Taking responsibility
Think tank: Social Market Foundation
Author(s): Aveek Bhattacharya; John Asthana Gibson
October 21, 2024
This report from UK think tank the Social Market Foundation looks at how the government can improve enforcement of farmed animal welfare laws.
Most Britons eat meat, but consumers increasingly care about where it comes from.
In this report, we set out to understand how farmed animal welfare standards are enforced, and how that enforcement can best be improved. There is an enforcement problem with farmed animal welfare regulations: There is a lack of transparency and reliable information to easily adjudicate the claim, but the fact that only 2.3% of non-compliance is prosecuted, suggests to us that there is an issue.
The majority of farms are inspected every 12-18 months by private assurance schemes, most prominently the industry-run Red Tractor. The state has deliberately stepped back, to reduce regulatory burden. Although compliance is marginally better in farms covered by private assurance schemes, participation in an assurance scheme is far from a guarantee of compliance, and assurance schemes have demonstrably failed to take sufficient action against breaches when they occur.
The report puts forward two sets of recommendations: straight-forward adjustments to the existing system that could make an immediate impact, as well as a more ambitious medium-term plan for a government-run licensing system for farms.
