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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of trends in the level of avian flu across the UK in the last 12 months.

The Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) and the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) lead Government action on animal disease control in Great Britain and Northern Ireland respectively. This includes carrying out routine surveillance of disease risks in the UK and globally. As part of this work, assessments of risk from highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) to both wild birds and poultry and how those risks are changing seasonally are made and published on gov.uk and daera-ni.gov.uk.

To support these assessments, the International and National Reference Laboratory for avian influenza at APHA Weybridge work closely with international colleagues to monitor for any changes in the strains circulating or changes in viral sequences indicative of adaptation. In the last 12 months, two strains of HPAI (H5N5 and H5N1) have been confirmed in commercial poultry in the UK. This was not unexpected and follows recent detections of both strains in continental Europe and detections in wild birds in Great Britain through the wild bird surveillance scheme. However, the number of findings of HPAI in wild birds and the number of cases confirmed in kept birds remain far lower than in previous years.