@start-1@An important target is to develop a monitoring system by which everybody can see that their personal concerns about the way animals are kept, managed and handled are addressed in a serious way. We are planning to start the first testing of the full system in January 2007. There are areas of concern for which we do not have appropriate measurements at present, but scientists are constantly developing new methodologies (we have, for example, few good measurements for positive emotions), which over time might become included in new versions of the monitoring system. It might also be that new findings prove that what we thought was an area of concern is less of a problem for the animals than we thought, or that a new aspect of the animal’s environment is cause for concern (e.g. not providing daylight). Therefore, we have designed methodologies for checking the reliability of measures; we identified potential measures for the various animal categories; we started to evaluate research proposals to carry out the work on the measures; we validated the measures and tested these for repeatability and@end-1@@start-2@feasibility under commercial conditions. Further, we researched how to integrate all these different measures into an overall welfare assessment. This included identifying both current techniques and problems when pooling information on animal welfare, and constructing the integration process. It is planned to group the many different measures into 12 mutually exclusive welfare criteria. The different criteria will then be grouped to give overall scores for four principle questions: Are the animals properly fed and supplied with water? Are the animals properly housed? Are the animals healthy? Does the behaviour of the animals reflect an optimised emotional state? When the answers to these questions are combined, we will have an assessment of welfare on a scale from good to bad that can be easily communicated to consumers. Not only will the monitoring scheme give a measure of welfare to consumers and retailers, but farmers and slaughterhouses will be able to use the results of the individual measures to identify strengths and weakness in their housing and management. More @end-2@