Thread by @NicolaCutcher

DEFRA seems to be in denial about the Wye egg story in the Observer.

I have to call out this disingenuous statement from an anonymous @EnvAgency spokesperson:

‘permitted farms are subject to regular inspections’

There’s a catch. THREAD 🧵 1/8

deframedia.blog.gov.uk/2024/01/14/cov…

The catch? Only poultry farms with over 40,000 birds need a permit!

Most free-range egg farms fall under this threshold (for example, they might have 16,000 birds or 32,000 birds etc)

I recently asked the EA (via FOI) how many farm inspections they’d conducted on non-permitted poultry farms in the Wye catchment from 2020-2023.

Answer? NONE.

At least, not knowingly. To be precise, they said:

“The Environment Agency does not regulate non permitted poultry units. We may carry out inspections as part of a general farm inspection but we would not keep numbers which would be readily available.”

So most free-range egg farms have gone without inspection, despite warnings for years about pollution coming from such farms.

Of permitted units (over 40k birds) supplying eggs in the Wye catchment, they told me they’d inspected 2 in 2020, 1 in 2021, 3 in 2022 and 3 in 2023.

They didn’t know how many of those (if any) were free-range sites. They could all be from intensive indoor egg-layers.

I think @charleswatson is justified in accusing the EA of “scandalous neglect”.

DEFRA should admit they’ve not done enough and seek to do better.

They should reduce the permit threshold so that units with fewer than 40,000 birds actually get inspected, and routinely.

Maybe that’s an idea for @SteveBarclay?

We’re still waiting for DEFRA’s Plan for the Wye. It would be good if information like this informed it.

ENDS