Badger Culling

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and George Eustice

Monday 27th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[George Eustice]

I extend my gratitude to everyone who has returned to the debate, as some hon. Members will have detected that I was getting towards the end of my contribution. I have gone through my notes to check whether I overlooked anything earlier.

To pick up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds on the culls that have completed their four years, as I explained just before we suspended the debate, at the end of last year we consulted on having low-level maintenance culling to keep the population in check. That would very much be a small operation with much-reduced numbers—not like the culls we had for the first four years. My hon. Friend also mentioned deer and other species, and he is right that wild deer can carry TB, but our veterinary advice is that their role in transmitting TB is significantly lower than that of badgers, because of their nature and how they move about. TB spreads less freely among deer, because badgers live underground in close proximity to one another. Nevertheless, deer are a potential concern, but we believe badgers to be far more prevalent in spreading the disease, and do so in far greater numbers, in particular in the south-west, the high-risk area, so that is where we are focusing our attention at the moment.

The hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross asked us to learn lessons from other parts of the UK. As I pointed out in his debate on badger culling and bovine TB, Scotland is officially TB-free, but Scotland has an incredibly low badger population. It is the only part of the UK not to have a large badger population.

In Northern Ireland, which was mentioned, the approach is to trap, test, and vaccinate or remove. We follow the evidence from that approach closely, but the difficulty is that there are no good diagnostics for picking up the disease, as I said earlier. The people in Northern Ireland might therefore release up to 40% of badgers that have the disease, although they would not have detected it. In addition, they could be vaccinating and re-releasing badgers that had already had the disease. That approach is by no means perfect, even though superficially it sounds logical.

The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Workington (Sue Hayman), mentioned costs. All I can say is that in year 1, the costs were higher—a huge amount of surveillance and post-mortem testing was going on, we had the independent expert panel and policing costs were higher—but the costs have been reducing as we have rolled out the cull. We also have to put that in context: every year, the disease is costing us £100 million, so doing nothing is not an option.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

There has been universal agreement across the House on one point in the debate: if we can find an oral vaccine, that is a possible solution. Will the Minister say something about the Government’s research into oral vaccines? I am thinking in particular about meningitis B and a vaccine for babies, on which I have campaigned. That new vaccine is manufactured in a totally different way. Will he look at the science behind such vaccines to see what lessons can be learned?

[George Eustice]

One of the challenges of TB is that it is a bacterial disease, and it is notoriously hard to get vaccines to work in that context, whereas with a virus, if the vaccine is cracked, the virus is cracked—as with, for example, the Schmallenberg vaccine. We have to recognise that despite decades of medical research, the best TB vaccine available is still the BCG. As I have said, however, we are spending millions of pounds on research to develop an oral bait that badgers would take and that would immunise them. As the hon. Member for Newport West pointed out correctly, if we can get the vaccination right, a herd effect in badgers could pass on the immunity. We are also in the very early stages of looking at the notion of self-disseminating vaccination with a positive, contagious vaccine that could spread through the badger population. My hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds is right that that is an important area of research, but I go back to what I said at the beginning: vaccination is only one of our tools for bearing down on the disease. I am afraid, however, that a badger cull is an essential part of any coherent strategy to eradicate TB. That is why we are continuing with the policy.

A number of hon. Members mentioned the BVA and its comments on the free shooting of badgers. As I said before, I live quite near Bushy Park, across the bridge from Kingston, and every autumn a sign is put on the gate stating, “The park is closed today because a deer cull is going on.” No one bats an eyelid. People do not say, “This is terrible”, and we do not get protesters running around dressed up as deer or in the middle of the night, trying to disrupt things. People seem to accept that.

I put it to hon. Members that we have to keep some sense of perspective. We are trying to fight a difficult disease and the veterinary advice is clear: a badger cull has to be part of any approach to eradicating that disease. Is it really that different from the approach that we take to controlling other wildlife, such as foxes, or deer in royal parks?

Basic Payment Scheme

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and George Eustice

Thursday 28th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[George Eustice]

I will come to that, but we should remember the experience of 2005. Some hon. Members have said we should learn lessons. Let us remember that in 2005 no one was paid in December, no one was paid in January, no one was paid in February and no one was paid in March. The first farmer to be paid was paid in March. Then, the last Labour Government decided to switch to a part-payment system and got themselves into a complete muddle that took a couple of years to sort out because of all the reconciliation that had to be done afterwards. They found that farmers had received inaccurate payments and it caused all manner of difficulties. For that reason, we should be cautious.

We should realise that, as a number of hon. Members have pointed out, the payment window does not open in May, but closes in May. The next application window opens in March, which is not long to go—five or so weeks. I want staff in the RPA to be working on making sure we get next year’s applications right and through, rather than messing around doing part-payments of this year’s applications.

I want to say what we have done. We have introduced a hardship fund. We have worked closely with groups such as the Farming Community Network that provide a triage process. If a farmer is suffering real hardship and cannot, for example, buy feed for their cattle, they are fast-tracked. In some cases, if we can we speed up an application, we make we sure we get it through as quickly as possible. In other cases when we suspect they will not be paid in a hurry, we have in many cases made part-payments on account cash-flowed by the Treasury—not EU-funded, which would expose us to difficulties, but on account from the Treasury.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Will the Minister give way?

[George Eustice]

I will not give way because I want to cover a few more points and leave time for my hon. Friend the Member for Wells.

Some hon. Members have talked about the banks. I have been meeting them regularly and encouraging them to show forbearance to farmers. One reason why we sent a letter last November to those who were not expected to get their payment at the end of January was that they could take it to the banks, which were ready for that.

A number of hon. Members talked about communications. As I said, a letter went out in November and a further letter has gone out to those not receiving payments now, in January. The RPA has held almost weekly meetings with key NFU office holders and regularly attends NFU councils, so I do not accept the allegation that people have been kept in the dark and not informed. What I can understand is the understandable frustration among farmers who have not yet received their payments. That is spilling out in criticism of communication, which is probably a little unfair.

I want to talk about next year. A number of hon. Members asked about lessons. The reality is that we now have all these data on the core system. For next year, farmers will start from the position they left off in this year. We are confident that having done all the difficult work to get those applications on, from here forward it will be far easier. We will offer paper applications to those farmers who want them next year, but we hope that those who were previously online—about 70% up until 2014—will return to being online.

I want quickly to cover the issue of commons, which was raised by a number of hon. Members. We had a legal challenge from a local authority in Minchinhampton. It challenged the very basis on which we used to make payments and it caused huge difficulty for everyone. The issue is not about just having a plan B; the problem is that the methodology that it has now forced on us through its challenge means that it is impossible to pay anyone on a common until we have resolved all those claims. Our biggest difficulty in relation to many of these commons is that the National Trust has a large, complex claim that has always taken a long time to resolve. That has caused us a particular difficulty with common land, but we are recognising that and doing what we can to try to speed things up.

I want to leave a bit of time for my hon. Friend the Member for Wells, but I will answer these questions. My hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) asked about the deadline for this year. It will be May; it will go back to the normal time. My hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Chris Davies) talked about some of the difficulties that the Welsh Government have experienced with requirements imposed by the EU, particularly in relation to accurate mapping and the difficulties with shade from woodlands. This goes back to my initial point. We are now in an era with an incredibly complex CAP, causing many difficulties.

We have had a very important debate, covering many different issues. We have not got on to the exciting issue of the European Union and the potential impact of the referendum, but we will have much more time to discuss that in the months ahead.