Cattle Identification Inspection (CII) statistics: EIR release

Information requested

1. How many cattle inspections for passports and movements have been carried out over the period 2020 to today’s date, broken down by year? What were the results and findings of those inspections?

2. Were any movements of cattle to or from the bull stud not properly recorded? Were any movements of cattle to or from the bull stud not recorded within regulated timescales?

Response

As the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the ‘public interest test’. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

Response to your request

The answers to your questions are:

1. There has been one Cattle Identification Inspection (CII) undertaken at the SG Bull Stud Farm Knocknagael since 2020 to confirm whether the key requirements of cattle identification and traceability legislation had been complied with.

The key requirements are:

• Registration with Animal and Plant Health Agency as the keeper of cattle
• Cattle tagged in accordance with current legislation
• Cattle registered with ScotEID and all births, movements and deaths notified on the ScotEID,ScotMoves+/ScotMoves systems
• appropriate passports retained
• records kept of all cattle births, movements and deaths

The inspection was undertaken in March 2024 and looked to reconcile the Identification, Registration and Movement Database with the cattle physically found, the passports held by the keeper and the cattle keeper’s records.

The inspection found 31 failures to notify movements to the Identification, Registration and Movement Database in accordance with current legislation, 7 failures to notify deaths to the Identification, Registration and Movement Database in accordance with current legislation and 5 animals presented with a single tag missing.

2. As noted above, there were failures to notify movements to and from SG Bull Stud Farm Knocknagael to the Identification, Registration and Movement Database in accordance with current legislation. However, all movements to and from SG Bull Stud Farm Knocknagael were properly recorded in the cattle keepers records and the Identification, Registration and Movement Database was subsequently updated based on these records.

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