Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether her Department has plans to support egg producers (a) affected by avian influenza and (b) generally.

The UK has a highly resilient food supply chain which has coped well in responding to the unprecedented challenges the industry, including the egg sector, has faced in the past few years.

Defra has been working closely with the egg sector and has acted where appropriate in response to the recent unprecedented avian Influenza (AI) outbreak. We announced changes to the AI compensation scheme on 28 October 2022 by allowing compensation to be paid for farmers from the outset of planned culling rather than at the end. This allowed Defra to provide swifter payments to help stem any cash flow pressures and give farmers earlier certainty about entitlements to compensation. We also granted a concession to the marketing standards rules for the labelling of free-range eggs from poultry that have been housed under an AI Prevention Zone with mandatory housing measures for longer than the 16-week period for which an automatic derogation applies.   More widely, the Government has put in place a number of measures which the egg industry has been able to access, including cuts to VAT and fuel duty and support through the Energy Bill Relief Scheme.

In December 2022 I hosted an egg industry roundtable which brought together representatives of the egg supply chain from across the UK. The Roundtable focused on addressing the challenges that the sector had been facing due to the increase in input costs caused by the war in Ukraine. The meeting was productive with a clear willingness from all parties to address issues affecting the supply chain.

At the recent No 10 Food Summit, I announced that we would be undertaking a supply chain fairness review of the egg sector.

We continue to keep the egg sector under constant review including through the UK Agriculture Market Monitoring Group and our ongoing regular engagement with sector stakeholders.