Britain likes to see itself as a global leader in animal welfare. It does often lead the way – on paper.
The Animal Welfare Act 2006, the Welfare of Farmed Animals Regulations, and a suite of species-specific protections form a comprehensive framework designed to deliver meaningful protection for the more than one billion farmed animals within UK borders each year.
But the latest The Enforcement Problem: 2024 Data Report from the Animal Law Foundation reveals an uncomfortable truth: much of this legislative architecture is functionally dormant. The law exists: the enforcement system does not.
Corrodes
Only 2.2 per cent of farms were inspected last year. More than a quarter of those inspections identified breaches. Yet just 2.2 per cent of confirmed non-compliance on farms resulted in prosecution. More than half of local authorities took no formal enforcement action at all, despite finding clear, documented breaches of the law.
This is not sporadic failure. It is systemic non-enforcement and it carries implications far beyond animal welfare.
A common misconception persists that animal protection is a niche issue, peripheral to core legal principles. In reality, it is a litmus test for them.
Animal welfare legislation imposes legal duties: to prevent suffering, to provide basic care, to protect animals at slaughter and during transport. When those duties are routinely breached and routinely unenforced, the message is unmistakable: some laws can be broken without consequence.
That corrodes the rule of law. A system in which compliance depends on geography, budgets, or political will is not a system governed by law but by discretion.
Enforcement
And when the state enacts laws, but lacks the capacity, or inclination, to enforce them, it undermines public confidence in the fairness and consistency of legal protections more broadly.
The irony is that the public does care. Polling consistently shows overwhelming public support for strong animal welfare protections. For most people, animals are not an abstract policy problem, they are living beings whose treatment reflects broader social values.
The public assumes that the laws they believe in are being properly enforced. The 2024 data shows they are not.
At the heart of the enforcement gap lies a fundamental design flaw: local authorities have powers, but no duty, to enforce animal welfare law. In a climate of shrinking budgets and soaring prosecution costs, many simply do not.
Central regulators are little better placed. APHA’s reluctance to define itself as an “enforcement body,” despite holding statutory enforcement powers, illustrates how blurred and unaccountable the system has become. The absence of reliable data on staffing and budgets leaves meaningful oversight impossible.
Protection
The result is a troubling form of quiet deregulation, one not enacted through Parliament, but through attrition.
There is, however, a notable shift. Parliamentary committees, professional bodies, and frontline inspectors now agree: the enforcement regime is failing, and the failure is structural. The Animal Sentience Committee’s call for a wholesale review of enforcement is no longer radical, it is legally necessary.
If the government’s forthcoming animal welfare strategy is to retain public trust, it must recognise what the 2024 data makes unequivocal: animal law must matter in action, not in words.
That means political will, transparent reporting and adequate resourcing. And a clear framework that does not leave the protection of millions of animals to discretionary goodwill.
Animal protection law is not separate from the rule of law, it is a measure of it. And right now, that measure is falling short.
This Author
Edie Bowles is the executive director of The Animal Law Foundation. Read the latest report here.