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Special Committee Dairy Produce Bill, 1924 debate -
Wednesday, 2 Jul 1924

SECTION 3.

On and after the commencement of this Act all premises in which dairy produce is manufactured for sale (whether such premises are or are not registered under this Act) shall comply with the following conditions (in this Act called the conditions of cleanliness and order), that is to say—
(a) the premises shall be structurally suited for the manufacture of such descriptions of dairy produce as are in fact manufactured therein and shall be provided with such plant and machinery or such appliances, and such utensils as are requisite for the manufacture of such dairy produce, and
(b) the premises, and the plant and machinery or the appliances, and the utensils, therein shall be in a state of cleanliness and good repair, and
(c) the milk or cream and all other ingredients and materials used in the process of manufacturing dairy produce on the premises shall be clean, and
(d) the premises shall be situated in such a position and used in such a manner as to prevent the exposure of the dairy produce manufactured therein or any ingredients or materials used in the process of such manufacture to any effluvium from any drain, cesspool, manure heap, cow-house, pigstye or other source of contamination, and
(e) the premises shall be provided with an adequate supply of pure water.

In move:—

" In line 25 to delete the words ‘ for sale.'"

I have in my mind the necessity of having powers to impose obligations upon places which are producing food from milk, but are not doing it for sale, for instance, institutions. I do not think that the term " for sale " strengthens the section, and it would allow any person or any institution or any body of persons that produce butter from cream for home use to get scot free from any obligations as regards cleanliness and order. That, I think, is undesirable. Then, again, it raises the possibility of avoiding the obligations of the Act. Supposing, let us say, that a creamery said:—" We are not producing butter for sale but are exchanging butter for boots. We are sending the butter to the Co-operative Wholesale Society and they are sending it to the Northampton Boot Supply Association, stating ‘ we are sending you so many cwts. of butter, you send us boots of the same value,'" that would be pure exchange. That would be extravagance perhaps. But certainly there are institutions which should be obliged to observe conditions of cleanliness and order, and should not be allowed under this section to go free from observation and prosecution.

Would not that mean that a farmer making butter for his own use would be liable to the conditions?

The objection I see is that if we say that we include every farmer and every farm, that would be including in the Bill something that we know we cannot administer. We should try to legislate with the intention and with the reasonable prospect of being able to carry out our regulations; and if we leave out the words " for sale " we include every farmer's house, big and little, and we are supposed to say that we apply the following conditions to it:—

The premises shall be structurally suited for the manufacture of such descriptions of dairy produce as are in fact manufactured therein and shall be provided with such plant and machinery or such appliances, and such utensils as are requisite for the manufacture of such dairy produce; and the premises, and the plant and machinery or the appliances and the utensils therein shall be in a state of cleanliness and good repair; and the milk or cream and all other ingredients and materials used in the process of manufacturing dairy produce on the premises shall be clean; and the premises shall be situated in such a position and used in such a manner as to prevent the exposure of the dairy produce manufactured therein or any ingredients or materials used in the process of such manufacture, to any effluvium from any drain, cesspool, manure heap, cow-house, pigstye, or other source of contamination; and the premises shall be provided with an adequate supply of pure water.

We say that if those conditions were to apply to every farmer's house we could not administer it; it would be quite impossible to administer it; and we should be putting something in the Bill which we could not contemplate carrying out. That would be unsound. We deal with the producer in Section 32. We prevent him supplying " any dirty, contaminated or stale milk or cream, or milk or cream which is contained in a dirty vessel," and so on; but that is a different matter. If we took out the words " for sale " we bring in the small farmer, and we bring him in under regulations which we find it difficult to apply to creameries, and which we should find it impossible to apply to a farmer's house. On that principle we should be filling the Statute Book with legislation which we really would not be enforcing.

I realise all that; but, nevertheless, I think we have a right to lay down that every establishment, even a farm house which is producing dairy produce, should be fitted for that occupation. Even the children of the farmer have a right to be protected.

It would be a Public Health Bill then.

It may be, but if the argument of the Minister applies to this it is a Public Health Bill.

Oh, no. It is a Bill for a specific purpose. A Public Health Bill is a Bill for another specific purpose.

