How Livestock Reporting is Changing Across the UK: From BCMS to ScotEID, LIS and EIDCymru

It's been 30+ years since the peak of the BSE disaster. Since then we have seen the introduction of comprehensive livestock traceability systems designed to track cattle, and later sheep, from birth to death.

The decision was made in parliament to launch the Cattle Tracing Service (CTS) under the organisation, the British Cattle Movement Service (BCMS) on the 28th of September 1998.

At this time Northern Ireland was excluded and had its own system however the other 3 countries, Scotland, England and Wales had all births deaths and other movements recorded at BCMS/CTS.

Then unfortunately followed by the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak. The existence of cattle traceability data did assist disease control efforts, but investigators later concluded that the absence of a comprehensive sheep traceability database created significant challenges during the outbreak.

After many years there was a specific, pivotal timeframe when the structural shift to separate devolved systems and the total retirement of the central British Cattle Movement Service (BCMS) / Cattle Tracing System (CTS) was officially agreed and then the fun begins - or not depending upon where you farm and your own personal opinions and experiences of course.

Between 2018 and 2019 the UK administrations agreed a move towards devolved livestock traceability systems supported by data-sharing arrangements.

The Catalyst: The 20+-year-old CTS core infrastructure was fundamentally obsolete and unable to handle modern data requirements. Most importantly, it could not support the transition to Bovine Electronic Identification (bEID) “(LIS)".

The Strategic Shift: Rather than building another single database for Great Britain, DEFRA and the devolved administrations formally agreed to move to a devolved, multi-species traceability model. Under this strategy, each nation took ownership of its independent platform while committing to build data-sharing protocols to maintain a "UK-wide view".

Traceability isn't just bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake—it's the backbone of disease surveillance and the UK's ability to trade livestock products internationally.

The fact that BSE or Foot and Mouth aren't a particular concern at this moment in time, traceability is important for disease surveillance right now (in particular for England and Wales) for Bovine TB and Bluetongue.

Scotland had been building toward its own livestock traceability system for some time, and the Scottish Government made no secret of its desire to have more direct control over livestock data for Scottish holdings (for many reasons). The result was ScotMoves+ on the back of ScotEid —the Scottish EID & Livestock Traceability system —which went live for cattle movement reporting on 4th October 2021.

This was a genuinely significant moment. For the first time in the post-2001 era, the unified GB-wide cattle reporting system was being broken apart. Scottish farmers would no longer report cattle movements to BCMS. Instead, all cattle births, deaths, and movements for Scottish holdings would go through ScotEID. However, for continuity of tracking in all 3 of the countries, ScotEid then immediately reported those movements to BCMS/CTS.

The announcement that there would be a separate system in Scotland undoubtedly created concern for many farmers since all the farms were by now used to the recording instruments and the vagaries of the BCMS/CTS system. However, the actual "switch-over" and the 'soft-approach' that ScotEID implemented, was a success.

For ourselves at Farm Solutions, we had been preparing to ensure that the change was entirely seamless. On our Livestock Management System, if your farm had a Scottish CPH number and the current date was on or after that of the switch-over date, the screens for reporting automatically changed and the farms reporting was sent to (and receipts received from) ScotEid. We could see in real time, the reporting data and the receipts from ScotEid working.

This is one of those details that matters enormously in practice but is invisible to anyone outside of farming. If a software provider hadn't been ready (I believe most were)—if the farmer’s software kept sending Scottish movements to BCMS after the cut-off, or hadn't established the connection to ScotEID—their farming customers would have been non-compliant. The obvious result would have been: Movements wouldn't have been recorded. Passports wouldn't have been issued. Animals couldn't have been legally sold or moved. It's the kind of thing that sounds minor until you're the farmer standing at a mart with cattle that can't be sold because your software didn't update.

ScotEID wasn't just a like-for-like replacement of CTS for Scottish holdings. The new system was built to be a multi-species platform from the outset. ScotEID had already been recording for sheep EID data for years before the cattle element was added (in 2021), so there was existing infrastructure and familiarity in the farming community.

Some notable aspects of the ScotEID system:

* Multi-species integration: One platform for cattle, sheep, and other livestock. This is tidier than having separate systems for different species.

* Real-time data: The system was designed with more modern data architecture, aiming for faster processing and more immediate visibility of movement records.

* Keeper-centric approach: ScotEID puts more emphasis on the keeper and holding relationship, which aligns with how farms actually operate rather than how legacy database structures were designed.

* API access for software providers: ScotEID provided application programming interfaces that allowed farm software to communicate directly with the system—a more modern approach than the older SIS email-based method, though the transition required development work from every software provider that wanted to support Scottish farmers.

The Scottish Government's stated ambition was always to have a system that better served Scotland's specific agricultural landscape—which is, in many ways, quite different from southern England. Hill farming, crofting, island livestock, the predominance of beef cattle rather than dairy in many areas—these all create different traceability challenges. Whether ScotEID has fully delivered on those ambitions is a discussion that Scottish farmers have strong opinions about (and those opinions are mixed, as you'd expect with any new system), but the fundamental fact is that Scotland took control of its own livestock data and the system is operational.”

