OWNERS of Otley's only auction mart fear it will be next year before it reopens for business.

But there are hopes that the mart, closed since February because of the foot and mouth crisis, will open shortly as a collection centre for animals destined for slaughter.

Meanwhile, in the week Leeds City Council announced it was reopening footpaths, a leading Otley farmer has claimed the Government's handling of the disease is deliberate policy to halve the farming community - a claim hotly denied by the Government.

Ben Atkinson, director of Wharfedale Farmers Auction Mart, said: "There is a definite feeling across the farming fraternity that the Government wants to have half the quantity of farms, that there's too many of us producing too much stuff and they want shut."

He claimed the Government was sending out a confusing message to the public by on one hand predicting the disease may re-surge later in the year while on the other urging local councils to reopen all footpaths.

"What conclusion can the public come to when the chief scientist says foot and mouth will come back while the Government re-opens all the footpaths.

"It simply just doesn't make any sense, it's like the Government is saying we don't want to get rid of this disease, let's let it go on a bit longer," he said.

But Mr Atkinson said farmers must remain optimistic, even though the immediate future looked bleak.

The auction mart is currently spending hundreds of pounds fitting new security measures ahead of it hopefully being made a collection centre - possibly as early as next month.

It will mean smaller farmers will be able to take their animals to the auction mart from where they will be transferred in larger deliveries to abbatoirs.

Mr Atkinson said:"It will benefit the smaller farmers and is a way of minimising the number of individual journeys to abbatoirs.

"It will mean farmers will be able to forward sell goods to slaughterers and, rather than deliver them piecemeal, they will be able to bring them to the auction mart where they will be checked over and then forwarded to the slaughterhouses."

And he predicted the auction mart would be one of the first to reopen once the disease was eradicated from the country.

"Nobody knows when that will be, the disease is still far from settled, but we will be as keen as mustard to get the auction mart opened again as soon as we can."

A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said it was simply not true that the Government was not taking the disease seriously.

"It is a very difficult message to convey. We are acting on scientific and veterinary advice and the advice we are getting is that there is no evidence that having footpaths open is helping to spread the disease."

He added that the fact that the chief scientist had warned of a re-surgance of the disease was proof of how seriously it was being taken.

"We are stressing to farmers the importance of biosecurity measures and have sent out 90,000 videos to all farmers in the country."

l Leeds City Council has decided as from midnight on Friday all 500 miles of public rights of way will be reopened.

The council says it is acting on Government orders that require footpaths to be reopened - unless there are extreme reasons whey they should remain closed.

It means that the council has no legal right to keep its paths closed.

l Foot and mouth latest: page 4