Badger Cull

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I remind hon. Members that there is a six-minute limit on speeches—[Interruption.] It is not a shame; we just want to get everybody in.

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[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We do not need enticement from the Front Bench. The Secretary of State does not need to get angry, as he will be coming back later, no doubt. Mr Wiggin, we do not need any extra help from you.

[Nia Griffith]

The European Commission has set out an indicative 10-year timetable for the cattle BCG vaccine and DIVA test to be available for use, but as the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, said, the timetable is precisely that: indicative. I ask the Government to put every effort into further research into the steps necessary to make the vaccine and the test both effective and usable in the international context. That is the way to make sure the farmer is in control, which is the real way to deal with the problem.

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[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I will have to drop the time limit on speeches to five minutes. [Interruption.] It is no use tutting. It is either that or I will have to knock someone off the list. With fewer interventions everyone might just have a chance to speak, so it is up to everybody to show some self-restraint.

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[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

The Opposition have called Members to the House for this debate, and the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Front-Bench team have proposed the motion:

“That this House believes the badger cull should not go ahead.”

This is the biggest animal health crisis is Britain and it is costing £1 billion, with 28,000 cattle slaughtered last year—and the Opposition have no policy, no alternative. Do they have a feasible alternative that they would like to put forward?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I have suggested short interventions, and if Members want to pass judgment on others, it would be better if they had been here at the beginning.

[Chris Williamson]

If the hon. Gentleman had been in his place and listened to my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield, he would have heard her set out the alternatives. There are alternatives, and that is the point that we are making. The Government are taking the wrong course of action. It is not just me saying that as a trustee of the League Against Cruel Sports; this is the scientific evidence. Let me quote some of the scientific evidence for the record.

Lord Krebs, who chaired a review team that originated the idea of the RBCT, said on 12 October 2012 on the “Today” programme:

“The scientific case is as clear as it can be: this cull is not the answer to TB in cattle. I have not found any scientists who are experts in population biology or the distribution of infectious disease in wildlife who think that culling is a good idea. People seem to have cherry-picked certain results to try and get the argument they want.”

Lord Robert May, a former Government chief scientist and president of the Royal Society, said:

“It’s very clear to me that the government’s policy does not make sense.”

He added:

“I have no sympathy with the decision. They are transmuting evidence-based policy into policy-based evidence.”

The recently retired Government chief scientist, Professor Sir John Beddington, has also refused to back the cull.

A letter published in The Observer on 14 October 2012 and signed by more than 30 scientists, including Professor John Bourne, former chairman of the ISG, Professor Sir Patrick Bateson, president of the Zoological Society of London, Professor Sir John Lawton, former chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, Dr Chris Cheeseman, formerly of the Food and Environment Research Agency, Professor Denis Mollison, former independent scientific auditor to the RBCT, and Professor Richard Kock of the Royal Veterinary College, states:

“the complexities of TB transmission mean that licensed culling risks increasing cattle TB rather than reducing it”.

The letter ends:

“culling badgers as planned is very unlikely to contribute to TB eradication.”

The Government are taking the wrong course of action. Government Members have spoken as though they were somehow the friends of the farmer, but they will make matters worse and cause incredible suffering to the badger population. They are enraging the vast majority of the British public and they are wasting police money. They have cut the police service to the bone and yet they want the police to waste resources policing the culls—estimated at about £2 million per cull. This is absolutely bonkers. It is criminal and it should stop.

I urge the Secretary of State, having heard the cogent argument put forward by my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State, to pause for a moment, to think what he is doing, to consider her words, to consider the scientific evidence, to think again and to take a different course of action.

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[Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is speaking with great knowledge. He mentioned the importance of cattle movement control. Does he accept that the shift of bovine TB to remote areas is a result of—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. It is up to Members speaking whether they give way or not, but those intervening, from whatever side of the House, should show self-restraint and make their interventions short. I call Neil Parish, who I presume has nearly ended.

[Neil Parish]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will not take any more interventions. I think that the hon. Lady was asking whether cattle spread disease to areas that were uninfected. Yes, they did to a degree. We have to tackle the disease in the hot-spot areas—where we have to cull—to make sure that cattle are not infected and that there is no chance of their being moved. We have to use every weapon available.

The key thing is what happened in the Republic of Ireland. While the number of cases of TB in Northern Ireland doubled, the number in the Republic halved over the same period. What did the Irish do? They culled their badgers. We have to be sure that we do all the relevant things.

Many of us are countrymen and countrywomen who would love to have the badger around. However, we want them to be healthy. We cannot leave diseased badgers in the field, to infect cattle and each other. Once we have reduced the number of badgers in those red-hot areas of TB, we will see a much healthier badger population. I also believe that we will not see as many badgers trying to mix with the cattle; there will not be the pressure on feed, which is paramount. We are not talking about a national cull of badgers. Our aim is not to exterminate badgers, but to cure cattle and badgers of TB and make sure that we have healthy food and livestock for our future.

The farming community feels despair because of the years of inaction from the previous Government. The community is not divided as the shadow Secretary of State tried to claim earlier; it is very much united by the fact that the disease has to be eradicated. That can be done by using all the methods, including a cull.

Finally, I go back to the Republic of Ireland, where statistics show that herds are half as likely to be reinfected with TB in areas where badgers have been culled. The beauty of the system there is that it involves badgers to cattle and cattle to badgers. Farming practices in the Republic are very much the same as those in Northern Ireland, which shows that a controlled cull of infected badgers will work. The farming community is behind the cull and I believe that, when it is explained, the public will also understand that the issue is about disease control and healthy cattle and wildlife.