It was expected that the English system would follow Scotlands within a year or two. Of course, the challenge facing England is considerably larger due to the scale of the cattle population, integration with TB testing systems and the complexity of existing agricultural databases.

There were of course the usual murmurs and consultations from DEFRA (the Department of Food and Rural Affairs). So, the original timeframe of 2022, or 2023 didn't happen, it was pushed to 2024, and that didn't happen. 2025 came and went, and now, halfway through 2026, there is a vague date of mid-2027.

If it is rolled out in summer of 2027 at some point, that will have been a full six years after ScotEID with ScotMoves+ launched.

Reasons for the Delays

The delays affecting England might be attributed to a variety of factors:-

1. Scale and Complexity

In England there are a greater number of cattle holdings compared to Scotland, coupled with a more diverse agricultural landscape. ( a dairy industry in England is particularly large). The new system will have to synchronise livestock traceability with bovine tuberculosis (TB) testing—which presents a more significant challenge in England and Wales than in Scotland Any new system must seamlessly integrate with TB testing databases, the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), payment systems, and various post-Brexit agricultural support frameworks.

2. DEFRA's Experience with Large-Scale IT Projects

Delivering major government IT systems is rarely straightforward, and DEFRA is no exception. Previous programmes, including the Basic Payment Scheme platform, experienced delays and well-publicised challenges. More recently, agricultural reforms associated with the Environmental Land Management (ELM) programme have taken longer to reach implementation than many in the industry originally expected.

Whether these experiences have directly influenced the timetable for livestock traceability reforms is difficult to say. However, they do help explain why farmers, software providers and other stakeholders often treat projected launch dates with a degree of caution until firm milestones are announced.

3. Brexit Aftermath

The exit from the EU has resulted in an overwhelming increase in workload for Defra—necessitating new import/export protocols, regulatory frameworks, and trade agreements. While livestock traceability is vital, it has had to vie for focus and resources alongside numerous other pressing issues.

4. What it Should Include

In other words, should it be similar to the existing ScotEid system or should it aim for more perhaps by adding in environmental factors, and animal health databases.

5. Inertia

The current system may be very old and has its drawbacks and limitations, but it works. Keeping it as is may be the cheaper option for now.

Not just for Farm Solutions as a software company, but for farmers, it is all a little frustrating. The agricultural sector is being asked to modernise in a lot of different ways including environmental stewardship, and carbon auditing amongst others. Without the ‘upgrade’ a lot of opportunities are being missed or at the very least delayed.

Also many years on from the ScotEid system up and running and yet no system in place for Welsh farmers who are currently (like their English counterparts) still recording cattle movements via BCMS/CTS.

However, the welsh EIDCymru was created and has for some time now been used to record sheep movements. As Wales has a high proportion of sheep to cattle, that made sense. The question is when will the cattle be added to the system?

There are challenges such as cultural difference and practices and not least because there are so many farming businesses straddling the border with England. It would make sense for EIDCymru to be in lock step with LIS at this point and to launch the cattle movements on the same date. Time will, of course, tell.

Sheep Reporting Across the 3 Countries

Most of the public attention around livestock traceability has for the most part focused on cattle. This is partly because cattle have had individual identification (with passports and everything) for longer, and partly because bovine TB and other ‘news’ stories keeps cattle firmly in the spotlight.

The move to electronic identification (EID) for sheep was driven by EU regulations, and the UK implemented it through a phased approach. This was an expensive road for farmers since EID tags are more expensive than the older tags, also many farmers had to buy tag readers.

The accuracy of electronic sheep tag reading is varied and there are many reasons for misreads and even no read at all even although a study suggests great accuracy. But the system has generally improved traceability for the sheep sector.

Country-Specific Sheep Reporting

Scotland: ScotEID has handled sheep EID data for longer than it's handled cattle data. Scottish sheep keepers report movements through ScotEID, and the system has had time to mature for ovine traceability. Scotland's large sheep population—particularly in the Highlands and Islands—means that the system handles significant volumes.

Wales: EIDCymru has been the primary sheep reporting system in Wales for some time, and it's probably the most established part of the Welsh livestock traceability infrastructure. Given that Wales has roughly 10 million sheep (roughly a third of the entire UK sheep flock), this is no small operation. Welsh sheep movements to and from markets are a major data flow.

England: LIS in England records all English sheep movements which must be recorded within 36 hours of the actual move. EID sheep movements was rolled out by LIS in march 2022 and so has been recording and tracing for 4 years now.

I want to spend a moment on what this fragmentation means for farm management software, because it's a perspective that doesn't get much airtime and yet it's central to how these systems actually function in practice.

Of course with one reporting system, when every farm across the UK reported movements through the BCMS/CTS system, software updates and new implementations were 'one size fits all'.

Now that we have ScotEID things are quite different. There are far more things that can be added to the software to help farmers because of the ease of the ScotEID system and how that can be used to help farms (eg A couple of clicks and direct comparisons between a farm’s records and those held at ScotEID can be made. One of many powerful tools not really available on BCMS (it can but it’s limited).

