.co.uk/British_Breedin...dy_(PSHP).html

[Ciss]

If anyone is having difficulty accessing the site cit and paste it to the browser rather than typing it in might help.

[KarynK]

Ciss thank you for posting this however after having read it thoroughly I would like to highlight some leaning points. No surprise there I suspect.

Like I said before it would be nice to have been consulted in some form. As a Quangoesque organisation yourselves I would have hoped that you would have been more sensitive to these types of issues and it would have added much more weight to your response were you able to quote accurate views from a representative number of breeders whom this would affect most.

This consultation was very clearly a qualitative data survey (as opposed to yes no answers seen in quantative data sets), in this case analysis of responses is a lengthy process and is undertaken by a person sumarising their interpretation of the responses to each question. Therefore the decision makers will not have sight of individual responses such as yours.

The key in these types of consultation is to be firm and stand out so that the responses you put forward make the process of “exception reporting”. Mild answers to some of those questions do not stand out to me, and therefore probably not the analyst that will prepare the summary of responses (they will often not have any experience in the subject at hand). My fear is that many of your answers will simply be taken as a group positive or very mild negative to the policies proposed and that their relation to the equine will be lost.

You only have to look at the response document from the recent passport regulations consultation to see this process clearly at work; it was the strong dissenters on certain issues that got their say, even though (typically with a Quango) many were not enacted.


As I had feared in trying to respond politically to these types of surveys your views can get distorted in the wash, trying to take on Quangos at their own game is dangerous and can fall short of the mark actually helping to make it a yes. The sitcom “yes Minister” was popular because it accurately displayed the complexity and trickery involved in internal politics of spin in its time, that game has evolved even further since those days and setting up a Quango has become a slick process and is probably why David Cameron was pledging to dismantle some of them this very morning on national TV.

I am however most disappointed that you chose not to answer the key question of should horses be included within the remit of this Quango. It was there clearly in the consultation document where it was abundantly clearly posed as a question? Where do you stand as an organisation on this issue? Raising issues outside of prepared questions is always worth doing and concessions were recently made on passport issues regarding the 3 hrs production deadline whilst hacking, that was NOT a consultation question!

Also it is not clear to me what you are proposing on who exactly should pay this levy, reading it through it sounds like those owning more than one horse for anything other than pleasure should stomp up????? Is that really the view of breeders unelected representatives? It is far more likely in this age that it will be a competing horse, duped welfare import, TB mare/foal or competition horse that will bring these diseases into this country. As pointed out so well by Gingernags previously my money is on the sucker for sob story of the French meat trade, imported for pleasure reasons and not sport horse breeders!

On that very issue I am disappointed also that a representative body is so keen to concentrate on the perceived inevitability of the arrival of these two diseases and not at least expend some thought and energy on finding way to prevent that. In North America their departments of agriculture insist that no sick animal will be exported and pre export tests and quarantine are compulsory. On the other front much research has been done on both West Nile Fever and African Horse Sickness and a vaccine is available for both, surely as a preventative strategy it would be better for the equine industry to bring over stock now end of story and much more cost effective and negating the need to contribute to this at all.

Surely the equine industry can find it’s own way to fund research into the prevention of infectious diseases in this country, we have the considerable resources available to the levy board and the AHT, who have worked so well on other diseases such as flu and strangles in the past, why on earth would we wish to contribute to this huge money sucking department!

My message is PLEASE make it a policy within your organisation to consult with the people you have declared yourselves as representing. We are after all living in a democracy are we not?

Karyn