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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what changes have been made in the past twelve months to the monitoring of animal health disease under the Animal Health and Welfare Framework.

The Animal and Plant Health Agency leads the Government’s monitoring of animal disease control and carries out routine surveillance of disease risks in the UK and globally, to help the Government anticipate future threats to animal health.

We remain vigilant to changes in risk and continue to use our established systems to monitor for new and emerging threats to our biosecurity through our Veterinary Risk Group and the Human and Animal Infections Risk Surveillance Group.

The Animal Health and Welfare Common Framework (Provisional Framework Outline Agreement and Concordat), published as a Command Paper in 2022, has been produced to explain how the UK Government and devolved Governments propose to work together in key areas of animal health and welfare law and policy. It explains how the principles of devolution continue to apply to animal health and welfare policy after the UK’s exit from the EU.

The separate Animal Health and Welfare Framework published in 2018 has been produced to help county councils, unitary authorities and metropolitan boroughs in England deliver their statutory duties in relation to the health and welfare of farmed animals.

Neither Framework in its own right establishes nor introduces any changes to the monitoring of animal health.