OFC14: Livestock rule changes ‘will save £70m’

Changes to livestock movement rules will save farmers and taxpayers £70m over 10 years, DEFRA secretary Owen Paterson has announced.
Cuts to burdensome red tape would make it easier for farming businesses to flourish and improve the ability to prevent and control the spread of diseases such as bovine TB, he said.
“Our farming industry is a cornerstone of our economy but for too long farmers have had to operate within overly complex rules and requirements,” Mr Paterson told the Oxford Farming Conference.
(More on cattle controls to tackle bovine TB)
“This change to the system for reporting animal movements will save farmers and taxpayers millions of pounds, while increasing our resilience to animal diseases.”
From 2016, sheep farmers would be allowed to increase the size of their farms from five miles to ten miles, meaning they could move livestock around more without needing to report it.
Red tape would be further reduced by removing the need to report grazing on temporary land within ten miles, said Mr Paterson.
Cattle tracing links and sole occupancy authorities (SOAs) would be phased out to further streamline the regime, he told delegates on Tuesday (7 January).
SOA rules currently allow livestock farmers to move cattle between sites they own without the usual standstill applying.
This prevents the movement of any livestock to or from a premises for six days after any animals are moved on to the site.
An SOA allows the farmer to group the sites he owns into a single holding for the purpose of standstill. Movements are still required to be recorded with local authorities.
CTS links allow farmers who regularly move animals between two holdings to link the sites and avoid the need to report movements to the CTS links database.
The changes follow recommendations made by the government’s Task Force on Farming Regulation, chaired by former NFU director general Richard Macdonald.
Mr Macdonald said: “These proposed changes follow closely part of the Task Force recommendations and will make a really significant improvement to local livestock movements.”
Michael Seals, chairman of the Animal health and Welfare Board for England, said the changes would improve the ability to react to disease outbreaks.
They would do so by creating a more effective system to report and track livestock movements, said Mr Seals, himself a Derbyshire livestock farmer.
“When an outbreak occurs, having a clear idea of where animals have been is vital in ensuing we can swiftly get to grips with the disease.”
(More on livestock farm inspections and compliance.)