AHLVA yesterday announced the private sector partner organisations that will take on subsidised work as part of its wider scanning surveillance network. From September, the Universities of Bristol and Surrey, SAC Consulting Veterinary Services and the Royal Veterinary College will begin to take on some of the post-mortem and surveillance workload from AHVLA, which is in the process of losing eight labs.

Six of the agency's 14 labs have already closed, with one more to follow this year and another in 2015.

Though the government and agency high-ups assure that spreading the workload across public and private sector labs (including the AHVLA labs, veterinary providers, cattle industry and universities) will provide a better service for farmers and improve surveillance, vets had expressed misgivings about aspects of the changes, which they warned could hamper the country's response to disease threats.

Reacting to AHVLA's announcement on Wednesday, British Veterinary Association president Robin Hargreaves said, "BVA believes that the importance of an effective system of veterinary surveillance in England and Wales cannot be overstated. As we have argued since the AHVLA's announcement of changes to the veterinary scanning surveillance system in December, any changes must not be determined by cost alone. The cost of disease outbreak far outweighs the cost of providing a robust surveillance system."

"We hope that all AHVLA's partners in the surveillance system – whether public or private, based in a university or elsewhere – will maintain high and expert standards of surveillance and diagnostics as well as deliver on the positive changes AHVLA wants to achieve, such as an increased focus on data collection and the centralised collation of data."

Earlier, concerns had been voiced about centralising or ensuring uniformity of data collected by private contractors operating separately, or over a range of fields (including universities, labs and private veterinary facilities).

AHVLA executives have assured that cuts have not been made to essential services which would hamper the agency's effectiveness, and said the main focus of the reforms is on improving AHVLA's ability to detect new and re-emerging animal diseases.