If this amendment is accepted one of the purposes of the Bill will be to ensure that no dairy produce shall be produced under bad conditions. Of course, it is enlarging the scope of the Bill, I admit. Whether the Minister is able to enforce that is another matter. I agree that it is another matter. But the fact that you are not able to enforce legislation has not hitherto prevented you putting that legislation on the Statute Book. The Public Health Act prohibits premises being insanitary, and yet there are insanitary premises. If we make it an offence, we create a public opinion against insanitation; and I think it would be well that we should make it clear that we desire and that we insist, so far as legislation can do it, that all premises in which dairy produce is manufactured shall be subject to certain conditions with regard to cleanliness and order. You may not be able to do what you would like in regard to inspection and enforcement in respect to farm houses, but in respect to the larger institutions you certainly would. The amendment would enable those regulations to be carried out and enforced in regard to them.

Section 33 says: " Any inspector may at all reasonable times enter any creamery or cream-separating station or any place where milk or cream is used for the manufacture of any dairy produce for sale." You may take out the words " for sale " there.

I withdraw the amendment.

I want a little information on this section. My question deals with the words " for sale," which Deputy Johnson mentions in his amendment. I take it that practically all premises come under these conditions. I hardly know of any place where butter is not made for sale. Does it not mean where butter is made for sale?

Ninety-nine per cent. make butter for sale.

They intend to sell a large proportion of it. They sell some of it anyhow. If that is so how are you to apply clause (e) : " The premises shall be provided with an adequate supply of pure water "?

We will discuss that on the section.

Amendment 10, by leave, withdrawn.

I move:—

In line 31, delete all words from word " and," line 31, to the word " produce," line 34, inclusive.

There is no definition of what plant or machinery is requisite, and the decision as to what is requisite is practically left to the inspector. Inspectors may differ in their views as to what appliances are requisite. One person may consider one thing requisite and another person may consider another thing requisite. I think it is unnecessary and quite undesirable that we should insert these words. We are now dealing with premises which are registered or are not registered, and we are asked to say that they shall be not only " structurally suited for the manufacture of such descriptions of dairy produce as are, in fact, manufactured therein," but that they " shall be provided with such plant and machinery or such appliances and such utensils as are requisite for the manufacture of such dairy produce." If you were only dealing with separating stations or creameries this may be applicable. But when you are dealing with all kinds of places producing dairy produce for sale, to speak of plant is a mistake, is redundant and quite undesirable, and it does not seem to serve any good purpose. I, therefore, move the amendment.

I should like to support Deputy Johnson in this amendment. When you take into account that this regulation applies to all premises, whether registered or not registered under the Act, an inspector passing the way will have the right to go into any premises, inspect them, and tell the owner whether they are big or small premises, what machinery and appliances of all kinds he ought to have. I think that is really going too far. I am glad Deputy Johnson has brought the matter up, and I think his amendment ought to be accepted. The provision in the Bill would give the inspector extraordinary powers.

To a certain extent I differ from Deputy Johnson. I think it would be very necessary that the plant and appliances should be liable to be inspected, and that the inspector should give orders that the necessary appliances should be there. But if the provision in the Bill meant standardising, I would be entirely opposed to it. For example, an inspector may go into a creamery and say that the plant there is inadequate. Under the Bill the owner has the right to go before an arbitrator. The only point I would wish to be enlightened about is whether there will be any effort made to standardise the machinery and plant, because if that were done it would be ruinous to some factories or creameries which may be only struggling at the present moment, and if effort were made by an inspector to compel them to conform to a certain standard, it would be very harmful. I hope the inspector will not make an effort to have the plant standardised.

The difficulty of leaving the words in is that they apply to a large number of ordinary farmers.

I think it is badly drafted. Registered and non-registered premises should be classified separately. At least farms should be classified from other premises. It will not be possible to specify the actual machinery.

But the inspector may specify?

The section as it reads says that all premises, whether registered or not, " shall be provided with such plant and machinery or such appliances and such utensils as are requisite for the manufacture of such dairy produce." Inspectors will differ as to what are requisite, as to what they deem to be requisite. It is not an impossibility, it is quite a possibility that we may have a revival in some parts of the country of the production of butter by the whole milk churning system as they have in the North of Ireland, or you may possibly have the Devonshire or Cornish method of starting with heating in a pan over a stove, and the Dairy Inspector will come along, and one inspector will favour one method and another will oppose that method. But there is nothing to tell the inspector or the farmer what those requisites are; and, consequently, this provision would cause very much more trouble than is desirable, and I do not think it is going to serve any good purpose. The next clause says that such plant and machinery as are there " shall be in a state of cleanliness and good repair." That is all that is required. It does not matter to me how a man makes butter if he makes good butter, even if it is mixed by hand.

