Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 1:45 pm on 5 April 2017.
Perhaps unrelated to the consultation that is going on at the moment, can I draw attention to a problem with the testing regime as it is at the minute? A strict liability regime is applied to the testing of cattle. If you fail to test within the 60-day window, then you automatically are fined, in effect. But very often we find cases—it’s possible that the leader of the house may have had constituency cases in her postbag along these lines—where a test has had to be abandoned because cattle become agitated, or even violent, and it’s unsafe in health and safety terms for the testing to continue. In those circumstances it’s possible, indeed highly likely, that the retesting can’t take place within the window and the farmer will automatically therefore attract penalties, even though it will be for something that is actually beyond his control. So, what I’m asking is: can there be some flexibility introduced into the testing regime, so that where events beyond the farmer’s control prevent compliance, he will not then attract penalties or there will be some mitigation?