Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what information Animal and Plant Health Agency holds on animals imported into the UK under the Pet Travel Scheme; and (a) when and (b) for what reasons that Agency stopped recording the country of origin of animals imported under that scheme.

Currently the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) holds data on the total number of animals entering Great Britain under the Pet Travel Scheme, and the number of animals that failed the compliance checks.

APHA stopped recording the country of origin of compliant animals imported under the scheme in 2016. Detailed data on non-compliant pet animals, including the country in which the paperwork accompanying the animal was issued, is always collected.

In previous years the country of origin data was taken from a legacy database (Pets database) which was deployed in 2006 when the throughput of pet animals was much lower. Pet carriers recorded details of pet animals entering Great Britain, including the country of origin.

APHA introduced a new system to establish the quality of the submitted data available from the Pets Database. This new system more accurately records the number of pet animals entering the country but does not record the country in which the paperwork was issued or the country the animal travelled from.

When the new system was introduced to verify throughput figures it was identified that recording the country of origin for compliant animals would place an undue burden on the carriers given the volume of pets travelling (the number of pets entering Great Britain has increased from 91,308 in 2006 to 336,446 in 2018).

Collecting the country of origin data for compliant pet imports has not proved useful in deterring puppy smuggling as it is essentially collecting information on legal movements; however APHA are looking at how this data could be accurately collected in the future and the likely costs that would be involved.

There is no legal requirement for the country of origin to be recorded, and we always relied on the good will of the carriers to record this information.