Animal Welfare Cost Data
Case reference FOI2026/01192
Received 20 May 2026
Published 15 June 2026
Request
We have been commissioned by the RSPCA to undertake research into the scale of animal abuse and neglect in the UK, and the associated costs to individuals, the economy, and wider society.
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, we would be grateful if you could provide any of the following information:
* The total expenditure on any contracted service related to animal welfare (e.g. kennelling, veterinary care, or rehoming) incurred as a result of any animal welfare enforcement activity, broken down by service (including farmed, wild and companion animals) for the following financial years: 2023/24 (01/04/2023 – 31/03/2024), 2024/25 (01/04/2024 – 31/03/2025), 2025/26 (01/04/2025 – 31/03/2026).
* Total legal costs associated with animal welfare prosecutions broken down by court fees, counsel/legal representation and prosecution-related legal expenses for the following financial years: 2023/24 (01/04/2023 – 31/03/2024), 2024/25 (01/04/2024 – 31/03/2025), 2025/26 (01/04/2025 – 31/03/2026).
* Any other staff time and associated costs attributable to animal welfare enforcement activities. This may include, but is not limited to, inspections, case management, and liaising with other organisations such as RSPCA and the police for the following financial years: 2023/24 (01/04/2023 – 31/03/2024), 2024/25 (01/04/2024 – 31/03/2025), 2025/26 (01/04/2025 – 31/03/2026). If you are not able to provide the exact figure, please provide a rough estimate.
* Any other costs associated with animal welfare enforcement activity not already included under staffing costs, legal costs or contracted services. This may include any other operational, administrative or incidental costs related to enforcement activity involving farmed, wild and companion animals, for the following financial years: 2023/24 (01/04/2023 – 31/03/2024), 2024/25 (01/04/2024 – 31/03/2025), 2025/26 (01/04/2025 – 31/03/2026).
If you cannot provide the information requested above in financial years, please provide it in calendar years (2023, 2024, 2025) or however your data is stored. If you do not have this data for all the years requested, please provide the data for the years you have. If the requested years are missing altogether, please provide data for the latest available time period.
Response
A: This information is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
The information requested is spread across multiple teams, including Licensing and Animal Welfare teams. Our officers who deal with farm animal welfare would have to go through over 600 welfare complaints itemising precisely how long they spent on each and every visit, this is not something that is routinely recorded. They would have to go back through all mileage claims to collate the miles travelled on each journey, cross referencing them with the particular welfare complaint visit.
Furthermore, the team would need to establish every single vet bill we have paid relating to stray dogs. Also, every time we have paid for medicine for farm animals, paid for vet attendance, every time we have seized animals and re-homed them. We would also need to manually calculate costs of disposing of animal by products- mainly dead animal carcasses which would be a time consuming process.
I have been advised that we do not record the time spent on collection of stray dogs. One officer responds to stray dog reports but has many other duties, such as dealing with abandoned vehicles and fly tipping. Animal welfare makes up part of a much wider post.
Officers believe the above work would take nearly 200 hours to do.
For animal licensing aspects for all questions, there are 167 records that the team would need to review to locate all the information requested. I anticipate it taking me 30 minutes to review and calculate officer time etc for each record. That calculates to be an additional 83 hours of work.
Regarding legal costs, I have approached our legal team who advise they don’t have this data readily available, and they would also need to review all cases manually to collate costs. They also added that in any case, “actual costs” vs “court-awarded costs” are calculated in completely different ways, so the figures wouldn’t accurately reflect actual cost.
Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
The Service Area have advised that they would be able to provide how many complaints/investigations/prosecutions/formal warnings/cautions we have received/issued/dealt with for each period, and the nature of the complaint, as well as actual Service budgets for Animal Health & Welfare and Animal Licensing budget. If this is something that you would like to receive please let me know.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.