Measures to prevent food poisoning outbreaks of the sort which claimed 20 lives in Scotland in 1996 were held up for a year by infighting between ministers and their departments, a top public health expert has claimed.

Speaking at the NHS management training scheme conference in Blackpool last week, Professor Hugh Pennington, who chaired the expert inquiry into the Lanarkshire E coli outbreak, expressed exasperation over the delay.

He blamed the problem on rivalry between the then Tory Scottish secretary, Michael Forsyth, and agriculture minister Douglas Hogg, and on boundary disputes between their departments.

Though the outbreak was blamed on poor hygiene in one butcher's shop, the expert group produced recommendations on slaughterhouse practice and food-handling which would have tackled the public health problem at source.

'The lesson from this story is not so much what happened during it, but that while our group was trying to learn the lessons from the outbreak, politics came into it in a big way, ' he said.

Because the group's recommendations would affect England as well as Scotland, both the Department of Health and Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food had sent observers.

'What we were going to say did not go down well south of the border.

Michael Forsyth did not get on very well with Douglas Hogg, who was not having a very good time because of BSE and other things.'

Their dispute had resulted in a personal attack on Professor Pennington by Mr Hogg over an earlier report on E coli which, he said, had been 'sanitised'. But, said Professor Pennington: 'I think I won in the end.'

He said his recommendations had been quite straightforward. 'All you have to do is to stop manure getting on food, or if it is on food to make sure it is cooked to kill the bug.'

But proposals to separate cooked and uncooked meats, and to bring in licensing for butchers' shops had not been acted on. 'December last year, a year after recommending these things, still nothing had happened, ' he said.

'The reason was there were terrible battles of the Hogg-Forsyth type on the detail of what should be in our recommendations.'

Action had been taken since the change of government, and the planned Food Standards Agency would answer not to MAFF but to the DoH, a move he welcomed.

'But I am pissed off that it has taken so long, ' said Professor Pennington.

'Things are now actually happening, but the fact that internecine disputes between government departments have been behind this is not pleasing.'

See News Focus, page 10.