Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many night licences to cull deer were issued in the last three years.
Answered by Rebecca Pow
Between 1st January 2021 and 31st December 2023, Natural England Wildlife Licensing Service have issued 204 licences for the purpose of shooting deer at night.
Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many equalities impact assessments his Department completed in each of the last five years for which data is available.
Answered by Mark Spencer
Under the Public Sector Equality Duty (the Duty) all public authorities, including Government departments, are required by law to ensure that they have due regard to certain equality considerations when carrying out their functions. While ‘equality impact assessments’ may be produced, there is no legal requirement for duty assessments to be recorded in a specific format.
Until November 2023 Defra did not keep a central record of completed duty assessments.
In 2023 the Department reviewed its processes and procedures in relation to compliance with the Duty, and in November 2023 established a central repository of Equality Impact Assessments completed across Defra group organisations.
The Department promotes awareness of the Duty and provides tools to help ensure compliance with it.
Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what the level of woodland cover is by council ward.
Answered by Rebecca Pow
Forestry is a devolved matter so this answer is for England only. The figures of woodland cover by ward are provided in the attachment to this answer.
Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many members of staff in their Department have one or more of the words equality, diversity, inclusion, gender, LGBT or race in their job title.
Answered by Baroness Prentis of Banbury
I refer my Hon Friend to the answer I gave him on 9 September 2020, PQ UIN 83985.
[questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2020-09-01/83985]
Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how much the Department spent on unconscious bias training in each of the last five years.
Answered by Baroness Prentis of Banbury
Defra obtains unconscious bias training for Senior Civil Servants and delegated grades from Civil Service Learning (CSL)[1]. All CSL online training is provided free of charge at point of use to our staff.
The information is in the table below:
Central departmental spend on unconscious bias training 2015-20
Course type | FY 2015/16 | FY 2016/17 | FY 2017/18 | FY 2018/19 | FY 2019/20 |
Unconscious bias workshop(s) | £2,833 | £21,095 | Nil spend | Nil spend | Nil spend |
Data source: Records of spend against a central learning and development budget.
[1] It is mandatory for civil servants to use CSL for their learning.
Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many members of staff in his Department have equality, diversity or inclusion in their job title.
Answered by Baroness Prentis of Banbury
Job titles are not recorded in the Human Resources database. To obtain this data, we would have to contact all business areas and we estimate this would break the disproportionate cost limit. However, we do have six members of staff who work in HR’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Team.
Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent assessment he has made of the Government's progress in increasing the number of trees (a) on streets and (b) in urban environments.
Answered by Rebecca Pow
The Government is committed to increasing the number of trees on streets and in urban environments, in and around the places where most people live and work.
In 2019, we launched the £10 million Urban Tree Challenge Fund which is providing matched funding to councils, charities, community groups, private sector bodies and individuals to plant 130,000 trees, including 20,000 street trees, in our towns and cities.
In addition, we are giving hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren across England, mostly in urban areas, the opportunity to plant trees in schools and local communities, as part of our 1 million Trees for Schools programme in partnership with the Community Forest Trust and the Woodland Trust.
The Environment Bill includes new duties on councils to consult when felling street trees and increased penalties for illegal felling. As part of our 25 Year Environment Plant, we have worked with stakeholders to develop and publish an Urban Tree Manual and we are developing policies to ensure all new streets are lined with trees. These measures will help to ensure councils pick the right trees in terms of biosecurity, value for money, air quality impact and biodiversity.
Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what (a) proportion, (b) value and (c) volume of (i) lamb, (ii) beef, (iii) pork and (iv) chicken consumed in the UK is imported (A) from the EU and (B) from the rest of the world.
Answered by George Eustice
According to analysis of HMRC Overseas Trade Statistics and Defra agricultural statistics, in 2018:
UK lamb consumption - (A) imported from the EU = (a) 7%, (b) £53m, (c) 21 thousand tonnes and (B) imported from the rest of the world = (a) 26%, (b) £320m, (c) 76 thousand tonnes.
UK beef consumption - (A) imported from the EU = (a) 30%, (b) £1.1bn, (c) 343 thousand tonnes and (B) imported from the rest of the world = (a) 2%, (b) £94m, (c) 22 thousand tonnes.
UK pork consumption - (A) imported from the EU = (a) 55%, (b) £849m, (c) 792 thousand tonnes and (B) imported from the rest of the world = (a) 0.1%, (b) £3m, (c) 1 thousand tonnes.
UK poultry consumption - (A) imported from the EU = (a) 25%, (b) £1.2bn, (c) 548 thousand tonnes and (B) imported from the rest of the world = (a) 2%, (b) £61m, (c) 36 thousand tonnes.
Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the potential increase in the number of Export Health Certificate that will be required in the event of the UK leaving the EU without a deal.
Answered by David Rutley
If the UK leaves the EU without a deal we expect the number of Export Health Certificates (EHCs) issued for exports to increase.
To address this increase, we have offered free training to official veterinarians, with around 1000 official veterinarians now able to sign EHCs.
We have created a new Certification Support Officer. This role will assist Certifying Officers to collate the evidence needed for certification. 250 have registered and 90 have qualified in Great Britain so far.
We have offered local authorities funding to help them meet demand for EHCs, and a new web portal for processing EHCs will also help by speeding up the application process.
The proposed risk based approach to inspecting EHCs will increase the capacity for local authority Certifying Officers to certify export health certificates for fish and fish products.
Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate he has made of proportion of registrations held by UK firms with the European Chemicals Agency to export to the EU in August 2018 that have been transferred to a non-UK EU-based entity.
Answered by Baroness Coffey
The European Chemicals Agency reported on 3 April 2019 that approximately 4,800 UK-based registrants had initiated a transfer to a EU-based company. This is out of a total of around 12,000 UK registrations in total.