Improving Systems Intelligence for Plant Health

The Plant Biosecurity Strategy for Great Britain and Tree Health Management Plan were adopted in 2014. They defined a new framework for protecting plant and tree health in Great Britain, taking on board recommendations of an expert task force set up to examine the issues highlighted by an outbreak of Chalara (ash die-back) in early 2012. Enhancements were made to the Plant Health budget (a programme known as PHEIS) to support increased activity and investment necessary to deliver the strategy.

An evaluation of this enhanced budget was completed in early 2016. In conducting the evaluation, it was found that there were a number of systemic issues that both limited the robustness of the evaluation's findings and are likely to limit future assessments, whether for formal evaluation, or for internal performance reporting, management or planning purposes. These included a lack of understanding of the causal pathways in how inputs to plant health biosecurity services led through to outcomes and a lack of routine monitoring of plant health outcomes (in part due to intrinsic measurement challenges for such outcomes).

In response to these issues, this research will support Defra's efforts to improve the monitoring system to better provide intelligence on the performance of the plant health system.