The Livestock Auctioneers Association (LAA) has spelt out how it believes the regulations concerning the electronic tagging of sheep could be improved to delegates of the EU Food and Veterinary Office (FVO).
And it is confident that these concerns have been taken onboard and could possibly lead to some changes to simplify the regulations later this year.
"Our talks with the FVO delegates in LAA markets last week were very constructive and beneficial," said LAA executive secretary Chris Dodds. "They explained that they were in the UK on a fact-finding mission, rather than on an inspection visit and that they wanted to find out how the EID regulation for sheep was being implemented here in the UK.
"This gave us the opportunity to discuss the problematic areas and the weaknesses in their regime, including the challenge of handling a mixture of manual and electronic slaughter tags, the prospect of reading and recording historic flock tag numbers post-January 2012 and the wish to display the EID tag number on single slaughter derogation tags."
Mr Dodds said the FVO members agreed with the LAA on several issues and he was hopeful that their report back to Brussels would recommend some modifications to the regulation to simplify its implementation for the UK sheep industry.