AGRICULTURE Minister Nick Brown insists, as he has done for the past three weeks, that the foot-and-mouth outbreak is under control.

His assertion is open to serious doubt. The provision of emergency plans to slaughter half-a-million pregnant ewes in an attempt to curb the spread of the disease does not give the appearance of a situation under control.

Yesterday chief vet Jim Scudamore said that the country was in the throes of a "major outbreak". Tacitly that is an admission that the scale of the problem has been under-estimated.

Ministers and civil servants may be reluctant to admit it, but the foot-and-mouth outbreak has become an epidemic.

The virulence of the virus is staggering. It is difficult to imagine that, within a matter of days, an individual infection in Northumberland has resulted in nearly 200 outbreaks across 23 counties of England as well as areas of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

While we cannot blame ministers or their advisers for the virulence of the disease, their handling of the outbreak is increasingly open to scrutiny.

Ten days ago this newspaper called into question the wisdom of relaxing the ban on the movement of livestock in disease-free areas just to get supplies of British meat to the retailers.

The speed with which the disease has taken hold across the country justified our concern that it was premature to classify any area as 'safe'.

If there are any doubts over the safety of the relaxation on the transport of farm animals then the total ban must be re-imposed immediately.

The fact that the Ministry of Agriculture now fears the movement of ewes and their unborn lambs may create an unacceptable risk of infecting other sites suggests the lifting of restrictions was hasty and ill-advised.

Before the outbreak, farming communities were already facing a crisis of confidence. Their confidence in the Government taking the right measures to control the outbreak is fading fast.

Confidence will disappear completely if ministers and advisers, who claim to be in control, fail to come to terms with the enormity of the crisis in their midst.