Please provide the following information covering the years 2019 to 2024, broken down by year where possible:
1.The number of farmed animal welfare inspections conducted by your authority.
Heart of the South West Trading Standards have completed 2,306 animal health and welfare inspections in the period you have requested. These are broken down as follows:
| Date | Primary Visits | Non Compliant Visits | Improvement Notices | Fixed Penalty Notice | Prosecutions |
| 2019 | 493 | 130 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 356 | 116 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 307 | 107 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 380 | 120 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 414 | 168 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 356 | 151 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Totals | 2306 | 792 | 1 | 0 | 6 |
2.The number of cases of non-compliance identified as a result of those inspections.
There were 792 non-compliant visits recorded for the period requested. Please see above table for the breakdown of those for each year.
3. The number of enforcement actions taken, including:
- Improvement notices
- Fixed penalty notices
- Prosecutions
- Service warning letters
Please see the above table to answer this question. In addition to this information the Service has recorded issuing 12 Service Warning Letters following Non-Compliance for Animal Health and Welfare Legislation.
4.Whether the council has produced and published an annual enforcement report on farmed animal welfare as required under Article 11 of the Official Controls Regulation.
o If yes, please provide a copy or a link.
The Service produces and publishes an annual service-wide report on its website: Annual Performance Report
5. The number of formal welfare complaints related to farmed animals received by the council, and how many led to inspections.
In total Heart of the South West Trading Standards received 4606 complaints linked to Animal Health and Welfare (AHW) over the period. These are broken down by year in the table below. We are unable to provide further detail regarding individual complaints leading to inspections.
| Date | AHW Complaints Received |
| 2019 | 714 |
| 2020 | 673 |
| 2021 | 755 |
| 2022 | 893 |
| 2023 | 785 |
| 2024 | 786 |
| Totals | 4606 |
6. The number of staff currently employed or contracted to carry out farmed animal welfare inspections or enforcement.
Heart of the South West Trading Standards currently employs 65.25 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff. Of these, 9.25 FTE are employed in the Rural Compliance Team, which regularly completes Animal Health and Welfare work. However, all officers are trained and able to effectively investigate any Animal Health and Welfare complaint should they be required to do so.