Countryside Stewardship Mid-tier Agreements
Angela Eagle Excerpts(7 months, 4 weeks ago)
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The Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs (Dame Angela Eagle)
Today, I announce that this Government will offer one-year extensions to more than 5,000 farmers with Countryside Stewardship mid-tier agreements expiring this year.
Countryside Stewardship pays farmers and land managers for environmental work alongside sustainable food production. This targeted, time-limited extension ensures they will continue to be rewarded for their vital role in sustainable food production and nature’s recovery.
With agreements set to expire on 31 December this year, one-year extensions are being offered while the Government develop the reformed sustainable farming incentive for 2026, refreshes the environmental improvement plan and rolls out the new Countryside Stewardship higher-tier scheme. This is part of our plan to give farmers long-term strategic certainty.
The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) will write to eligible farmers with details about their extension offer. The letter will contain details of how they accept their extension and the deadline they need to meet for it to be processed.
The one-off investment of up to £70 million from within existing budgets ensures more than 5,000 farmers, foresters and landowners have the support they need to continue their vital role in sustainable food production and nature’s recovery. It reflects our commitment to working with the sector to build a stronger, more profitable farming future.
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Emma Reynolds) and I will now review plans for the sustainable farming incentive to ensure the available funding is distributed more efficiently and more fairly. The Government will publish information on the next iteration of the scheme in due course.
Funding for farmers through the environmental land management schemes, which include the Countryside Stewardship mid-tier scheme, will increase by 150% to £2 billion by 2029, helping to boost rural economies, strengthen domestic food production and enhance the UK’s natural environment for future generations. This underpins the Government’s cast iron commitment to food security and creating more resilient farm businesses.
Through the Countryside Stewardship mid-tier scheme, farmers are planting wildflower margins to boost pollinators and managing hedgerows to create vital habitats for birds and small mammals—alongside sustainable food production.
Investing in nature through the Government’s plan for change is central to securing Britain’s future economic growth, developing a sustainable, resilient and profitable farming sector, and ensuring long-term food security.
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Bovine Tuberculosis Control and Badger Culling
Angela Eagle Excerpts(8 months ago)
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The Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs (Dame Angela Eagle)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your watchful eye in Westminster Hall, Mr Stuart, on this first evening back. I begin by acknowledging the strength of feeling in this debate, including from 170 of my constituents in Wallasey and the 102,000-odd members of the public who signed the petition. For many, the idea of culling badgers—a protected species—is deeply upsetting and even unconscionable, and I understand and respect that view.
As many have said, this is a totemic and polarising issue. The fact is that over successive years, hundreds of thousands of badgers have been culled indiscriminately across a vast area, stretching from Cornwall to Cheshire and across to the midlands. For valid reasons, many, including the Labour manifesto, have described the policy as ineffective.
I will be clear from the outset that this Government are committed to ending the badger cull. We stand by that commitment, and I say again that the badger cull is ending. We have already taken decisive steps to bring the cull to its closure.
Bovine TB has a devastating impact on our farming community, as we have heard in great detail from all parts of the House. It has cost the lives of more than 274,000 cattle, compulsorily slaughtered in England because of the disease. It costs the taxpayer over £100 million a year, and it costs farmers dearly in lost income and extra business costs. We have heard about the stress and mental health problems that waiting for those constant tests have subjected many families to. Far too many farmers have suffered profound stress and hardship as a result. They live with the constant anxiety of regular testing, the financial strain of movement restrictions and the heartbreak of losing affected animals, often reared with care and pride over generations.
In the year up until June 2025, more than 21,000 cattle were slaughtered in England for bovine TB control. That is fewer than the year before—but that is little consolation for any farmer who has had to watch one of their animals being taken away. Since 2013, more than 247,000 badgers have been culled under licence. That is a very large figure, and a hard figure to hear. Our challenge is to strike the right balance: tackling bovine TB with urgency while protecting our wildlife. The Government are committed to moving decisively towards a future free from this devastating disease, and to doing so in a way that is effective and that earns the trust of the communities most affected.
