Badger Culling

Bill Wiggin Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) on securing this debate on behalf of the petitioners. I took one of his sentences to heart, which was that we should at all times avoid a “slow, painful death”. I quite agree with him on that.

I would also pick up the point my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) made about tuberculosis. This whole debate started with tuberculosis in human beings, and it is helpful for people to be aware that there are 10 million cases of human TB annually around the world and that 1.5 million people died of TB in 2020. This disease is a killer.

I then listened to the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), who talked about his pet, Dennis and said that it was lucky he could not bring his pet here. At that point, I felt that I should share with this august body the death of my pet on Thursday. His name was Free Fallin’, after the Tom Petty song. He weighed about 1.25 tonnes. He was the best bull in the UK for estimated breeding values—or certainly one of the best. I am not going to cry or anything, but it is upsetting. I lent my bull to a friend who is serving abroad with the Army. His neighbours got TB and it soon spread to my friend’s herd. He could not have artificially inseminated his cattle, because he was not here. Unfortunately, the TB spread to my bull. The Government rightly insist that any animal coming back to a farm from another should be tested, so I insisted that before my bull left he be tested. He failed. I think he is still alive, but he will not be for much longer. It is really upsetting. That was the first time it happened to me.

When we talk about our pets, it is helpful to recognise that as owners we have a responsibility to our animals. If they get a fatal disease—which tuberculosis certainly is—we have to do the right thing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley said, no animal should have a “slow, painful death”, be it a cow, badger, deer or sheep. We must do the right thing by our pets, whatever they are. The right thing is to put them out of their misery before they suffer. I am sure the hon. Member for Weaver Vale would do the same if his badger were ill with an incurable, fatal disease.

In this debate, the emotions escape from the realities. Every year, around 30,000 cattle and about 24,000 badgers are culled in the high-risk, high-infection areas. Last year, 28,000 cattle were culled, of which 1,400 were in Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The last Labour Government were reluctant to use gassing, but recognised that sick creatures need to be put down, out of their misery, and that the spread of TB could not be halted without some form of culling. Shooting by qualified marksmen was deemed by the last Government to be the most humane option. The alternative was gassing, and I do not think that anybody would like us to go there. I support the Government’s 25-year eradication strategy and their goal to be free of TB by 2038, but I would like it to be sooner.

The Government must learn lessons from the covid-19 pandemic. There are valuable lessons to be learned in how we deal with TB. We cannot beat this bacteria. It is not a virus; it does not respond as well to vaccinations as viruses do. We will not beat it unless the R number is below 1. We have all learned this from watching TV the last couple of years. Work is being done to approve the proposed deployable vaccine, with field trials starting soon. That is nice, but we have been talking about this for years. When is this vaccine going to be rolled out? With covid, we did not unlock until the vast majority of the population was protected. Stopping the cull now, before the necessary protections are in place, would be counterproductive, irresponsible and impossible to justify.

The evidence shows that the cull is working. My constituency is in a high-risk area for TB. It received its first licence to cull in 2015, and 80.5% of the land in the county is now covered by licences. That is funded and supported by local farmers—not by DEFRA or the civil service or the taxpayer. It is funded by local farmers who think this is the right thing to do because of the point I made earlier that animals, whether badgers or cattle, must not be allowed to suffer from this disease.

Data shows confirmed breakdowns to be the lowest they have been in the county since 2006. Importantly, fewer animals are being slaughtered—down from a high of 3,505 in 2005 to 1,341 last year. This shows that the cull is working—it is not necessarily helpful to people who love badgers, but it does work. It also stops illegal culling. That is critical for perturbation, which is when badgers are frightened and so leave their traditional areas. If they are infected, they spread that disease to healthy badger populations. The healthy badger populations on the eastern side of the UK need to be protected, just as much as healthy cattle. The evidence from Somerset and Gloucester shows, respectively, falls in disease of 37% and 66%, so this works.

The whole House agrees that TB needs to be eradicated, but the majority of respondents to the Government’s consultation felt that revoking, or reducing the durations of, the badger disease control licence would reduce the effectiveness of the strategy and result in regression in the progress made over the years. The problem is that the people doing the culling are volunteers—local people, not civil servants. They cannot be switched on and off; they cannot be re-employed. When they stop, they will stop, and it took an enormous amount of effort to set up those groups. They are doing a tremendous and extremely difficult job for which they have to be highly trained.

Paragraph 5.6 of the Government’s response states:

“Responses from Natural England (NE) and the British Veterinary Association (BVA) broadly supported the decision to retain culling as an option.”

The people who did not accept it were the conservation groups, and it is worth pointing out that including the cost of policing the cull zones distorts the credibility of some of the sensible points that have been made. We cannot add the costs policing of protesters and then acknowledge that the protesters have got the figures right—it does not seem quite right.

