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Animal Health and Welfare Strategy for Great Britain: The Evidence Base

Chapter 10: Indicators

10.1 Purpose

10.1.1 The Animal Health and Welfare Strategy published along side this document establishes a number of important objectives to be achieved over the next 10 years. A mechanism is needed which assesses the success of the strategy in achieving these objectives and for providing information on the progress being made so that appropriate decision can be made if, for example, progress towards a particular target is falling behind schedule. Indicators are the means by which progress towards these the strategy outcomes will be assessed.

10.2 Role of indicators

10.2.1 The Animal Health & Welfare Strategy indicators will have a range of functions:

(a) acting as quantitative measures of the success or failure of the strategy in achieving its outcomes;

(b) being used in conjunction with other data and analysis for subsequent evaluation of the strategy;

(c) facilitating communication with all stakeholders by helping to describe progress and identify areas of strength/weakness within the strategy;

(d) sending the right message in terms of what the strategy is seeking to achieve, whilst remembering that they are indicators and not outcomes in their own right.

10.3 Characteristics of a good indicator

10.3.1 The general characteristics of a good indicator include;

(a) highly correlated to the outcome or process they relate to;

(b) relatively immune from external factors;

(c) readily understood by all stakeholders;

(d) obvious which direction is good and which is bad;

(e) should not in principal be influenced by what data is available.

10.4 Indicators for the Animal Health Welfare Strategy

10.4.1 The aim of the Animal Health and Welfare Strategy is to:

Develop a new partnership in which we can make a lasting and continuous improvement in the health and welfare of kept animals while protecting society, the economy, and the environment from the effect of animal diseases.

10.4.2 For indicator purposes the objectives of the strategy can be separated into four broad categories:

(a) To reduce the impact of endemic disease in animals;

(b) To improve animal welfare;

(c) To guard against and mitigate the effects of exotic diseases in animals;

(d) To reduce incidence of zoonotic diseases in animals which might imperil
human health.
10.4.3 As well as addressing these four main strategy outcomes, we are also considering indicators which track the balance of costs borne by industry and government and the proportion of farmers using a farm health plan. Economic and environmental indicators will also be considered.

10.4.4 Table 10 below summarises the indicators which have been considered to track these outcomes. The process of developing the indicators is well under way but in some cases the underpinning data currently available is insufficiently robust for our purposes and new or refined sources will be needed. In other cases further work is required to investigate other sources of data and whether other indicators might be more appropriate.

10.4.5 A detailed framework for the indicators needed to measure the progress of the strategy will be put to the first Animal Health and Welfare Conference for Great Britain in the autumn. As suitably robust data sources are identified and developed, baseline estimates will be provided for each indicator together with the targets we are aiming for and the milestones we expect to achieve over the lifetime of the strategy. Results of progress against published targets and trajectories will be made available to Strategy stakeholders.

Table 10.4.1 - Indicators for the Animal Health and Welfare Strategy

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