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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to the Answer of 20 April 2017 to Question 70622, on what date the new reporting system was permanently introduced; for what reason the data recorded on the Pets Database and presented in the Answer to Question 62238 was inaccurate; and what the margin of error was in the data used in the Answer to Question 62238.

In July 2015 the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) began piloting a parallel system to establish the accuracy of data available from the Pet Travel Scheme (PETS) database. Defra is evaluating options for a new permanent system.

The data provided in PQ62238 was taken from the parallel system piloted by APHA, and is believed to be an accurate representation of the number of animals entering Great Britain. However, there may be unavoidable errors due to manual data entry onto spreadsheets by the carriers.