The petition calls for an immediate end to the badger cull and a stronger focus on cattle-based measures. I want to respond to that clearly, because I understand, and we have heard in this debate, how deeply people care about the issue. This debate comes at an important moment—perhaps slightly too early, I must say, but the petitioners are the petitioners, and we get the debates when we get them—since we are refreshing the bovine TB eradication strategy introduced by our predecessors in 2014. It was they who instigated this cull.
A new strategy is being co-designed with farmers, vets, scientists, conservationists and the Government, all of whom will have a voice, in an attempt to deal with some of the polarisation in the debate. It will be informed by independent evidence in the review led by Professor Sir Charles Godfray. The update to that review, which was published on 4 September, has been referred to on several occasions.
On the role of badgers, the petition argues that wildlife are being scapegoated. I understand the use of that word, but we must be clear that transmission runs both ways within species and between cattle and badgers, as has been demonstrated repeatedly by using modern technology such as whole-genome sequencing. We must have an honest debate and, to have an effective policy, we must recognise the reality that TB infections go both ways, from one species to another and back again. The Government’s direction of travel, though, is clear: we are investing in non-lethal interventions—non-lethal for badgers, that is—and cattle-focused measures, including both cattle and badger vaccinations, to end the badger cull by the end of the Parliament.
The most sustainable way to protect farms and wildlife is by investing in measures to reduce infection in both species, such as badger and cattle vaccination. Sir Charles Godfray’s evidence review concluded that the overall package of interventions—cattle testing, movement controls and on-farm biosecurity alongside the badger cull policy—has contributed to reducing bovine TB in cattle, but it also concluded that it is not statistically possible to isolate the impact of each individual measure. He said that it was possible to control bovine TB effectively both with a badger cull and without one, and therefore we must see how to move forward in the best possible way, given the manifesto commitment on which we were elected last year.
The petitioners, and many voices in the debate, argue that badger culling should stop immediately. They say that it lacks solid scientific evidence, it has gone on too long and it takes the focus away from tackling bovine TB in cattle. But, however much one might sympathise with those views, it is not really about choosing between badgers and cattle. The real question is how to take those facts seriously and decide the best way to keep bearing down on bovine TB until we can finally get rid of it.
I say again that the badger cull is ending. The 2025 season is nearly over, and this is the final year of industry-led culling in England’s high-risk and edge areas. To provide a little more information about that, at the height of the badger cull there were 73 licences to cull badgers operating up and down the country, and in this season there are 21. By the end of this season only one licensed cull will remain. It will continue until the end of the season and then there will be an analysis to see how effective it has been scientifically. A decision will then be made about whether to continue with that final licence.
Dame Angela Eagle
Yes. It is to deal with a TB hotspot that appeared. By the end of this season there will be no cull licences in any high-intensity or edge area.
Everybody has said in their own particular way that we all agree that we have to reduce the incidence of and eradicate bovine TB, and we also want to stop killing badgers, so we have to do more on cattle, which is exactly what the Government wish to do. Cattle measures are the foundation of our eradication programme. That means there should be regular testing, both routine and targeted, using the highly specific skin test, supplemented where appropriate by the highly sensitive interferon-gamma test. We also have robust rules on cattle movements and slaughterhouse surveillance, and tools like the ibTB map to help farmers to make risk-based and informed decisions when they buy or sell stock.
But more can be done to strengthen our cattle testing programme. The DEFRA-funded TB advisory service and the TB hub are the go-to advisers in supporting farmers to implement practical biosecurity measures. Simple things such as raising water troughs, securing feed stores and keeping wildlife out of buildings are simple, low-cost steps that make a real difference. Yet I recognise the Godfray panel’s view that more must be done to strengthen biosecurity across the board, so we will focus on what that might look like.
One of the most exciting developments in a generation is cattle vaccination. The cattle BCG vaccine, used alongside a new test that can tell the difference between vaccinated cattle among infected animals—the so-called DIVA skin test—is being trialled on farms as we speak. If marketing authorisations are granted by the Veterinary Medicines Directorate, we could start using those tools in the next few years. These things are annoyingly slow, but I will see whether there is any way to ensure a speedier way to get those things used. Vaccination is clearly never going to take off if one cannot tell the difference between an infected or vaccinated animal, so it is clear that we have to make progress on that.
