European Member States have agreed to delay individual movement reporting for older sheep. Since electronic tagging of sheep older than 1 year was made compulsory on 1st January 2010 there has been speculation that the compulsory IED tagging could be rolled out to older sheep. However, an agreement by the EU’s Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health (SCoFCAH) reached yesterday means this won’t be required for the 8 million sheep born before this date, until 2015.

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Agriculture Minister Jim Paice welcomed the news; the UK government had petitioned for the proposal to be tabled. He said, "In this economic climate it is not affordable or practical to electronically tag the millions of sheep born before electronic sheep identification was introduced. I have been pressing Europe hard to defer the impending individual movement reporting requirement for these older sheep.  I am pleased they have listened to us and farmers by delaying this requirement for three years."

As sheep tagging is important in the management of animal disease, older tags will need to be retained.  The pre-2010 older sheep can retain their conventional tags, and keepers will be able to continue to record and report their movements as a batch.  Though Defra said this delay will give farmers time to decide how they wish to identify and record their older animals.

The government estimated that electronically tagging older sheep and the associated work that would have gone into the change, through either visually collecting and recording the sheep’s tag number on movement documents or retrospectively identify them with electronic tags would have cost the industry between £4 to £11.5million over the next three years.

Alistair Mackintosh, NFU livestock board chair, also welcomed the news "This has been a burning issue for the UK’s sheep farmers so we are delighted to secure this extension. It will save a huge amount of money, time and unnecessary bureaucracy and also give farmers some breathing space to comply."

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