IT is six months since foot-and-mouth first appeared in our fair country and yet it is only now that the Government has woken up to the possibility that it may have been ripped off.

And it has only woken up after the personal intervention of the Prime Minister Tony Blair, who realised that the English average of £100,000 for cleaning up each infected farm was so far beyond the Scottish average of £30,000 as to be suspicious. Mr Blair also discovered that the cost of each clean-up in England is ten times the price on the Continent.

It is clearly right that this should be investigated as a matter of urgency so that the disinfecting procedures can start as quickly as possible. Two weeks is being talked of, but even in the slow and fragmented world of government, surely it can't take a fortnight to put in a call from Westminster to Edinburgh to discover how the Scots do it so cheaply.

The most staggering element of this latest fiasco is that this apparent waste of tax-payers' money should have gone on so long without being noticed or thought about.

After the election, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food was put out of its misery and the Department of for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was supposed to represent a clean break. However, it was always said that if the same civil servants were shuffled from the old department to the new, the approach to foot-and-mouth would continue to be haphazard. As well as going through the figures with a toothcomb, Mr Blair should be working out which of his civil servants are not up to the job.