Rachael Maskell
I am really grateful for all that my hon. Friend has said, but I am reminded of what Kate Bingham said when she talked about the scaling down and scaling up of our capability in responding to the pandemic. Will my hon. Friend look at the methodology so that we are able to respond not only to this particular crisis but, as the shadow Minister highlighted, to the future risks that farmers face?
Dame Angela Eagle
I am well aware of the increased risk of disease and issues suddenly emerging, having lived through the last outbreak of foot and mouth in this country, albeit not quite in the way that the shadow Minister did. It can be catastrophic, so it is very important to think about how we can be ready to scale up surveillance very quickly.
In her contribution my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) talked about the battle against covid that we all lived through a few years ago and compared it with this battle. Even though the repayment method will be long, money was no object then; in this instance I am afraid that finances and money have to be an object. We have to try to get our surveillance and ability to respond quickly in the best place we can within the resources we have, so there is more of a constraint than there might have been in some of the examples that my hon. Friend used.
Andrew George
I am grateful for the Minister’s helpful remarks. She says that the DIVA test is currently being tested, which is wonderful, but does she accept that, given it was possible to produce a vaccine within a relatively short time in the pandemic—I appreciate that civil servants seem to have a rather stretchy temporal language—a few years is not good enough? Can she be more specific, given that this is costing the country millions of pounds every year?
Dame Angela Eagle
Well, I have been in the job a month—I will be more specific when I have had more time to chase the questions I want to ask the appropriate people. However, I will make the observation that covid was a virus, and we are not dealing with a virus in this instance. This disease is difficult to find, pursue and detect because it has evolved to evade detection, which is what these kinds of things tend to do.
It is not simple and easy. One has to be careful to ensure that things are safe and not try to chivvy along medical regulators just so that I can make a convenient announcement to Parliament. We need to know that things are safe and effective. As various people have said, if we are to unleash them and they are to be used with the Government’s scientific imprimatur, we had better be right about it; otherwise, we will get into a situation where we cannot tell whether cattle are vaccinated or infected. Once we are in that situation, we cannot ever come back from it. This has to be done in a precautionary way. I am probably as frustrated as the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) by the speed at which it is going, but it will take as long as it has to, with chivvying at an appropriate level.
To end the badger cull responsibly we must continue to tackle TB in wildlife using tools that are backed by science. Badger vaccination is not about ignoring the role that badgers play in spreading TB, and it is certainly not about blaming wildlife; it is about reducing infection within badger populations in an area where they pose a risk to cattle without resorting to culling a protected species. That has to be an aim we wish to pursue. I am told that vaccinating 30% of a badger population is effective at achieving the goals we wish to achieve.
Multiple studies show that vaccination is an effective way of controlling the disease in badgers, which is why we are scaling up at pace. In 2024, more than 4,000 badgers were vaccinated. That capability will expand further with the introduction of a new badger-vaccination field force next year, which will see us partnering with industry to deliver more vaccination areas. Alongside that, a new national wildlife TB surveillance programme and an updated badger population survey are being put in place to ensure that the field force and other measures are deployed where they will make the greatest difference.
When bovine TB hits a farm, it is not just an entry on a spreadsheet or a data point in national statistics; it means months of restrictions, mental strain and real financial jeopardy. National numbers matter, but people live this day after day in the affected areas, which is why our strategy must be practical on the ground, understandable at the kitchen table and, above all, effective. It is also why we are co-designing it with those who face the devastating disease every day, ensuring that their experience and insight shape the solutions we put in place.
As I speak, a steering group drawn from the existing bovine TB partnership for England is overseeing several expert working groups involving over 100 individuals. These groups are focused on governance and resourcing, cattle surveillance and breakdown testing, accelerating cattle vaccination, trade and movement, and badgers and other wildlife, as well as how to respond to changing epidemiology. The plan is to present a new strategy next year. In doing so, we will deliver a step change that reflects the best available evidence, the lived experience of those affected and a shared commitment for England to be free of bovine TB by 2038.
