Day 146 - 03 Jul 95 - Page 16
1 she had it on offer.
2
3 Then: "There is no separate chilled detention room for
4 condemned or detained carcasses. This led often to a
5 situation where detained carcasses were kept in the same
6 chillers with carcasses that had passed the inspection.
7 This practice easily leads to either contact or airborne
8 contamination". Again, no detail in that whatsoever.
9 Which chillers is she talking about? Is she talking about
10 the chillers for McKey meat or is she talking about the
11 chillers for carcass meat?
12
13 Then: "The carcasses were washed with high" -- this is No.
14 6 -- "pressure water before the inspection". Then she says
15 it is dangerous. She has had a look at the plan, that is
16 clear enough, which plan was then available on the basis of
17 this statement. There is in this statement before us now
18 no indication whatsoever that she is talking about some
19 stage earlier in the process than the washing which takes
20 place after the main inspection which one can see perfectly
21 well from the plan.
22
23 When she gets to court, having looked at the plan, she put
24 some kind of a carcass wash at an earlier stage of the
25 operation. That is something of which we should have been
26 told because, of course, as we now see from Mr. Bone, it
27 can be dealt with.
28
29 Then, finally, 7: "The chillers were, as a rule, over
30 filled, this leading to contact contamination and
31 preventing proper chilling of the carcasses". Again, there
32 is an astounding lack of detail.
33
34 My Lord, all that detail, the missing detail, was filled in
35 when she came to give evidence-in-chief. In addition, of
36 course, there were things that she said of which one has no
37 indication in this statement whatsoever.
38
39 My Lord, can I do that this way, first of all, by looking
40 at the statement from Mr. Bone ---
41
42 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
43
44 MR. RAMPTON: -- one can see that Mr. Bone has picked up a
45 general allegation made by Ms. Hovi, perhaps by
46 implication, from her detailed allegations. I start on
47 page 3, my Lord, and because I accept that the swab tests
48 are not new, those are the two "E"s in paragraphs 3 and 4,
49 but there is an "N" against paragraph 5. The reason is
50 that the overall implication of Ms. Hovi's evidence as
51 opposed to what we find in her written statement is that
52 the whole plant was, frankly, a bacteriologist's nightmare;
53 that nothing was properly cleaned, no walls were cleaned,
54 surfaces were filthy. Your Lordship will remember, for
55 example, an allegation by Ms. Hovi, quite unnoticed in her
56 statement, that the white vinyl cutting boards in the
57 boning room were always dirty and could not be cleaned
58 properly. We had no notice of that allegation whatsoever.
59
60 So Mr. Bone deals with the whole range of cleaning
