CATTLE due to be slaughtered under a Government culling scheme will have to be transported out of the county following the withdrawal of a major contract from Hatherleigh's largest employer — West Devon Meat.

The move has angered West Devon and Torridge MP John Burnett which he says will have animal welfare implications and could end in job losses.

He is urging Agriculture Minister Nick Brown to investigate the process which resulted in the removal of the culling contract from the Hatherleigh abattoir.

Mr Burnett is furious over the Intervention Board's decision to reject a tender from West Devon Meat to continue slaughtering over 30-month-old cattle as from the end of December.

It will then leave the county, which has the highest density of cattle to be culled in the whole country, without a facility for slaughtering. Cattle and farmers will face journeys of up to 180 miles, said the MP.

Mr Burnett said Hatherleigh could ill afford the inevitable job losses and it was compounding problems for farmers.

'The national quota for culling is not sufficient to meet the demand across Britain as a whole,' he said. 'That means farmers are constantly having to wait to get into the cull and they have to book a long time ahead.

'This is just another blow for farmers. There seems to be no conception of the damage caused to agriculture. It is completely unacceptable.'

The MP said there were serious animal welfare implications with animals having to travel great distances.

Also, it was not a good thing, environmentally, with all the extra lorries on the road transporting cattle when it could be dealt with locally, added Mr Burnett.

The additional transport costs are estimated at £10 per bullock and the same for collection point charges.

Mr Burnett said he wanted the minister to explain why there was a difference between West Devon Meat's tender price and the amount quoted by the Government-appointed Intervention Board.

'It appears to me that the Intervention Board believes that West Devon Meat's bid is some 20 per cent higher than the actual bid made,' he said.

'I will be asking the minister to call in the tendering process and conduct an enquiry into it — it is only right that this tender process should be scrupulously fair.'

Mr Burnett is hoping to meet the minister in the next few days with fellow Devon and Cornwall Lib Dem MPs Paul Tyler, Colin Breed and Nick Harvey.

West Devon Meat currently slaughters 2,000 animals per week in the Over Thirty Month Cattle Scheme (OTMS) — taking up four out of the five days workload at the factory.

Chairman of the Okehampton and Hatherleigh NFU, James McInnes, said the nearest abattoirs were in Penzance and Bridgwater but Penzance could only take cattle in the immediate area around it.

'This means that most of Cornwall and all of Devon will not have an abattoir operating this scheme — it is a terrible blow to Devon and to Hatherleigh because there is a possibility we might lose West Devon Meat altogether and 65 jobs with it, ' he said.

'It appears that the Treasury has told the Intervention Board it needs to cut back the costs of the OTMS and to do that, it is having to cut back the number of abattoirs around the country from 40 to 20.

'To be quite honest this does not add up. I do not know what the Government is up to.

'Devon is one of the most intensively farmed areas in the country as far as bovine animals are concerned.

'If you take Hatherleigh and the other abattoirs out of the equation, there will not be enough to take the amount of animals that need to be slaughtered under the scheme. It is very worrying really.

'It is really ironic that one day the Government lifts the beef on the bone ban and the next day Hatherleigh loses the OTMS which is a bigger blow than the ban.'

Managing director of West Devon Meat, Peter Bowyer, said the company's workload was twice as much as any of the other abattoirs.

'The chaos is already happening because I have 800 cows on my books that I cannot take before I lose the contract,' he said.

'The employees are absolutely distraught — there are going to be redundancies unless something can be done to stop this.'

Okehampton and Hatherleigh NFU are encouraging people to write directly to Steve Briggs of the Intervention Board at PO Box 69, Reading.