The Government have promised a cattle vaccine, which is not approved. They have monitored the data from the cull area and proved that culling is working, so until other viable alternatives are place, we cannot change the policy without doing untold damage to cattle and badgers. Bovine TB is a serious disease for people, as well as for badgers and cattle, and my fear is that, without proper control, sick badgers will infect the healthy badger population. I do not see why we should allow badgers to die slowly and in agony from consumption—that was the old word for TB, because it consumes your body. As these badgers become ill, they are driven out of their social groups and move into other badgers’ territories, where they will fight. Of course, a scratch from an infected badger can pass on the disease, so it is critical that we keep the badgers in the high-risk areas, away from the healthy badger population.

It is important that we look forward to a time when culling is no longer needed—I look forward to that very much. There will be a time when both badgers and cattle can be vaccinated effectively in a proven campaign to defeat M. bovis, but sadly, today is not that moment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Daniel Zeichner]

I was very pleased to see the right hon. Gentleman walk in because I expected him to make exactly that intervention; we had a similar discussion during the passage of the Agriculture Act 2020. As I am sure he will appreciate, the DIVA test is well advanced. He is right to say that we need to make progress, exactly as the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) said. Science moves; I am, perhaps, more optimistic about the pace of that movement than others.

The petition has a significant number of signatures. It focuses on the killing of badgers rather than the bovine TB issue, which I shall return to. The view expressed is that the shooting of badgers is poorly monitored and inhumane. Anecdotally, one is certainly told of cases where badgers are not shot cleanly and are left with injuries. According to Natural England’s compliance monitoring report for 2020, badgers were shot at but not retrieved in 11.4% of cases, but only one case of a badger being shot at but wounded and lost was reported; presumably some of the rest may not have been found. As with all such figures, the situation is not clear. I suggest that there is some cause for concern.

Can the Minister say why the number of badgers culled through free shooting rather than cage-trapping has changed so dramatically? According to the figures in the very good briefing prepared by the House of Commons Library, those numbers have increased from rough parity in 2014 to around four in five in 2020, creating a greater risk of inhumane culling. What is the reason for that? It seems that that is directly relevant to the question raised by the petitioners.

The wider question is about the future of shooting badgers in general and the continuance of the cull. I remember when the Government finally responded to the Godfray review while we were sitting on the Agriculture Bill Committee. By complete chance, they responded on the very day that Labour happened to have tabled an amendment addressing this very question—it was one of a number of cases when Government statements appeared miraculously on certain days during the course of the Agriculture Bill’s passage through Parliament. What we took from the Government announcement, the headlines and the spin was that the cull was to end. However, what we have seen since has shown that that was not the whole story.

Despite the points made by the hon. Member for North Herefordshire, given that the cull has been going on for 10 years or so, it is worth asking what the Government’s policy on badger culling has done to get this horrible disease under control. One thing we know for sure is that it has killed a lot of badgers—more than 140,000. That is not in doubt. Every year since 2015, the number culled has grown, with more than 38,600 killed in 2020. Last year’s figures are due any time; they are expected to be larger still.

The Badger Trust tells me that in some areas of Gloucestershire and Somerset, badgers are now all but extinct. It also predicts that, by the end of the cull, the number of badgers in England will have been halved. As I reflected on earlier, the sad truth is that some of those badgers will have had unpleasant deaths. There are then the financial costs. Again, the Badger Trust estimates that, between 2013 and 2019, the cost of the cull was around £60 million—although I hear the points made by Government Members.

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

I was thinking about what the hon. Gentleman said about how half the badgers in the UK will have been lost. If he looks at a map of the country, the western side is where the cattle and badgers live, and that is where the infection is. It is not about losing half the badgers in the infected area, but protecting the other half on the eastern side of the country.

[Daniel Zeichner]

I hear the hon. Gentleman’s point. However, he will know, full well, that others will disagree that that is what is actually going on. The worry expressed by the petitioners today, and by many others, is that this looks like a massive cull of an iconic species in our country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jo Churchill]

Indeed. As every Member said, we need to approach this issue in the most humane way possible.

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

I am interested in what the Minister said about 2025. The Labour party would need to win the next election to bring in its policy: it sounds like it will not be able to do that by 2025. She also mentioned East Sussex, which is the perfect place for a test because it is not surrounded by infected badgers, but that is not an alternative to the culling regime. The alternative is the DIVA test and a cattle vaccination. Is she sure that 2025 is the date that we will get that?

[Jo Churchill]

That is the date that I have been directed to. As my hon. Friend knows full well, as do I as somebody who worked in the Department of Health and Social Care during the pandemic, these things have a habit of not always coming through. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby said, something might be deemed unpalatable or it may not have the degree of sensitivity we need, but it is right that we try to ensure that the vaccine for both cattle and badgers is where we are getting to, so we can drive down and deliver on what the Godfray review said—that we should replace culling with vaccinations and disease surveillance.

We are developing several schemes and initiatives to make it simpler for those who are suitably trained to start vaccinating badgers. There is no single measure that will eradicate bovine TB in England by 2038. That is why we have to continue to have a wide range of interventions. We need to strengthen cattle testing and movement controls, which the hon. Member for Cambridge mentioned. We have to improve biosecurity on the farm and when trading, and we need to develop that cattle vaccine, in addition to building our support of badger vaccine. Cattle controls and measures continue to be the foundation stones on which our TB eradication strategy is based.