We will consolidate and strengthen cattle-focused controls, testing, movement, biosecurity and advisory support. We will continue to advance the cattle-vaccination programme at pace—and we will see quite what that means. People with greater minds than mine have talked about the relativity of time, but I want it to happen as quickly as is safely possible. That way, when authorisations are in place, we can begin the roll-out. We are preparing for deployment so that we can go quickly as soon as we get the go ahead.
We will scale up badger vaccinations across large, contiguous areas, supported by enhanced wildlife-TB surveillance. This is how we will end the badger cull: by building the capabilities and viable alternatives that make culling less necessary. We should not underestimate the challenge, though. The nature of the disease means the strategy must remain flexible, adapting to the disease picture as that too evolves.
The petitioners who made this debate happen want a cattle-centred approach, farmers want certainty, fairness and access to all the tools that work on their farms, and scientists want us to follow the evidence wherever it leads. The strategy refresh is our chance to knit those threads into a durable plan to ensure that we achieve bovine TB-free status in England by 2038.
The Government will end the badger cull by the end of this Parliament. We will replace it—safely and credibly—with vaccination, strengthened surveillance, better biosecurity and, crucially, we hope, a cattle vaccine and a DIVA test that can build resilience into the herds. That is how we will reduce disease, costs and stress, protect a much-loved native species and restore hope to the farming families who have lived for too long under the shadow of bovine TB.
Male Chick Culling
Angela Eagle Excerpts(9 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dame Angela Eagle)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for securing this debate. She raised this issue in a Westminster Hall debate on animal welfare standards in farming in June, and I am grateful to her for giving us the opportunity to focus on the subject in more detail today. I fully recognise that there is strong public feeling on the routine culling of male chicks, as highlighted by the breadth of support that the Vegetarian Society’s “Ban Hatch & Dispatch” campaign has attracted. My hon. Friend has spoken passionately on the subject this evening.
As a nation, we are rightly proud of the high animal welfare standards that underpin our high-quality British produce. This Government want to build on and maintain our world-leading record on animal health and welfare, and we are absolutely committed to ensuring that animals receive the care, respect and protection that they deserve. I completely understand that the culling of day-old chicks is a process that many, including someone not far away from this Dispatch Box, may find incomprehensible and wasteful.
I assure my hon. Friend that all farm animals are protected by comprehensive and robust animal health and welfare legislation, including when they are killed. Regulations set out strict requirements to protect the welfare of animals at the time of killing, which includes male chicks in the egg production sector. As she pointed out, the permitted killing methods for chicks, such as gas stunning, are based on scientific research and assessment to ensure that the birds are spared any avoidable pain, distress or suffering. All laying hen hatcheries in the UK use argon gas mixtures as their stunning method. That is a much more humane method than other gases, such as carbon dioxide, which is routinely used in several European countries and elsewhere in the world.
However, as has been commented by the Animal Welfare Committee—an expert committee advising the UK, Scottish and Welsh Governments on animal welfare issues—the routine killing of chicks is principally an ethical issue, rather than a welfare problem, because it does not lead to direct welfare harms. Of course, that does not mean that we should not work to see if we can move away from it in the future as quickly as is practical and possible. Being able to do that relies on viable alternatives being developed; my hon. Friend talked about some of those in her remarks.
The Animal Welfare Committee reviewed the alternatives to culling newly hatched chicks and published its independent opinion on this issue last year. In its report, the committee recommended that chick culling should be banned as soon as reliable, accurate technologies were available. It also highlighted that several consequences would arise from such a ban, and as such it would be crucial to learn from those countries that have already committed to move away from the culling of male chicks.
My hon. Friend mentioned that Germany, France and other European states have banned the culling of male chicks, but some European states have encountered issues following a ban. In some cases, in countries where there is a ban in place—Germany, for example—male chicks are merely transported to other member states prior to being killed, which is not the welfare gain one would want to get from such a ban. Any ban on the culling of male chicks needs to allow for the rearing and processing of those male birds that hatch despite the use of in-ovo sexing technology.