Farm Solutions (and I am sure other Livestock Management Software solutions not only contend with diverging reporting platforms each with their own complexities but also diverging rules and rural payment claims.

For a software company, this means maintaining multiple integrations simultaneously, testing against multiple systems, keeping up with changes from multiple government agencies, and—this is the really fun part—doing much of this with limited advance notice from the governmental bodies involved.

Here at Farm Solutions we have of course prepared our software (as far as we can) for the new English and Welsh systems and will endeavour (once we actually get the relevant information and the all important launch dates) to make the change over as seamless as we did for the ScotEID switchover on the 4th of October 2021.

Let's engage with the elephant in the room, will England actually hit the mid-summer 2027 target?

Well, based on the progress since 2019 (when the 3 Nations were 'definitely' decided on divergence from BCMS. I personally might put it at 50/50 particularly since there is not an actual date. Cynical maybe, but to some extent we have heard it all before.

If, or when it does roll out, will it be a full replacement of CTS with all the functionality farmers need from day one? Or will it be a phased rollout where certain features come online first and others follow later?

Based on the experience of other large public-sector IT projects, it would not be surprising to see a phased rollout, transitional arrangements and a period of refinement following launch. There will be a transition period where both the old and new systems run in parallel. There will be teething problems. And software providers will be scrambling to build and test integrations against a system that's probably still changing.

The farming community should prepare for this by:

• Ensuring their current reporting is up to date and compliant with existing BCMS requirements
• Keeping their CPH registrations and herd records accurate
• Working with software providers (like us) who have demonstrated the ability to handle system transitions smoothly
• Engaging with industry consultation processes, because the shape of the new system is still being influenced by stakeholder feedback.

I also think farmers should be vocal about what they need from a new system. The risk with any government IT project is that it gets designed by people who've never set foot on a farm, tested in idealised conditions, and then deployed to a sector where the reality is muddy yards, intermittent internet connections, and time pressure that doesn't wait for a loading screen. The best system in the world is useless if it doesn't work in the environment where it's actually needed.

One of the less discussed but absolutely critical aspects of having three separate country-level traceability systems is the question of cross-border data sharing.

Animal movements between the 3 countries is significant. Scottish store cattle are sold to English finishers and vice versa. Welsh sheep move to English lowland farms for winter. Cattle cross borders to abattoirs etc. This requires robust, real-time data sharing between ScotEID and BCMS currently and its eventual English replacement, and EIDCymru.

The current Scotland and BCMS protocols that have been established for data sharing are working, but they've required ongoing maintenance and attention. We can only hope that the eventual systems in all countries will be able to 'speak' to each other without adding more angst to busy farmers.

It's worth noting that the UK's livestock traceability challenges aren't unique. Australia has its National Livestock Identification System (NLIS). New Zealand has . The EU has continued to develop its own frameworks post-Brexit

What is so different about the UK just now is the fragmented system and the long delays with 2 of the roll outs of a more robust system. The UK's staggered, still-incomplete fragmentation is unusual.

What actually matters is that our trading partners have the confidence in our tracing of livestock from 'farm to fork'.

Having three different systems that may or may not share data smoothly is not the most convincing pitch. It hasn't caused trade problems yet (that I'm aware of), but it's a vulnerability that the sector should be conscious of.

If I were a betting person—and farmers are, in a sense, the ultimate gamblers, betting every year on weather, markets, and policy—here's what I'd expect to see over the next couple of years:

2026: Hopefully we will see some activity around the LIS system to suggest the the current forecast of theirs of mid summer-2027 may see some actual dates or milestones disclosed to help software providers if nothing else.

2027: Possibly—a phased launch of the English system. If it happens, it may be accompanied by a parallel running period where both old and new systems operate simultaneously. If it switches over in the way that ScotEID did, then all will be well, or will there be further delays and we will substituting "2028" for the current projection. I do hope not, from our perspective as a software provider, repeated timetable changes inevitably make long-term planning more difficult.

As discussed above, the UK's livestock traceability journey is far from complete.

Scotland demonstrated in October 2021 that a transition away from CTS could be achieved successfully with the right preparation, industry engagement and software support. Five years later, Scottish farmers have become accustomed to reporting through ScotEID, while England and Wales continue to prepare for their own next-generation systems.

Whatever form those future systems take, there are lessons worth learning from Scotland's experience.

Technology is only one part of the solution. Farmers also need practical support, clear communication and confidence that genuine mistakes will be dealt with fairly and constructively.

As LIS and EIDCymru take their own new cattle tracing services and they get nearer to completion, farmers will hope that the same principles will remain at the core of livestock traceability. The ultimate objective remains the same as it was in 1998: a livestock traceability system that protects animal health, supports trade and gives farmers practical tools that work in the real world. The technology may change, but those goals remain constant.

Livestock reporting in the UK has changed significantly since the introduction of BCMS and CTS in 1998. Scotland moved to ScotEID in 2021, England is developing the Livestock Information Service (LIS), and Wales continues to use EIDCymru for sheep movements while cattle remain on CTS. Although the systems are diverging, the common aim remains effective disease control, livestock traceability and supporting the farming industry.