Bovine Tuberculosis Control and Badger Culling

Cat Eccles Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Cat Eccles (Stourbridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stuart, and a privilege to speak in this important debate. I pay tribute to those who signed the petition, and to the campaigners, experts and local groups who continue to fight for evidence-based policy on bovine tuberculosis and badger culling.

I do not support the continuation of the badger cull. The evidence on whether it works is at best deeply flawed and at worst deliberately ignored. In June this year, Sir Brian May and vet Dick Sibley from the Save Me Trust visited Parliament to highlight the science. They showed us—as many independent scientists have—that the link between badgers and the spread of bovine TB has been overstated and misrepresented for years. Crucial facts often get ignored. The Government themselves recognised in a previous debate that slurry spreading is a major cause of bovine TB transmission.

Yet instead of tackling that problem head-on, we persist with killing badgers. It has been more than a decade since general testing of all animals was undertaken. The last large-scale testing found that sheep, deer and alpacas showed far higher incidence of bovine TB than badgers, with sheep at about 28%, deer at 22% and alpacas topping the list, at 30%. Badgers, however, came in at only around 7%. That really matters. Even in areas with no badgers present, bovine TB persists, yet we continue to scapegoat this single species.

The science also tells us that badgers become fully infectious with tuberculosis only after about five years, but the average lifespan of a badger in the wild is three to four years. Those badgers that are killed are often too young to have developed TB. It simply does not add up. Fewer than one in 10 badgers tests positive for TB. As one campaigner noted to me, TB is primarily spread by aerosol. So I ask colleagues in more rural constituencies, when was the last time they saw a badger sneeze on a cow?

The economics of the policy are just as indefensible. Policing the cull costs over £1 million per zone. The official badger cull trials cost millions, but the results were then ignored. Meanwhile, alternative methods, such as the Gatcombe strategy or improved skin testing, offer more effective, humane and cost-effective options.

Let us not overlook the perverse incentives in the current system. Farmers receive far more in compensation for TB-affected cattle than they would receive from selling the animals at market. That does not drive good practice, and nor does it support the long-term health of the herd. A fairer and more robust approach would be regular MOT-style health checks for farms.

Stronger badger culling is not the answer. It is scientifically unsound, economically wasteful and morally wrong. We should invest in real solutions such as biosecurity, testing, farm management and ending practices such as slurry spreading on grazing fields. I am pleased the Government are working towards a new national strategy to bring down bovine TB, and I am proud to be part of a party that has a manifesto pledge to end the badger cull by the end of this Parliament. Although the focus on non-lethal culls for badgers is a definite improvement to the status quo, I urge the new strategy to take into account new science and evidence that calls into question the link between badgers and livestock.

It is time that we stopped this failed and cruel policy, and focused instead on tackling bovine tuberculosis at its true sources. Let us not wait until the end of this Parliament to do the right thing: let us end this barbaric practice now.