Enforcement of animal welfare legislation

Policy:  Animal welfare legislation relating to animal boarding establishments, pet shops and dog breeding is enforced by local authorities.  However there are no national standards or fee structure and PAC considers the variability of enforcement to be unacceptable.  PAC considers that the DEFRA agency Animal Health to be a more appropriate enforcement body and urges governments to transfer the responsibility to them.

Background:  The licensing of establishments for animal welfare activities is a small element of the work of local authorities and so generally has a low priority.  Licence inspections may be carried out by relatively poorly trained staff and there is no nationally enforced standard.  Consequently PAC considers some licensed operations to be below an acceptable standard.

Animal Health is the DEFRA agency tasked with ensuring the welfare of farmed animal and consequently has significant numbers of well trained staff.  While some additional training in companion animal matters could be necessary PAC considers that skill levels would be higher than in some local authorities.

Licensing of companion animal establishments is intended by the legislation to be self-funding.  No significant additional resource would be required to effect such a change.  As a UK wide organisation Animal Health is in a far better position to enforce the legislation to a single appropriate national standard.