Farmers are consulting lawyers in the hope of bringing a multimillion-pound compensation claim for damages caused by foot-and-mouth disease.

National Farmers’ Union (NFU) officials said that they were considering action after the publication of a report that pinpointed a laboratory complex as the most probable source of infection. Peter Kendall, NFU president, said that members had lost money because of the outbreak and had incurred many costs through no fault of their own.

Health and safety inspectors have said that the virus probably escaped from either Merial, a private research company, or the Institute of Animal Health, a government-funded organisation. Further tests are under way in an attempt to determine which of the two was responsible for a viral leak.

A spokesman for the NFU said: “We are taking legal advice on behalf of our members. We are looking at the possibility of legal redress.”

Legal experts said that the outcome of a court case was by no means assured but that farmers would be likely to have a strong argument for damages to be awarded.

Peter Cusick, a partner with the solicitors Thring Townsend and a specialist in agricultural litigation, said a previous leak of the virus from the Pirbright site in 1959 had established that such installations can owe “a duty of care” to neighbours when they bring alien substances on to the land.

He said there was also a precedent to show that laboratories that leaked viruses, if it could be proved who was responsible, faced strict liability. Rather than negligence having to be proved, all a neighbouring farmer would need to do, he suggested, was show who had leaked the virus.

However, the question of whether a farmer with uninfected holdings could claim compensation for loss of income was likely to be the subject of a test case. Similarly, it remains unclear whether farmers with culled livestock would be likely to win a court case for damages if the disease were to spread farther afield from farm to farm, rather than being directly infected by a research laboratory.

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