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Organophosphates

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate, particularly the noble Countess, Lady Mar, whom we all respect for her committed work over a considerable period on this very important issue. I discussed these issues with her when for a short while I held responsibility for the transport brief in this House. I was well aware of the strength of her arguments and I did my best, from a more limited position than my noble friend Lord Rooker, to see how we could make progress on those issues. A number of speakers suggested that the Government have been tardy in responding to these issues out of an unwillingness to commit resources, or from anxiety about compensation that may be payable. Those are unfair charges. The issue is straightforward, as the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, emphasised; namely, that we must make progress on the basis of the scientific evidence. As I understand it, the problem is that we do not have a secure enough scientific base to know exactly what to do. That is not to say that we are not aware of studies such as the one to which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, referred. After all, that was commissioned by Defra. I am sorry that the noble Lord did not find the response on the website; I shall give it now. The researcher, Dr Sarah Mackenzie Ross, found that the results suggested there may be a relationship between long-term, low level exposure to OPs and the development of neural behavioural problems. This is an important piece of research but we have commissioned two other research reports as a result of COT’s work in 1999 and we await their publication. We cannot publish them yet because they have not been subjected to peer review and proper scientific vetting and analysis. All these reports, and our response to them, will be produced in the very near future. That brings me to the question: what has happened to the Carden Committee? As the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, indicated, it has changed its name as Mr Richard Carden is now retired. Therefore, the committee reverts to its original title, the Official Group on Organophosphates, which produces the appalling initials OGOP, which I shall mention once but not refer to again in those terms; rather, I shall refer to it as the committee. It would take me more time than is available to me in this debate to list all the contributors to the committee but representation on it is an example of joined-up government. There is not a single government department relevant to this issue that is not actively represented on the committee and forms part of its composition. The only thing that is missing from there is any direct reference to lawyers. Given that it was suggested that they might be the very contributors to delay, I should hope that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, will feel reassured by that omission. Not that I am saying that no lawyers are ever present with a government committee of this kind; I am merely indicating that the legal contribution is not important. What is important is the scientific support and the contribution of the government departments that all have an interest in this area; for example, the Health and Safety Executive, the Food Standards Agency, the Health Protection Agency, the Department of Health, my own department and others. I merely summarise the contributors. I would be happy to publish a list. When will the committee meet again? It will meet shortly. Noble Lords are right to say that we have not made sufficient progress in the past couple of years to justify the committee meeting. I noted the criticisms made by noble Lords that they were not aware of what the committee did at its 2007 meeting. In 2007, the committee did some very important work. It looked at an Australian review of diazinon. The Australians seemed to have made progress with regard to sheep dips. However, when we examined the progress that they had made we found that it fell short of being a conclusive position that we could adopt. It was clear that where the Australians had tackled issues with regard to sheep dips and offered advice on the basis of their experience, they had not conducted the supervision of sheep dipping in quite the way that we do in the United Kingdom and we could not translate their results directly to our own experience. This conclusion was reached on the basis of very clear analysis of the Australian activity. Since then, the committee has reviewed the research projects to see whether sufficient progress is being made to bring the group together. I heard that what this country needs in this area is a bit of a zip behind it such as President Obama has produced in the United States. I am at one with the House in thinking that most things good in America at present result from the election of President Obama and the work that he does. He certainly has insisted that additional work is done with regard to Gulf War veterans. That work will produce results in February 2010 because you cannot speed up such work. When that United States research and the other pieces of research I mentioned that we have commissioned, and which have received scientific validation, are completed, our committee will meet and address these issues further. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, asked about the timescale in the most trenchant terms and asked whether it constituted an exercise in procrastination. That is not the case. This is an exercise in dealing with what we all recognise is a very difficult issue on the basis of making progress and of having a committee which is equipped to do this work. Its timescale is clear and fits in with crucial pieces of evidence that will be available to us in the not too distant future. I appreciate the work that the noble Countess, Lady Mar, has done in this regard. However, until she mentioned it this evening, I had not appreciated that she had suffered illness in this context. I express my concern about that and I am therefore not at all surprised at the anxiety that she expresses on behalf of others who may have come into contact with the problem. I say to her and to my noble friend Lord Rooker, who, as ever, was bold and assertive in his comments and confirmed exactly how he would have acted in government, that we are obliged to work on the basis of the best scientific advice. It is certainly government practice to—