Badger Culls (Assessment)

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I draw hon. Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a farmer, although I do not keep any stock so I have no financial interest in this debate.

We have again found ourselves having a debate about an incredibly important scientific issue before the scientific evidence has been fully analysed and published by the Minister’s Department. The debate is premature and speculative and will be incompletely informed. The second year of the culls ended on 20 October, and we have not yet seen the results of either of the trials in Somerset or Gloucestershire, so how can we have a reasoned and fully informed debate assessing those trials? I suspect that the debate will be centred on rumour and uninformed results.

[Chris Williamson]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman once only.

[Chris Williamson]

Will the hon. Gentleman comment on the Government’s decision to disband the independent expert panel? Surely it would have provided the comfort blanket of impartial evidence.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The Government have said that that they will fully audit the results. When they are fully audited and analysed and properly published, I have no doubt that the hon. Gentleman and others will want to examine them in great detail and return to the House with comments.

One point of fact is the dreadful disease that bovine TB is and the pain it causes to badgers, cattle and farmers. Significant attention has been given to the relatively small number of badgers being culled in these trials, but less attention is given to the 314,000 cattle that have been slaughtered in the last 10 years at a cost of £500 million to taxpayers. Indices of TB in cattle show that it increased ninefold between 1997 and 2010 in England, which now has the highest incidence of TB in the whole of Europe. The cost will rise to more than £1 billion over the next decade if nothing is done to eradicate TB from our communities.

It is important to remember that culling is simply one aspect of the Government’s comprehensive strategy to eradicate TB within 25 years. I hope that no one speaking in the debate will disapprove of that.

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I will give way to my hon. Friend once.

[Martin Horwood]

My neighbour and hon. Friend and I share a concern for Gloucestershire farmers, and I am sure we share the ultimate aim of seeing both cattle and badger populations healthy and TB-free. Does he agree that preliminary data that seem to be emerging in the press, and which the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) referred to, suggest that less than half the target number of badgers were killed in Gloucestershire this time? If those data are correct, we may worsen the risk to Gloucestershire cattle because of the perturbation effect.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

That is speculation, but even if it proves to be true, we will need to have a debate over what the target numbers were, and I shall come on to that later in my speech. We will begin after this second year, and certainly in the third year, to be able to analyse some of the results and see what is already known through some anecdotal evidence, which is that some farms that have had TB reactors for six or eight years have, this year, for the first year in those six or eight years, had no reactors. That may be anecdotal evidence, but it begins to point to the fact that the culls are having a beneficial effect.

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that during the course of the randomised badger culling trial there were 472 new confirmed breakdowns to TB in the proactive culling areas? Would he therefore argue that the culls did not work in those instances?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I have great respect for the hon. Lady, but I think she is drawing a false analogy, because the numbers removed in the randomised badger culling trial per square kilometre were considerably lower than the numbers removed per square kilometre in either of these two trials. Let us give the trials a chance—[Interruption]—instead of chuntering about it. These trials are trials—they are exactly that. What we need to do is evaluate the science and see whether it is in favour of the trials or not. I think that would be a constructive way forward.

The cost will rise to £1 billion over the next decade if nothing is done to eradicate TB from our communities. I ask the hon. Lady what her party’s policy is going to be: is she just going to let this disease continue to spiral out of control? Does she want our farmers to continue to slaughter cattle, and does she want to continue to have to pay more taxpayers’ money in compensation? Her public statements so far—I am happy to let her intervene if I am wrong—suggest that she would discontinue the trials, so we will have gone through all the pain, yet we will not have the scientific evidence to be able to evaluate them properly.

[Maria Eagle]

In my view, there is no point in going ahead with a policy that has been shown not to work, as is the case with this one.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

With great respect to the hon. Lady, it is too early to say. If she will not begin to take some of the anecdotal evidence of people on the ground who have to make their living from farming with cattle, I do not know what else I can say to her. Let us let these trials go ahead and evaluate them. Instead of setting our face against them, let us give them time and see if they work, and then let us hope that we can begin to eradicate this dreadful disease. I repeat what I have just said: this is part of an overall policy to eradicate TB in this country in 25 years. I will allow the hon. Lady to intervene again on me—does she agree with that aim or not?

