Apply for funding to improve animal health and welfare
Source: gov.uk (2025-09-25)

Apply for funding for a vet to visit your farm to reduce endemic diseases and conditions, increase animal productivity and improve animal welfare.

Start an application

This service forms part of the Animal Health and Welfare Pathway. It will provide payments to livestock keepers to fund farm visits by vets.

To get funding, you must apply for an Improve Animal Health and Welfare (IAHW) agreement. Before you start any actions from reviews or follow-ups, make sure you have applied and the agreement is in place.

You’ll need your Rural Payments service customer reference number (CRN) and password to sign in. Applying takes about 5 minutes.

Start now (https://apply-for-an-annual-health-and-welfare-review.defra.gov.uk/sign-in)

About improve animal health and welfare

There are 2 parts to the service:
- animal health and welfare review
- endemic disease follow-up
You can choose the vet you want to do these. The review and follow-up are not an inspection or audit.

If you are a farmer who is a vet, you cannot carry out your own visit, you must use another vet.

As part of your IAHW agreement, you can have up to:

3 reviews on any number of herds or flocks of one or more species from the list of eligible livestock – beef cattle, dairy cattle, pigs or sheep

3 follow-ups on any number of herds or flocks of one or more species from the list of eligible livestock – beef cattle, dairy cattle, pigs or sheep

The service ends on 19 June 2027. Your review and follow-up visits must be done by then. You must submit your claims by 19 September 2027.

Animal health and welfare review

During a review, the vet will:
- test for endemic disease (for cattle and pigs)
- test the effectiveness of medicines to treat worms (for sheep)
- advise you on how to improve animal health and welfare
- advise you on how to increase animal productivity
- discuss any other topics that are important to you
After the vet has completed a review, you can choose to have an endemic disease follow-up.

Endemic disease follow-up

You can only do a follow-up on a herd or flock after you have done a review. You may also prefer to claim successfully for the review before you organise a follow-up. The follow-up must be on the same species as the review.

During a follow-up, the vet will:
- do more in-depth disease testing based on your review results (cattle and pigs)
- do disease testing or condition assessments based on farm health priorities (sheep)
- do a biosecurity assessment
The vet will also advise you on further steps to:
- control and prevent disease
- improve animal health and welfare
- improve animal productivity
Follow-ups must be on the same species as the review.

Get help with your application

For more help with applying for this service, you can watch this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4kEsnvBgl0). It shows you how to apply and how to find all the information farmers and vets need.

Contact the Rural Payments Agency if you:
- cannot apply online
- have a question about your application
You can scan and attach documents in an email and send them to us. Or you can post them to our address. You should:
- use ‘IAHW’ in the email subject heading
- put your SBI and IAHW agreement number on everything you send to us
Write to:

Rural Payments Agency

PO Box 352

Worksop

S80 9FG

Email: xxx@xxx.xx (mailto:xxx@xxx.xx).

Telephone: xx-xxxx-xxxx Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5pm, except public holidays.

Find out about call charges (https://www.gov.uk/call-charges).

Funding to improve animal health and welfare: guidance for farmers and vets (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/funding-to-improve-animal-health-and-welfare-guidance-for-farmers-and-vets)