Livestock: Disease Control

Tim Farron
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many cattle were slaughtered owing to irregularities with their passports in each of the last 10 years.

Jane Kennedy
[holding answer 2 April 2009]: The data required to provide the number of cattle slaughtered specifically because of irregularities with their passports in each of the last 10 years are not held in a form that is easily accessible. As the extraction and collation of these data would require a considerable amount of work and incur an unacceptable cost an answer cannot be provided. The data recorded monitor cattle slaughtered owing to the broader category of identification irregularities.