As far as the farmer's house is concerned, the inspector will not be able to say or to specify what plant and machinery he has to have there. But, on the other hand, it is obvious that we must have power to make provision for the requisite minimum amount of machinery and plant in creameries and butter factories.

Whether registered or not?

All butter factories will be registered.

I suggest that another clause should be drafted, and that the new section should leave out non-registered premises.

You all agree that it would be necessary to provide for the equipment of creameries and butter factories, but you say that it is neither desirable nor useful nor possible to provide for the equipment of the ordinary farmer's house. We can redraft the section from that point of view.

I am not satisfied. Take Section 17. There is contemplated there a butter factory. We have been arguing, and we are more or less agreed on what class of establishments would come under Section 17 as manufacturing exporters. They would be creameries which gather cream or single farmers' establishments, the owners of which make butter from their cream in a special way and export it, provided that they export the quantity required. I want to allow for the possibility of special methods being adopted by any farmer who has a fancy that way, provided he does it under clean conditions, and satisfactory conditions. It is the butter I want to see, and, as I said before, I do not mind what appliances he uses in the making of it, if he gets a satisfactory result. Undoubtedly, butter factories which come under Section 17 will have to be registered, and there may be more sense in saying that any person registered will have to comply with certain conditions if he wants to have the advantage of registration. But it should not come into Section 3.

It is clear that it will be necessary to regulate butter factories as well as creameries. There would be no more right to allow butter factories to get out of date and to keep absolutely useless plant than there would be to allow creameries to do the same thing—to use plant which would injure butter-making.

There is the provision in Clause (b), " the premises and the plant and machinery or the appliances and the utensils therein shall be in a state of cleanliness and good repair."

The creameries manufacture two-thirds of the butter and the factories deal with one-third. Some of them do things very well. Others will have machinery very much out of date; and it will be necessary to be able to say to them: " You cannot export butter from your factory unless you get in such an item of equipment." It may be something which has been in every other creamery for the last seven or eight years. It is absolutely necessary now to turn out butter of a certain quality. We should have the same power over butter factories that we have over creameries; and we should be in a position to provide equipment for butter factories as well as for creameries. Deputy Hogan has an amendment in Section 14 to insert the word " additional " before the words " plant or machinery." I propose to accept that. And that being so, if we do find it necessary to provide equipment and plant and specific equipment and plant for creameries why should we not, also, provide that butter factories should have certain equipment and plant? I see the uselessness of attempting to regulate the equipment and plant that the farmer should have in his house, and I should rather redraft that section so that we may have no power of interference there. But with regard to the other two there is just as much reason for regulating the equipment of the butter factory as for regulating that of the creamery.

Does the Minister suggest that we may make provision for that at some later stage?

The equipment that will be necessary for a manufacturing exporter. We have in Section 22 power to inspect premises and plants.

It is quite true that you could go into the factory and see what sort of butter they were turning out. You would know beforehand that this factory was turning out bad butter, and you would see something obviously wrong or something wanting, and you could say: " You must get that or we won't allow you to run the place."

With regard to the registration of factories this Section 3 deals with the registered or non-registered factories. If a person chooses to engage in that trade and does not seek registration, then I question the desirability of inserting provisions which provide that he must use certain kinds of plant and machinery.

If he is not registered?

The section does not specify that an establishment will have to use certain plant or machinery. If it did, I would be absolutely against it, because I am against placing the creameries in the hands of one manufacturer. The whole point is to have machinery of a certain class. You may have a creamery with, perhaps, almost obsolete plant that would very much want replacement, but the creamery may not be in a position to replace it at the moment. They may have had a very bad time the previous year. In such a case it may be necessary that the inspector should be in a position to say: " This is not the plant that turns out the butter we want, and this plant must be replaced as soon as possible."

