Taking responsibility: How the government can improve enforcement of farmed animal welfare laws

Key points

• There is an enforcement problem with farmed animal welfare regulations: There is a lack of transparency and reliable information to easily adjudicate the claim, but the fact that only 2.3% of non-compliance is prosecuted, suggests to us that there is an issue.
• Given the scale of animal farming in the UK – over a billion factory farmed chickens are slaughtered every year – even a low rate of non-compliance with animal welfare legislation translates into an enormous amount of preventable suffering.
• The majority of farms are inspected every 12-18 months by private assurance schemes, most prominently the industry-run Red Tractor. The state has deliberately stepped back, to reduce regulatory burden.
• Although compliance is marginally better in farms covered by private assurance schemes, participation in an assurance scheme is far from a guarantee of compliance, and assurance schemes have demonstrably failed to take sufficient action against breaches when they occur
• When issues are identified, fragmentation and a lack of resources means they are too rarely investigated and non-compliance tends to be addressed informally.

Recommendations

The report puts forward two sets of recommendations: straight-forward adjustments to the existing system that could make an immediate impact, as well as a more ambitious medium-term plan for a government-run licensing system for farms.

• Immediate adjustments include: Responsibility for welfare enforcement should sit exclusively with APHA; APHA should be able
  to retain the revenue from penalty notice fines for animal welfare offences; CCTV should be mandatory in large industrial farming
  operations
• Medium-term plan: the more ambitious reform of government-run farm licensing, though it suggests this ought to be considered as an alternative to basic assurance schemes to avoid unnecessary duplication and bureaucracy.