English beef producers should go through their animal paperwork with a fine-toothed comb this spring and hand-in any passports they still hold from animals that have died in the past, urges the English Beef and Lamb Executive (EBLEX).

Cattle Tracing System (CTS) rules - set out clearly in the new handbook to be provided to all cattle keepers this spring - stress that the passports of all animals under 24 months of age dying on-farm must be returned to BCMS within seven days.

Equally, the passports of animals that die at over 24 months must be sent with the stock when they are disposed of through the designated BSE-testing channels.

Assessments of the number of stock born before August 1996 remaining on farm for OTM exit planning, however, have revealed a number of cases of missing passports from dead animals.

MLC beef economics manager Duncan Sinclair said: “To draw a line under the past and eliminate these historic errors from the system once and for all ahead of the crucial EU Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) inspection mission in June, BCMS has said that action will not be taken against farmers just because the passports were returned more than seven days after the death of the animals.

“Together with an even more careful cross-checking of their statements by all concerned, spring-cleaning of any old passports should do much to maintain the momentum of improvement achieved in the accuracy of the whole CTS database over the past year.”

Overall, the number of movement anomalies in the system has been cut from a total of 1.2 million in the spring of 2003 to just 400,000 at the start of this year, with incomplete movements down from 600,000 to 50,000 over the same period. 

Encouragingly too, data errors in registration have been halved over the past two years. In parallel, the percentage of registrations made electronically through CTS on-line has virtually doubled from 20pc in early 2003 to 38pc today.

Added Mr Sinclaire: “This underlines both the value of electronic registration in eliminating errors at source and the extent to which producers are finding it an easy and convenient way of applying for cattle passports.

“Even so, BCMS records still show around 2000 animals/month being denied full passports through late applications and so excluded from entering the human food chain. This continues to represent a serious loss both to individual producers and the beef industry as a whole and emphasises the need for producers to register all births well within the 27-day deadline.”

EBLEX accepts that ensuring all CTS paperwork is kept accurate and up-to-date can be seen as an additional chore for some producers. However, it insists that a redoubling of efforts is vital this spring in order to deliver the conditions needed for a change in the OTM rule and a  resumption of bone-in beef exports within the year - allowing the country to finally shake-off the damaging after-effects of BSE.