Asked by: Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask His Majesty's Government how much they have spent on compensation, disinfection of premises and other costs associated with avian flu outbreaks at poultry and game farms, in each of the last five years.
Answered by Baroness Hayman of Ullock - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
Figures include (i) compensation claims related to the avian influenza compensation scheme; and (ii) operational costs, which includes culling, disposal, and cleaning and disinfection at infected premises.
2023/24 Total costs of £13.1 million, made up of £2.9 million compensation claims and £10.2million of operational costs
2022/23 Total costs of £84.5 million, made up of £38.3 million compensation claims and £46.2 million of operational costs
2021/22 Total costs of £24.8 million, made up of £6.5 million compensation claims and £18.3 million of operational costs
2020/21 Total costs of £4.5 million, made up of £1.5 million compensation claims and £3.0 million of operational costs
2019/20 Total costs of £0.1 million, made up of £0.1 million in operational costs, there were no compensation claims.
Asked by: Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of existing measures in place to both respond to, and reduce the risk of, outbreaks of avian flu at poultry and game farms.
Answered by Baroness Hayman of Ullock - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
Defra’s approach to avian influenza is set out in the Notifiable Avian Disease Control Strategy for Great Britain supported by the Mitigation Strategy for Avian Influenza in Wild Birds in England and Wales. Current policy reflects our experience of responding to past outbreaks of exotic animal disease and is in line with international standards of best practice for disease control.
All avian influenza disease control and prevention measures are kept under regular review as part of the government’s work to monitor and manage the risks of avian influenza, and all decisions regarding these measures are based on risk assessments containing the latest scientific and ornithological evidence and veterinary advice.
Mentions:
1: Samuel Kurtz (Welsh Conservative Party - None) So, would that be classed as 'affected' by this—those farms? - Speech Link
2: Huw Irranca-Davies (Welsh Labour and Co-operative Party - None) Not simply on slurry management, but also in terms of chicken farms and so on and so forth. - Speech Link
3: Huw Irranca-Davies (Welsh Labour and Co-operative Party - None) Oh, sorry, on the community farms and the local authority owned—? - Speech Link
Written Evidence Jan. 16 2025
Inquiry: The role of natural capital in the green economyFound: Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust RNC0003 Written evidence submitted by the Game & Wildlife Conservation
Mentions:
1: Lord Morrow (DUP - Life peer) Over 24,000 family farms in Northern Ireland will have no certainty about their futures, and therefore - Speech Link
2: Lord Thurlow (XB - Excepted Hereditary) of removing APR will engineer the collapse of many small family farms, as we have heard. - Speech Link
3: Baroness Kramer (LD - Life peer) We regard family farms as vital and often economically precarious. - Speech Link
Asked by: Blake Stephenson (Conservative - Mid Bedfordshire)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to the Answer of 13 February 2025 to Question 29188 on Agriculture and Business: Inheritance Tax, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of reviewing her Department's data collection methods to enable the collection of data on the number of estates containing woodlands impacted in the 2026-27 financial year.
Answered by James Murray - Exchequer Secretary (HM Treasury)
HMRC guidance sets out that woodland is only agricultural property, and therefore qualifies for agricultural property relief, if it is occupied with, and that occupation is ancillary to, agricultural land or pasture. It will include woodland shelter belts, game coverts, fox coverts, coppices grown for fencing materials and clumps of amenity trees or spinneys. Woodlands occupied for purposes that are not agricultural, such as amenity woodland or woodland used for the production of commercial timber, are not agricultural property. However, they may be eligible for woodlands relief or business property relief.
Executors must include the value of any timber and woodland owned by the deceased that is not part of a farm in box 69 of the IHT400 form, alongside the value of the deceased’s other interests in any business or partnership (which may or may not be related to woodlands). Some farms may also include coppices, small woods and belts of trees that shelter the land, and the value of these should be included in the value of any farm, farmhouses and farmland owned by the deceased in box 68 of the IHT400 form.
However, as stated in our answer to UIN 29188, while estates include supporting documentation about the type of assets on which they claim agricultural and business property reliefs when submitting their claims, only the value of eligible assets is digitally captured in a format available for further analysis. It is also combined with the value of other assets in the boxes mentioned above, and these may or may not be related to woodlands. As such, any further level of detail is not readily available from historic claims to estimate how many future estates might contain woodland. It would be disproportionately costly for HMRC to manually review historic claims to digitally capture this information.
As detailed in my recent letter to the Chair of the Northern Ireland Select Committee, Inheritance Tax is currently operated by HMRC using a predominantly paper-based system. As part of my work to modernise HMRC, we plan to move to a digital system.
Mentions:
1: David Chadwick (LD - Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe) not enough connection to shoppers.The consequences of unfair practices extend far beyond individual farms - Speech Link
2: Andrew George (LD - St Ives) having worked for over a decade to get the legislation through, I obviously have some skin in the game - Speech Link
3: John McDonnell (Ind - Hayes and Harlington) I feel that the Government need to get ahead of the game. - Speech Link
4: Harriett Baldwin (Con - West Worcestershire) The Labour MPs who voted for an inheritance tax on family farms simply do not understand where their - Speech Link
Mentions:
1: Daniel Zeichner (Lab - Cambridge) an opportunity to improve how we do that under a fair and just farming transition, which supports farms - Speech Link
2: Victoria Atkins (Con - Louth and Horncastle) Thirdly, if families have managed to cling on to their farms despite all that, then Labour will tax them - Speech Link
3: Tim Farron (LD - Westmorland and Lonsdale) There are 6,100 new entrants to SFI this year, yet only a mere 40 of them are hill farms. - Speech Link
4: Julie Minns (Lab - Carlisle) However, there are smaller farms, such as those in my constituency in north Cumbria, that would not have - Speech Link
Nov. 19 2024
Source Page: Sales of antibiotics for animals at lowest level to dateFound: There are 12 Proof of Concept farms (four beef, four sheep and four dairy farms) across Wales piloting
Nov. 19 2024
Source Page: Sales of antibiotics for animals at lowest level to dateFound: There are 12 Proof of Concept farms (four beef, four sheep and four dairy farms) across Wales piloting