The presence of footrot in a flock can have serious implications for animal health, welfare and productivity. Associated increases in treatment and prevention costs, as well as losses in performance, have led to a notable interest in using breeding to control footrot in sheep. Current breeding indexes for UK hill sheep such as the Scottish Blackface, include both lamb and maternal traits, and have led to improvements in economic returns. So that breeding for resistance to footrot can be evaluated in the context of multi-trait selection programmes, the genetic relationships with current breeding goal traits must be quantified. The objective of this study was to identify important environmental factors affecting footrot prevalence and to estimate genetic parameters between footrot severity and other traits used in current UK hill sheep breeding indexes.