Another issue flagged in the Animal Welfare Committee’s report is the fact that male chicks provide a whole food source for exotic animals and raptors.
Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) on securing the debate and outlining so eloquently the case for this cause, which I support. Given that we use many male chick carcases for animal feed, pet food and places like bird of prey centres, and we import far more than we use, does the Minister agree that we need to find a solution to meet that need, if we are, as I hope, to eventually move to in-ovo sexing in hatcheries?
Dame Angela Eagle
I agree that when a supply chain, however difficult, is established and we try to move away from it, there can be unintended consequences. We have to look at the whole series of issues along that chain, so that we do not end up in a situation that has lower welfare outcomes than the one we started with. I assure my hon. Friend that the Department is well aware of that, and we will not move in any way if we would end up in a worse welfare situation than the one we started with, but he makes a perfectly good point.
As I was about to say, another issue flagged in the Animal Welfare Committee’s report is the fact that male chicks provide a whole food source for exotic animals, and we would have to replace that.
In recent years, there has been phenomenal global progress in the development of technologies that could help to end routine culling of male chicks by identifying or determining embryo sex before hatching, and it appears that this is going on in the dairy industry as well. There is clearly a lot of scientific work going on to see what we can do to get away from the current situation in our livestock supply chains. Several new methods and systems have appeared, and many refinements in existing systems have continued, since the publication of the Animal Welfare Committee’s report on this subject.
We welcome the UK egg industry’s interest in the development of day-zero sexing technology, which enables eggs to be sexed prior to the start of their incubation. Such a commercial system offers many benefits, including economic and sustainability savings by directly freeing up hatchery space, in addition to providing an ethical solution to the culling of chicks.
In Germany, one alternative is the rearing of male layer chicks for meat production, also known as brother hens. Due to their slower growth rate, rearing brother hens requires a greater input of feed and a longer rearing phase to produce a smaller bird with less desirable body composition, making it more challenging to rear them commercially at scale in the UK. There is a lack of published research on the welfare of brother hens, but animal welfare concerns have been linked to this practice. In particular, managing aggression and high mortality within all-male flocks can be problematic, often accentuated by housing inappropriate to the birds’ behavioural needs.
Aside from in-ovo sexing technology and rearing of brother hens, I was pleased to hear about an initiative to assess the viability of dual-purpose poultry breeds in the UK—that is, breeds that can be used for laying and meat. Clearly, they are not as specialist as the different breeds currently used for the laying of eggs and for meat, but since they are dual purpose, they do not result in the mass culling of males in the laying industry. The initiative was awarded funding earlier this year as part of DEFRA’s farming innovation programme.
Using birds that can serve both as egg layers and meat producers could offer an alternative to chick culling, but it is different meat—they grow and turn out differently than UK consumers are perhaps used to. It is also thought that dual breeds bring other animal welfare benefits, as hens of dual-purpose breeds have lower incidences of keel bone fractures, and some breeds show less injurious pecking behaviour than found in commercial laying hen breeds. The males of dual breeds have better walking ability, lower levels of pododermatitis and better feather cover than fast-growing meat chicken breeds.
In addition to the animal health and welfare benefits, the project is also looking at the sustainability benefits of dual breeds. Dual breeds have lower protein requirements, and a German trial found that locally grown beans were a suitable alternative to very high- protein soya. If this approach to chicken breeding can be made viable, become popular and be accepted by UK consumers—those three things all have to work—it may deliver sustainability benefits. Bringing value to male layer chicks is of key importance, and I look forward to hearing the outcome of this research and whether dual-purpose breeds might offer a more ethical and sustainable approach than our current one.
This Government were elected on a mandate to introduce the most ambitious plans in a generation to improve animal welfare, and that is exactly what we are going to do. Our farm animal welfare policy is backed by a robust evidence base, and is supported and shaped by input from our many excellent stakeholder and expert advice groups. I look forward to speaking to hon. Members about this in more detail soon. Although, as I said earlier, this is principally an ethical rather than animal welfare issue, that does not mean that we should not be trying, very robustly, to address it. I look forward to seeing progress in this area over the next period.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
That was incredibly educational.
Question put and agreed to.