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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether she plans to introduce in-ovo sexing technology to end the routine culling of day-old male chicks in the UK egg industry.

We are firmly committed to maintaining and improving animal welfare and want to work closely with the farming sector to deliver high standards.

In its 2024 ‘Opinion on alternatives to culling newly hatched chicks in the egg and poultry industries’, the Animal Welfare Committee considered a range of technologies that could help end the routine culling of male chicks by identifying or determining the sex of chick embryos before hatching. In recent years there has been rapid global progress in the development of these technologies, and we welcome the UK egg industry’s interest in the development of day zero sexing technology.