[Maria Eagle]

Of course I agree with eradicating TB, but I do not see how one does that by pursuing a policy that does not work.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Well, that is the hon. Lady’s prejudiced view. She does not know yet whether it will work, because this is a four-year trial.

[Roger Williams]

The hon. Gentleman draws our attention to the public cost of this illness, but the cull that is now taking place is actually at the farmers’ expense. Does he agree that if there is no improvement or if, in fact, it makes things worse, farmers will not be willing to pay for something that acts against their interests?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am extremely grateful for that intervention. The hon. Gentleman must have been reading my notes, because I make that point very well. As he said, these two trials are entirely at the farmers’ expense, and there would be very little cost in policing them were it not for the activity of the protesters. If we set the cost of culling against the cost of what the farmers are providing, there is no doubt about it: this cull is very considerably cheaper than the cost of vaccination, which is not yet proved to be working either. I would be interested to know, when the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) speaks, whether she thinks vaccination is working in Wales.

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

The reality is that the Labour Government in Wales fully recognise that they cannot measure the impact of vaccination yet, and what reduction there is of bovine TB in Wales is just the same outside the vaccination area as it is inside, so the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) can point to no evidence that the alternative Labour method is working in Wales.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I had better make some rapid progress, Mr Caton, or else you will call me to order for not making my six-minute deadline. Let me make one or two brief points.

As I said, it is welcome that vaccination is taking place in certain parts of the country to try to prevent the further spread of this awful disease, but the simple fact is that vaccination does not work for an already infected badger. If it does not work, that infected badger, by going to the bottom of its sett, continues to infect the whole of that sett. It also must be remembered that vaccination generally works better on young badgers. Young badgers do not emerge from their sett for six months or so, and therefore do not get vaccinated for that first vital six-month period of their life when they are likely to be infected by the infected badgers. The other point to remember about vaccination is that badgers have to be vaccinated every year for five years before it is effective.

I have referred to some anecdotal evidence about how the trials have worked, but I can also give the House some actual evidence of where vaccinating is not working. On the Killerton estate in North Devon, where TB is a huge problem, the National Trust has been vaccinating badgers at an annual cost of £45,000 for the past four years, and there have recently been as many as six additional herd breakdowns due to TB, which seems to show that vaccinating alone is not the solution.

Many people cite vaccination in Wales as an example, as my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) mentioned, but that is not the whole story. Although TB has been reduced in Wales, the current vaccination programme is only being conducted in 1% of the country and it is only in its second year. It is therefore difficult to see how the Welsh experiment—as he said, the Labour party in Wales does not think it is working—has led to a 25% reduction across the whole of Wales, where other factors must be at play.

Therefore, culling must be part of the solution. No less than the president of the British Veterinary Association has said:

“Badger culling is a necessary part of a comprehensive bovine TB eradication strategy”.

I really hope that the Labour party will think carefully about what one of our foremost experts in the country said about that. Vets are the very people who want to see a humane strategy for tackling this disease, because they of all people know what suffering the disease causes to badgers.

Nobody wants to see animals culled. I am an animal lover. Farmers are animal lovers. This is not an enjoyable solution, but it is a necessary one. Clear evidence tells us that no country in the world has got its TB problem under control without removing it in the reservoir of the wildlife. We have seen that in Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, all of which are now virtually BTB-free.

On top of that, evidence also tells us that every time there has been a culling programme in this country—any of the six previous trials, including the Krebs trials— there has been a reduction in bovine TB. I accept that in some of the Krebs trials the reduction was relatively small, but that was related to the number of badgers that were taken out. The higher the number of badgers in an area that are taken out, the higher the reduction in BTB, and that, I think, has been fairly well scientifically proven.

In conclusion—because I think I have exceeded your patience and my allotted time, Mr Caton—it is too early to tell whether the culls have been successful. Anecdotal evidence tells us that they are beginning to have some success. Let us hope, for the sake of the farmers who are affected by this dreadful disease and the cattle that will have to be culled, that they are having some effect. The culls will be rolled out only in the very worst areas of BTB. I am all in favour of ring vaccination around those really bad areas, but let us see it as part of a comprehensive strategy. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister and the Government for being steadfast in their desire to eliminate this dreadful disease.