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The UK took a week to prevent meat and other animal products entering the country from Germany last month, despite German officials warning that exports could be affected by an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, according to border experts.
Witnesses told MPs on Tuesday that Britain had been slow to respond to news of the highly contagious virus, detected in a herd of water buffalo near Berlin, because of failings in its post-Brexit border regime.
Helen Buckingham, a chartered environmental health practitioner, told the House of Commons environment, food and rural affairs committee that while import restrictions on German meat and animal products came into force on January 11, it took another seven days for the UK’s border system to be updated.
“In that time things got through, and that was rather remarkable,” Buckingham said, noting that she had been contacted by inland UK authorities at the time asking what they should do with recently arrived German products of animal origin, such as whey.
“We’ve not got enough clear communication coming down the pipe from central government about what to do. My [border control post] colleagues will tell you that the guidance about what to do and how to deal with this stuff didn’t come through quick enough,” she added.
Lucy Manzano, head of port health and public protection at the Dover Port Health Authority, said the UK’s biggest port was aware for at least six days that German products were being cleared through “systems designed to detect them and to remove them” because of issues with the UK’s border regime.
The automated clearance process — known as the “timed out decision contingency feature”, or Todcof, was created in conjunction with the implementation of the UK’s new post-Brexit border with Europe to prevent delays in the event of capacity issues at control posts.
Manzano said: “Products within scope of the FMD [foot-and-mouth disease] controls were able to auto clear the system via Todcof.”
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Announcing a ban on imports in January, Defra vowed to do “whatever it takes” to protect farmers and said there were no cases of foot-and-mouth in the UK.
The viral disease can spread between live animals in close contact with each other, from animals eating food or coming into contact with dead animals that have been infected with the virus, or from contamination in the environment.
An outbreak in 2007 in the UK spread on the tyres of lorries.
In 2001, the UK experienced one of the worst outbreaks of the disease, which resulted in the killing of 6.5mn infected and in-contact animals. The direct cost of the outbreak was estimated to be more than £3bn, with a further £5bn in losses incurred by the tourism industry.
