FRCAW | Policy paper: Welfare of Animals at the Time of Killing (England) Regulations 2015: post implementation review

Document type : Report of the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (U.K.)

Preview: Society expects that all animals will be slaughtered and killed in a humane manner. Council Regulation (EC) No. 1099/2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing (PATOK) sets out the directly applicable main requirements for protecting the welfare of animals at the time of killing.

The Welfare of Animals at the Time of Killing (England) Regulations 2015 (WATOK) implement and enforce PATOK and contain strict national rules which provide greater protection of animals at the time of killing. WATOK is relevant to slaughter operations/killing of animals by slaughterhouses, on farms, kother small companion animalsker's yards, small-scale producers and private individuals.
Regulation 46 of WATOK requires a review to be carried out five years after the regulations came into force. The conclusions of the review should be published in a report by 5th November 2020. The review should consider if the objectives of the WATOK regulations have been achieved and whether they continue to be appropriate.
The review must in particular:a. set out the objectives intended to be achieved by the Regulations;b. assess the extent to which those objectives are achieved; c. assess whether those objectives remain appropriate and, if so; the extent to which they could be achieved in a less burdensome way; and d. so far as is reasonable, have regard to how the EU Regulation is enforced in member states.
The objectives of WATOK set out in the Impact Assessment for implementation of PATOK were to: - Ensure there is no overall reduction in existing welfare standards; and- Ensure the obligations and requirements that PATOK places on Member States are met.

Scope of the review of WATOK.

This review will assess whether implementation of WATOK has ensured no overall reduction in existing animal welfare standards; and how the obligations and requirements of PATOK were met. The review will also assess whether the objectives of WATOK are still appropriate and/or if they could be achieved in a less burdensome way.
The review will also broadly assess the effects on business and regulatory bodies in terms of process, impacts and costs. This will be based on the original Impact Assessment for consultation on implementation of Council Regulation 1099/2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing produced in 20121 and on data we have been able to obtain from stakeholders, regulators and policy experience over the last 5 years on actual impacts on industry.
Implementation of the Mandatory Use of Closed-Circuit Television in Slaughterhouses (England) Regulations 2018 is not covered by this review but there is evidence from the Food Standards Agency (FSA) that the presence of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) and the availability of CCTV evidence has enabled Official Veterinarians (OVs) of the Food Standards Agency to identify non-compliances and enforce animal welfare standards. The introduction of retrospective CCTV viewing could have contributed to the increase in the number of Certificates of Competence (CoCs) suspended in 2019.Stakeholder engagement.
In order to inform the evidence base for the review, it had been our intention to undertake detailed stakeholder engagement, in particular to understand impacts on industry, including costs. However, in the context of the Covid-19 emergency, we concluded that this detailed engagement could not take place as stakeholders would not have the capacity to respond to detailed questions to a timescale that would enable us to meet the November deadline.Delivery agencies (Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA)/Food Standards Agency (FSA)) have also been impacted and resources to extract and review data in detail were limited.
It is not a legislative requirement that this review includes an analysis of cost data. The costs in the original Impact Appraisal for WATOK were small, with a net cost to business of £4.5M a year.
We have therefore conducted the review with less detailed cost information from industry. However, we were able to gather some data through informing stakeholders of the review via letter (Annex C) and posing a smaller number of broad questions regarding the impact of WATOK on industry, in particular:- Whether costs associated with WATOK were as expected and, if not, how did they diverge significantly from original estimates?- Whether there are specific areas of WATOK where the regulatory costs seem disproportionate to the welfare protections?- Whether WATOK has delivered animal welfare protections as intended?
We received 17 written responses from industry, veterinary organisations and welfare NGOs and followed this up with a small number of meetings with key stakeholders.
In addition to this specific stakeholder engagement on the five-year review, Defra engages regularly with all parts of the slaughter industry. Defra participates in regular meetings with industry representative bodies such as British Poultry Council (BPC), British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) and Association of Independent Meat Inspectors (AIMS) to discuss general animal welfare at slaughter matters.
Since the introduction of the regulations, specific examples of engagement include workshops and individual meetings with industry on the Mandatory Use of Closed Circuit Television in Slaughterhouses (England) Regulations 2018 which came into force on 4 May 2018 and on implementation of Annex II of Council Regulation 1099/2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing that came into force on 8 December 2019. These were combined engagement efforts with the Food Standards Agency.
In addition to information from stakeholders and regulators, we have based our assessment on advice from the expert advisory body the Animal Welfare Committee as well as known impacts from policy, industry and regulator experience over the last 5 years and on the available science.
We engaged with the Regulatory Policy Committee Secretariat early in the review process to inform them of the approach we would be taking and worked with them to ensure that the outcome would be as robust and useful as possible and would satisfy their processes. Legislative changes.
Now that we have left the European Union (EU), this review also provides a significant opportunity to identify/signpost key themes for improvement in the regulations on welfare at slaughter in England which can be assessed further after the review. This will enable us to raise our animal welfare standards above the EU's level if we wish and will enable us to raise other domestic requirements where there is no related EU law. An EU Farm to Fork Strategy recently announced suggests that the EU may also be considering reform of its legislation on animal welfare.
To make amendments to the regulations on animal welfare at the time of killing (WATOK and PATOK) would require a combination of both primary legislation and/or secondary legislation.