Badger Cull

Caroline Spelman Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I am in touch with farmers all the time, and I have had a meeting with the National Farmers Union. I have met farmers in Derbyshire and, indeed, all over the country.

The wildlife trusts, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the National Trust are all vaccinating badgers on their land. The Zoological Society of London and the wildlife trusts are pushing for volunteer involvement in badger vaccination, which would greatly reduce the costs. According to a report published today by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, for which I pay tribute to the Committee and its Chair, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh):

“The vaccine has been available for 3 years but the government should now produce a clear strategy for using it.”

That is a pretty damning indictment of what the Government have been doing for the past three years. As a result of Labour’s investment, we now have a cattle TB vaccine and a DIVA test to differentiate infected and vaccinated cows.

The Select Committee report is critical of the Government’s approach to cattle vaccination. It says that the debate on cattle vaccination is unclear, and that

“the government must accept a great deal of the blame for this”.

It says:

“The quality and accuracy of the information that Defra has put into the public domain has been insufficient and inadequate.”

The Government have delayed field trials of the cattle vaccine after misinterpreting EU rules, and they must now undertake those trials as soon as possible.

I must make it clear, however, that neither a vaccine for badgers nor a vaccine for cattle will work on its own. We need a coherent policy framework to tackle all aspects of this complex disease. The Independent Scientific Group has suggested several key principles that could form the basis of such a framework. Page 175 of its report states that

“the movement of TB infected cattle...poses the greatest threat to the disease security of uninfected farms and particularly so in the case of farms in low disease risk areas”.

According to the report, cattle movements

“are also likely to make a significant contribution to the local spread of infection in high risk areas.”

Page after page of the report lists different control strategies for low-risk and high-risk areas, some of which were implemented by the last Government and some of which are now being adopted by the present Government.

We welcome, for instance, the risk-based trading strategy on which the Government have embarked. There must be transparency in the marketplace to prevent farmers from unknowingly importing infected cows into their herds. However, the Government have not investigated, for example, the 40% of farms in high-risk areas in the south-west that have consistently avoided bovine TB. What are those farmers doing to protect their farms? How are they trading, what is their biosecurity, and what are their husbandry practices? Can they be replicated? What can we learn? Until we get to the bottom of that, we will not find a solution.

[Mrs Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)]

As I think the hon. Lady is beginning to make clearer, it is not a case of either vaccinating or culling. The Government have introduced a package of measures, including security measures. At the heart of the vaccination question, however, is the challenge of how to persuade 26 other European Union member states to import the meat from vaccinated cattle when there are questions to be answered about the efficacy of the BCG vaccine and the efficacy of the skin test.