Minister urges calm over tagging

Published on Tuesday 29 December 2009 18:01

CABINET secretary Richard Lochhead last night reassured sheep farmers that no immediate action is required on new European sheep tagging rules which come into force on Friday.

The rural affairs secretary was reacting to concerns expressed by farmers last week – reported in The Scotsman on Thursday – that the Scottish Government has not yet announced how the new rules for the electronic identification (EID) of sheep are to be applied.

Although the new regulations, which have been bitterly opposed by Scottish sheep farmers, come into force on Friday, Lochhead pointed out that only lambs born after 31 December require to be electronically tagged and not until they reach nine months of age or leave the farm of birth.

"That gives farmers a few months to prepare and we will be issuing detailed implementation guidance in the New Year," said Lochhead. "The recent consultation on implementation of the new rules was very helpful but there remains a few issues to be ironed out."

But he added: "I wish to make it clear that in taking decisions over which derogations should be used and how we implement EID in Scotland, my guiding principles will be simplicity and practicality. I want to avoid introducing any regime which ends up causing problems and has to be fixed in a year or two because we took the wrong decisions now."

Lochhead said he would continue to explore how the impact of EID on the industry can be minimised and additional targeted support provided to help sheep farmers meet the new requirements. "Failure to comply with the new rules is not an option," he stressed. "The Scottish Government would be financially penalised and farmers would lose between 15 and 50 per cent of their Single Farm Payment."

The government has already secured a concession from Europe allowing sheep movements to be recorded at "critical control points" at auction marts or abattoirs. As a result, most farmers will not now need to invest in expensive equipment to read ear tags.

However, support of up to 1,000 per farm for the purchase of electronic reading equipment is available under the Scotland Rural Development Programme and a 3 million research pilot has been running in an effort to find the best solutions for implementing the rules in Scotland.

The government is also committed to the creation of a central database which is seen as crucial to success in recording the movements of every sheep, as required by the new European legislation.

The government has consistently argued, with the backing of the farming industry, that the rules will place unnecessary burdens on farmers and create additional costs and bureaucracy, with little improvement in traceability, compared with the present system of batch recording.