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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to the Animal Welfare Strategy for England, what resources her Department has allocated to deliver the commitments on decapod crustaceans; what progress her Department has made on (a) publishing guidance on killing methods and (b) examining the treatment of decapods through supply chains; what steps she has taken following stakeholder engagement on those commitments; and what her planned timetable is for the delivery of each of those.

The Animal Welfare Strategy sets out the priority issues that this Government will address, focusing on the changes and improvements that Defra aim to achieve by 2030 to improve the lives of millions of animals across the UK and resources have been allocated accordingly.

Publication of decapod guidance will be sequenced alongside the broader set of policies set out in the strategy.

Defra-commissioned research on how live decapod crustaceans move from sea to plate has been completed and will be published in due course. A project on the welfare of decapod crustaceans across the supply chain is in the Animal Welfare Committee’s current work plan.