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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment she has made of the (a) quality and (b) availability of animal welfare data published by the Animal and Plant Health Agency.

The Animal and Plant Health Agency hold all the data related to its regulatory activity on animal welfare; they are extrapolated and made available regularly from the databases held by the relevant teams for reporting purposes. APHA has a continuing commitment to quality assurance and there are appropriate checks of the data before it is included in report for England, Scotland and Wales.

Defra publish data in the Multi-annual National Control Plan (MANCP) annual reports, relating to animal welfare official controls and enforcement activities undertaken within Great Britain. Defra is not considering increasing the amount of official reporting beyond that already published in these annual reports.