My point of view, and so far as I know, the point of view of every farmer Deputy with regard to this is, that we are of opinion that as far as registered creameries are concerned, some minimum quantity of machinery should be provided for by the Bill or by regulation. But there is a point with regard to a factory which is not registered. I do not know whether that point is feasible, because practically all factories are exporters. As far as the minimum quantity of machinery that is necessary is concerned, we are in favour of having the minimum quantity of machinery.

With regard to the point that Deputy Johnson made about non-registered factories, if you omitted the non-registered factories what possibly would happen would be that little places would take the butter from the farmers, blend it under perhaps very poor and bad conditions, and without proper equipment, and send it along to a central place which would be registered. There are a number of little factories where things are done very badly. They probably would not register and would put up the case: " We are not exporting," and they would be supplying butter to a bigger factory—dirty butter and with water in it. Once an institution calls itself a factory—there won't be so many of them in the country—it is no great hardship to regulate it. Such institutions are in a different position from the farmers' houses.

Does the Minister propose to make any provision which would allow a farmer to produce butter by his own method? The difficulty I see about this is that you are leaving the decision as to what is requisite for the manufacture of dairy produce to an inspector who may have peculiar ideas. He may have gone through one school and his colleagues may have gone through another school; and we know what the practice is in regard to these things. One person will say that in order to manufacture good butter you will have to employ a certain method or use certain plant, while another man will say: " No, this is the better appliance." And under that section it may come down to a particular maker. And that is what Deputy D'Alton is afraid of. It may leave an inspector to decide that this peculiar kind of equipment is only manufactured by a particular person. It may be a particular patent. In the case of premises where butter is made or cream is separated or cheese is made, to leave it to an inspector to decide what is requisite is unnecessary and undesirable.

Is it being left to the inspector? Does not Section 14 cover that?

What is the alternative? On one side a man with a bee in his bonnet may say: " I would like this patent." Another man may say: " You must have a Westphalian separator." Or there is something that everybody will agree is absolutely requisite for a creamery or a factory, and the inspector says: " You will have to put in that." It may cost some money. Somebody must decide and must insist on what is requisite. There is the possibility that somebody may have a bee in his bonnet. What is the alternative?

The alternative is to leave the words out; and in the case of non-registered premises leave them under the obligation that the plant and machinery and utensils " shall be in a state of cleanliness and good repair."

This applies to both.

There is little between us. If Deputy Johnson says that he is only concerned with non-registered places I am definitely taking out the farmers' places. There is scarcely a factory in the country that does not produce butter for export.

If the Minister would look into this matter.

I am quite agreeable, in view of the facts of the situation, that when a person applies for registration, he should be obliged to conform to certain conditions with regard to appliances. But I want to leave it to the non-registered person to make butter in his own way.

Will you withdraw the amendment? The Minister undertakes to redraft Section 3, I understand, for the Report Stage, and make it clear that the whole section shall not apply to farmers in the ordinary sense. The only question that is still outstanding is whether it shall apply to non-registered factories. There is a slight difference of opinion still on that.

And especially sub-section (a). That is the only one.

That is so.

I think this redrafting may do away with my objection. I would call the Minister's attention to clause (e) of sub-section 3, which says that " the premises shall be provided with an adequate supply of pure water."

If a factory it must be.

But it applies to farms also.

They are to be excluded. That has been definitely stated.

Would there be an appeal against an inspector's report on uncleanliness ?

That would be impossible. A man would appeal and then clean up. If it is necessary to introduce a Bill in which the State interferes with a trade, you are in the hands of the inspectors. You cannot get over that.

Does the Minister intend to exclude farms from the whole section?

You don't intend the provision about plant and machinery to apply to farmers?

No. The ordinary farmer who is not registered could not be compelled to put in additional plant and machinery.

There will be regulations governing farms. Clause (e) of Section 3 says that " the premises shall be provided with an adequate supply of pure water." That is sometimes impossible. There is not a supply of pure water available on the premises. The farmer may be able to get pure water, but the premises cannot be provided with an adequate supply of pure water.

That section was not inserted with the idea of farmers' houses. It was intended for the creamery and the separating centres. If the Minister would say that.

The better thing to do would be to withdraw the farmers from the ambit of the whole section.

Amendment 11, by leave, withdrawn.
Question—" That Section 3 stand part of the Bill subject to redrafting on Report "—put and agreed.
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