Waterhouse, I would need to be up all night telling you what is wrong with the existing implementation of EID for sheep, but I will tell you some of it.
Before I get onto that however, the thing which has riled me about the idea of implementing this pre-movement notification for sheep is that when sheep EID was introduced, one of the things we as farmers were promised was that there would be no need for us to buy readers or software as all marts and abattoirs would be recording centres, and we would not need to list individual ids if we were en route to a recording centre. Clearly, if pre-movement notification is introduced then we will need to have readers and software on farm - yet another pointless expense.
In my previous life I was a project manager. One of my key skills was making sure that whatever got implemented was what was needed, that everyone involved in the project or affected by it got what they needed and that if they had to accept disruption or costs as a result of it, they got something positive from it too to compensate them for that. It incenses me that Defra continually implement schemes with badly-defined requirements, which are not met, which cause unnecessary disruption and cost and deliver no benefit to anyone, including not delivering the original project goals.
So you see I can't start from the premise "tagging is going to exist for traceability purposes because of the disease that shall not be joked about" because EID as implemented in sheep provides very little improvement in traceability over the previous non-EID method.
It was blindingly obvious to many farmers, myself included, that this would be the case, before the scheme became law. I attended several meetings with Defra and each time they were told what the problems would be, and each time they were dismissive at best, rude and patronising at worst.
What it would seem is happening now is that Defra has now realised that the whole sheep EID scheme has failed to meet its single original requirement, despite having cost the industry millions and delivered no benefit whatsoever except perhaps to the companies who manufacture and/or sell the tags, taggers, readers and software. To paper over this, it looks as though they are now going to break yet another of their commitments to farmers, and force us to spend more money implementing readers and software systems on the farm.
Having watched disbelievingly my local marts spend between them hundreds of thousands of pounds on EID readers (money which they can ill afford and in one case at least has resulted in planned improvements which would have delivered significant animal welfare benefits having to be shelved) which still break down at least once a week and which still fail to correctly list more than 97% of the tags running through them, I surely do feel and express a great deal of resistance to being forced into having on-farm readers and software, yes.
What will happen is farmers who currently buy and sell sheep will have to decide if they can afford the equipment and extra work entailed.
Picture the scene. It's 4am and you are collecting your lambs to go to the mart today. You rear your own and bought-in store lambs, so it does require you to read and list all the eartags of all the sheep. (If it was just your own homebred lambs you could get around the problem by tagging at the point of loading and using the - more expensive - numbered tags so that you know what numbers are in the lambs' ears without having to read anything.) It will have to be electronically because (a) there are so many sheep it would be infeasible to do this manually and (b) many of the sheep have slaughter tags, on which only an electronic device can read the individual id. Defra will insist on 100% accuracy - so you tell me what you will do when, having collected the 100 lambs and driven them past the reader, you find only 98 numbers read. And remember that if they are slaughter tags, you cannot read them by eye.
The farmer in this picture will have had to spend money on equipment and handling facilities (the reader will need to be kept dry, so there'll have to be an undercover race for the lambs to be driven through and past the reader), quite likely will have to move the lambs from where they have been kept to this facility for tag reading before loading, will certainly have to start the whole operation quite a bit earlier to allow for the time it takes to get the readings and deal with any errors.
What will happen is quite a few farmers who currently buy in store lambs to fatten on their spare winter grass, who buy in ewe lambs to grow on and sell as gimmers, will decide it's not worth the hassle and will stop buying and selling sheep. Most hill farmers rely on the store market for a significant portion of their income, as they do not have the type of ground on which all their lambs can be fattened. So this will be another nail in the coffin of hill farming sheep.
Which makes it all the more surprising that you say that NSA are behind this. So before spending any more time writing up what is wrong with the proposals which I haven't seen, I think I had better go and read up what the NSA and others are actually saying and Defra is actually proposing.