On Friday two questions that Henry Smith had sent to the Government’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DeFRA) were answered by Rebecca Pow and published. The headline for the two questions were Reindeer: Exports and Reindeer: Imports and these were the questions

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many reindeer were:

exported from the UK in (a) 2020 and (b) 2021; and to which countries those exports were sent in each year.

imported into the UK in (a) 2020 and (b) 2021; and from which countries they were imported.

The answers were as followed. It is interesting to understand why the Crawley MP is interested in this theme and indeed if this relates to Christmas, given that his question was asked less than a month after Christmas 2022.

There has only been one export of reindeer in 2021, this was exported from the United Kingdom to Northern Ireland and the consignment contained two reindeers. There were no Exports of reindeer in 2020. The information that we have provided is a true reflection of the information that we have access to. We cannot guarantee the accuracy of this data, as we can only rely on the information that has been input into external customer facing systems by third parties.

There were no reindeer imports into Great Britain during 2020. During 2021, there were two imports of reindeer (two consignments of two animals, a total of 4 animals). Both of these consignments came from Northern Ireland. The information that we have provided is a true reflection of the information that we have access to. We cannot guarantee the accuracy of this data, as we can only rely on the information that has been input into external customer facing systems by third parties.

Perhaps we can ask Henry what was in his thinking?