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August 07, 2007
Foot in mouth?
So, after the floods comes the plague. Now we have Foot and Mouth again - and a rush of politicians and Civil Servants all eager to demonstrate its not their fault - really.
The most likely source of this outbreak seems to be a laboratory occupied jointly (it was once a Government Lab but has been partly "privatised" by the Treasury) by a Civil Service laboratory unit (Defra Managed!) and a private company. Already the Civil Servants are blaming the company with the usual claim that "Our Procedures have been followed to the letter." The problem with the "Procedures" is that, like any so called Quality Control system, it measures only certain things and ensures consistency of the measured parts. Thus, if the product is ordure, and everyone knows it is ordure, the ordure can at least be said to be absolutely consistent. The Procedures do not ensure that anything is improved or protected or even identified as being a potential risk. They just make sure that whatever they apply to is always handled in the same way.
So where is the problem in that you may ask. Simply this, if the procedure was written forty years ago, and is not updated or rewritten to take account of new knowledge or better methods of doing/protecting/safeguarding something all they will do is tick the boxes. They will not actually do a damned thing more. Procedures need to be flexible, they need to be written by people who know what they are doing and what they are dealing with and they need to be reviewed by people who know it as well. Any Procedure written by a non-specialist in non-specialist language to be interpretted and understood by jumped up filing clerks who call themselves managers isn't worth a damn.
I'm prepared to bet that the Commercial Lab side will get the blame for this - after all the Civil Service is investigating the leak so they won't find anything wrong with THEIR procedures now will they - and the politicians will try to tell us how well they and their Civil Servants have done to contain it. Will it get as big as the last outbreak? I doubt it, for one thing Whitehall daren't let it and the finger of blame from the last lot would now be pressed to their heads very much more firmly.
The real losers are again the British farming community, the British taxpayer and everyone whose livelihood depends on our livestock industry. I should think this outbreak will be it's deathknell.
Posted by The Gray Monk at August 7, 2007 02:39 PM
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