Day 073 - 13 Jan 95 - Page 49
1 would justify any great amount of research or work to be
2 done.
3
4 Mr. Walker will be a somewhat longer witness, no doubt
5 because of the Vesty Brazil question principally. My Lord,
6 I am anxious that we should not, as your Lordship has just
7 indicated, suddenly find that Christmas 1995 is merely a
8 staging post and that we are going to be looking at June
9 1996 as the terminous of this case.
10
11 Your Lordship has been, I would readily grant, I make no
12 complaint about it, generous to the Defendants in point of
13 time for preparation. I do not accept they have always
14 made the best use of that time. I would say that if they
15 are not ready to deal with Mr. Chambers on Monday, 23rd
16 January, then the fact must be that they have, largely
17 speaking, wasted the last three weeks on something other
18 than the preparation of this case.
19
20 MS. STEEL: On the subject of whether animals and food poisoning
21 have been up and running prior to this and whether we have
22 had time to prepare, firstly, I do not believe that before
23 Dr. Gregory gave evidence we were given any time for
24 preparing on that issue; if we were, it was at most a day
25 and we had our expert witnesses in court behind us
26 prompting us the questions to ask. We were not actually
27 fully prepared for that; we had not read all the
28 documentation. I should add that we do not know that our
29 experts will be able to be sitting behind us to prompt us
30 for Mr. Chambers and Mr. Walker. So, it is very important
31 that we do get some preparation time.
32
33 Mr. Oakley had nothing in his statement about animal
34 welfare, from what I can remember, and I believe that I did
35 raise this as an objection at the time because it was not
36 something we had prepared for. So we did, as I remember,
37 do that off the top of our heads. I do not think for that
38 we looked into the documentation either.
39
40 Mr. Gonzales was very general and he was also mostly about
41 America. I believe that most of the documentation we have
42 got relates to the UK. So, we have not been through and
43 read all that thoroughly. In any event, that which we have
44 read, which is not all of it, we do need to be able to
45 re-read and prepare separate and different questions for
46 the witnesses that are coming up.
47
48 As far as we are concerned, we do this, we do see this as
49 coming on to a separate issue and, although food poisoning
50 and animal welfare have been amalgamated, they are two
51 separate areas in the sense they both have quite
52 substantial quantities of documentation involving figures
53 and things like that, and things that do require quite a
54 bit of concentration to be properly prepared on.
55
56 MR. MORRIS: I just want to reassure Mr. Rampton that I do not
57 waste one minute of my time. I have not wasted one minute
58 of my time for the last two and a half years -- I only wish
59 I could, to be honest -- and I do have responsibilities
60 which I cannot avoid.
