Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, pursuant to Answer of 25 May 2021 to Question 2401, how many incursions by livestock onto the rail network have occurred in each of the last five years; and how many of those incursions resulted in investigations by Network Rail.

In the last five years there have been 4,431 incidents on Network Rail infrastructure involving livestock. These can be broken by year into the following:

2016-17 – 965 incidents

2017-18 – 941 incidents

2018-19 – 1,162 incidents

2019-20 – 684 incidents

2020-21 – 679 incidents

Network Rail undertakes investigations of all incidents of livestock incursions as a matter of course.