Badger Cull

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. I know that you are an assiduous reader of Hansard, Mr Speaker, and you probably remember every one of my 600 parliamentary questions on this issue, one of which revealed that, as my hon. Friend suggested, 56% of the traps were tampered with during the Krebs trials and 14% were actually stolen. That is one of the lessons we are learning from the trials—there might be a more efficient and humane manner of removing badgers.

Anyone who has looked closely at this issue will see that a comprehensive cattle testing programme, combined with restrictions on cattle movements, remains the foundation of our policy. Restrictions have been further strengthened over the past year to reduce the chance of disease spreading from cattle. In January, we introduced a new surveillance testing regime and stricter cattle movement controls, which means that we will be testing more cattle annually and working hard to get in front of the disease, to protect those parts of the country where bovine TB is not a major problem. We will continue to maintain the significant effort we have put into enhancing cattle controls and combating cattle-to-cattle transmission.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Paterson]

Other Members want to get speak, so, if I may, I will push on a bit further.

Vaccination is another tool that we will continue to invest in—we are spending £15.5 million on research and development in this Parliament—one that I know many hon. Members would like to see deployed. Some £43 million has been invested since 1994 in this vital work, to which the shadow Secretary of State alluded. We, too, would like to deploy it more widely, but I am afraid that we are just not there yet in terms of either development or practicality, as has been clearly described in this morning’s Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report.

Oral cattle and badger vaccines will, I hope, prove viable, but they will not be ready to deploy for years, and we cannot wait while the disease puts more livestock farms out of business and threatens the sustainability of the industry. In January, the Minister of State and I met the EU Health and Consumer Policy Commissioner, Tonio Borg, to discuss our progress towards a cattle vaccine. He acknowledged that we have done more than any other country to take this work forward, but confirmed that the implementation of a legal and validated cattle vaccine is still at least 10 years away.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

As a west country MP, I can tell the House that there is widespread opposition in the west country, in Gloucestershire and in Somerset to this badger cull going ahead. I have had a huge number of e-mails and I also know that there is a diverse, vocal and determined coalition of groups, ranging from non-governmental organisations and environmental charities to people involved in farming and ordinary members of the public.

[Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)]

rose—

[Kerry McCarthy]

I will not give way, because I only have six minutes and the hon. Gentleman will get his chance to speak.

There has been very vocal opposition and public meetings, and a lot of lobbying. I am sure that the Minister of State, who is the Farming Minister and is also a west country MP, is well aware of that. I invite the Secretary of State to come down to those areas and meet some of the people who have been involved in the campaign so far.

I want to focus on a few issues, the first of which concerns estimating badger populations. As has already been mentioned, the persistent difficulty of knowing how many badgers are in the cull areas has not been satisfactorily resolved and could still make the culls unworkable. We know from the randomised badger culling trial that the only circumstances in which the spread of the disease can be slowed slightly—and even that reduction was only by 16% over nine years—would be if more than 70% of the badgers in an area were eradicated. If the reduction were any less than that, the spread of TB to cattle could increase.

The difficulty of knowing how many badgers there are in an area has been raised many times, including by Lord Krebs and others. Last year, the Government delayed plans to cull badgers as they could not work out how many badgers there were in the cull areas. I understand that according to the Government’s own figures, farmers in Gloucestershire must kill between 2,856 and 2,932 badgers, but according to Professor Rosie Woodroffe at the Zoological Society of London, the estimate of the population ranges much more widely, from 2,657 to 4,079, and there is a 40% chance that the figure for the real population lies outside that range. Professor Woodroffe has concluded that if the real population is below the minimum cull target of 2,856, farmers could kill every badger in the area, breaking the strict condition of the licence that forbids local extinctions while simultaneously failing to kill enough badgers to satisfy the terms of the same licence. The situation is similar in Somerset.

I would be interested to know from the Minister whether the estimates of the number of badgers in the area factor in the number of badgers killed illegally by farmers. A study from the universities of Bangor, Kent and Kingston this year found that approximately one in 10 livestock farmers in Wales had illegally killed a badger within the previous 12 months. In Gloucestershire, there have been press reports of allegations that at the Forthampton estate, an area of 3,000 acres near Tewkesbury that will be one of the main staging points for the cull, badger setts have been illegally filled in. If those allegations prove to be true, the estate may have to withdraw from the cull, which would affect the number of badgers killed and therefore the effectiveness of the cull, as I have explained.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) mentioned the humaneness of the killing. The Humane Society International UK recently obtained from a freedom of information request the heavily redacted document that will be used to monitor the humaneness of the badger cull. I would like to take up the concerns voiced by the society. Will the Minister make public how wounded animals that retreat underground will be included in the humaneness assessment? That is not mentioned in the document. The document admits that no shooter will have prior experience of shooting badgers. My office spoke to Pauline Kidner from the Secret World wildlife rescue, which is based in Somerset and has worked with badgers for many years. She said that badgers are not an easy animal to shoot, and when injured will always go back to their sett. So free shooting is likely to result in a slower death as a result of secondary infections and starvation from reduced mobility, and that will prolong the pain and distress suffered by badgers.

As the Secretary of State will be well aware, Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust has been involved in looking at the bovine TB issue for over 30 years, and in 2011 was the first non-governmental organisation in England to launch a badger vaccination programme on seven of its nature reserves. I would be interested to know what assessment the Government have made of that vaccination programme so far.

The chief executive of the trust says:

“Bovine TB has had a devastating impact on farmers in Gloucestershire and unfortunately there is no single, cheap or effective fix.”

He goes on to say that the Government have “overlooked” the benefits of a sustained programme of vaccination, and that:

“Vaccinating badgers could play a much larger role in controlling bovine TB while a cattle vaccine is developed and licensed.”

[Anas Sarwar]

Scientific research done by Chambers et al in 2010 showed that adequate vaccination could reduce incidence by up to 73%, whereas a cull would only reduce incidence by between 12% and 16%. So I am not sure that the Government have got the balance right on this.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Yes. It is a huge difference, and there is a debate to be had about the cost of vaccination, which I think is the Government’s main objection to it. I do not think it is about effectiveness; I think they are cost-driven. In the vaccination programme that is operated in Somerset by Secret World wildlife rescue, the cost of vaccination is much lower because the programme is volunteer-led. I do not know whether the Minister has factored that into his calculations.

The chief executive of Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust says:

“We’re not taking part in the cull on any of our 60 nature reserves in Gloucestershire because we believe the science demonstrates it won’t be very effective in controlling the disease and could even make things worse.”

The Minister does not seem to be listening to what I am saying now, but I—[Interruption.] Well, the Farming Minister is listening; I thank him for his politeness. The Secretary of State does not seem to be paying much attention to me. He needs to come down to Somerset. He needs to come down to Gloucestershire. I would urge him to do it now that the cull has started—not the Farming Minister, the Secretary of State. [Interruption.] Well, I would urge him to come again, and talk to people about their concern that people will be roaming their areas with shotguns at night. They are not being told where those people are. They do not know whether they can go camping in areas where they used to go camping. There is real public concern, and real public opposition to the cull. I do not think that the Minister is taking that seriously.