IMPROVED contingency planning to handle future animal disease outbreaks has been called for in a new report on the foot-and-mouth crisis.

The report, published by the National Audit Office, reveals that the epidemic has cost the public sector £3 billion and the private sector more than £5 billion.

The NAO says the crisis resulted in huge increases in Government costs for buying services and supplies and that sometimes the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs - formerly the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, was "in a weak negotiating position."

In Devon, the report says this resulted in DEFRA "paying a high mark up for some of the land on which to build the mass burial pits."

The NAO said: "For the Ash Moor pit in Devon, the department paid £350,000 for the land, which it estimated to be about three and half times the usual rate for such land."

Ash Moor cost the tax-payer £5.8 million to buy and construct and will cost an estimated £1.2 for maintenance and restoration "from 2002-03 to end of life", says the report.

Ash Moor was constructed to take 400,000 carcasses, but was never used.

The NAO report added: "The department overestimated the number of carcasses that needed to be disposed of for mass burial. This was partly because, when decisions to build mass burial sites were taken, the outbreak's course and the availability of other disposal routes remained uncertain.

"With hindsight, the decline in daily confirmed cases turned out to be sharper than the Department had prepared for. Ash Moor in Devon, for example was never used for mass burial, because a 'flare up' of this disease in Dartmoor, which the Department had feared, did not occur."