Badger Culling

Mike Amesbury Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve once again under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone, and to speak in a debate on this important topic, secured by petition. I also declare an interest, because I have sponsored a badger. I named it Dennis, after the former hon. Member for Bolsover, who was an excellent help to me when I first arrived in this place. He gave me some tips about its peculiarities and how to try to get on top of it and do my best by my constituents. He was respected across the House.

It is a shame that we are not allowed to bring props into Westminster Hall, because alongside my sponsorship of Dennis I have received my very own personal fluffy Dennis, who now watches over my constituency office while I am here down in London. I will post a picture of Dennis at some stage today. He is a kind beast of Cheshire and a law unto himself at times, and he is passionate about scurrying around Cheshire. People will see a picture of him in his natural habitat.

I sponsored Dennis after visiting the Cheshire badger vaccination programme—or CBVP for short—a volunteer group that, after receiving professional vaccination training, works with landowners and farmers to map locations of badgers and trap them over a 10-day process. It is labour-intensive and includes some very early mornings—my office manager had the pleasure of going on one—but it means healthy badgers, healthy cattle, which is vital, and humans happy in the knowledge that they are avoiding badger culling in favour of a more humane approach.

Badgers, unfortunately, do not respond well to national public health campaigns to get them vaccinated. We do not see them marching down to their local vaccination centre; the CBVP informs me that peanuts placed in traps works much better. The CBVP does excellent work, working together with farmers and landowners to protect livestock and create a long-lasting, stable population of TB-resistant badgers in the Cheshire area. Bovine TB is an incredibly difficult disease to counter, as the hon. Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) mentioned, and we lose tens of thousands of cattle to it every year.

I represent a semi-rural constituency in Weaver Vale, with many farmers as well as many wildlife lovers, and I am keen that we should work hard to find a solution that protects cattle, livelihoods and local ecosystems, as well as protecting wildlife welfare. We also need to be mindful that the evidence points towards direct transmission from badgers to cattle making up only a minority of transmissions—I think the hon. Member said about a quarter. Ensuring that cattle are vaccinated, as well as healthy, will ensure that we rid the countryside of TB. Not only does culling not respect animal welfare, but it disturbs the overall composition of badger communities, meaning that badgers are likely to move more frequently and over longer distances, which risks higher disease transmission between badgers and cattle.

We need to take into account the cost of culling, which was £6 million in 2020 alone. The Derbyshire badger vaccination programme estimated that killing a badger costs £1,000, compared with £82 for vaccinating each badger that they trap. It is clear from the amount of support that the Cheshire volunteers receive, as well as the number of constituents who have contacted me and other hon. Members who are in the Chamber, that there is support for the badger vaccination programme, and more than half the public oppose culling. There are even deeper concerns, particularly about the shooting of badgers. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us specifically how the Department plans not only to phase out culling quickly, but to stop the use of culling licences altogether.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Jo Churchill)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) for bringing forward the debate, and I thank all the right hon. and hon. Members who took part in it. We have aptly demonstrated how difficult this issue is, and I gently say that we cannot have a solution to a problem until that solution is available.

Our beef and dairy industries contribute billions of pounds to the UK economy, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) laid out. We want them to continue to do so, and have to ensure that they can—particularly as the UK enters a new trading relationship with the world. As arguably one of the most pressing animal health problems in the UK today, bovine TB represents a constant threat to that success. We heard about the difficulty that we have here.

I appreciate both sides of the argument, as the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) did when he laid out the challenge. Bovine TB continues to be both emotive and controversial, but what is not controversial is that badgers are implicated in the spread and persistence of bovine TB and in its particular prevalence in certain areas of the country, such as the south-west. We have set out how we are going to deal with that.

I would agree with much of what has been said. Badger culling has led to a significant reduction in the disease, but, as the Godfray review laid out, and as I think every single Member has said—both those who farm animals and those who represent those who farm animals—nobody wants to see the cull carry on longer than necessary. However, we need the right tools in the toolbox to ensure that we can deal with the situation, because nobody wants to see the disease take hold, particularly in areas with animals that not only add to our economy, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Sir Bill Wiggin) laid out so poignantly, are valued members of the family as well.

One of the most poignant things I ever did in this place was to watch a farmer who had had his entire herd destroyed. He had his arm around his 10-year-old and he wept because his father had entrusted the farm to him, and he no longer had the farm to pass on to his son. We need to protect the badger and the farmer, and we need to make sure that we have the tools available to do so.

Every year since the first badger cull in 2013, Natural England has closely monitored and reported on the accuracy of shooting activities through direct observations in the field. Annually, we disclose those details. I am very sorry that the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) doubts that, but we need to be transparent, and shooting activities are directly observed. We know that the cull has reduced bovine TB, as demonstrated by the publication of independent, rigorous research and past studies.

National statistics show how a holistic TB eradication strategy is working, but we do not want to see a protected wildlife species culled for longer than necessary, so in 2021 we started phasing it out. The next stage of the bovine TV strategy will include replacing culling with badger vaccination and disease surveillance. My hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire said, “When?” Well, in 2021, DEFRA awarded funding of £2.27 million for a five-year badger vaccination programme in the TB-endemic area of east Sussex. The project features vaccination by the farming community, because, as has been pointed out, they are the people who know both the badger community and their herds. They are working on the frontline to help develop and refine future developments of the models so that we can vaccinate on a large scale to protect badgers, because that is where we want to get to.

[Mike Amesbury]

On that point, in Cheshire it is farmers, landowners, volunteers and the general public who support vaccination. It is exactly right that that important mix has to be behind the programme.

[Jo Churchill]

The hon. Gentleman is right. The Government have invested over £40 million in vaccines and tests. As set out in the Godfray review—again, this is in answer to my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire—our aim is to have a deployable cattle vaccine by 2025. Field trials began last year. My right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Sir Robert Goodwill) mentioned that the challenge is having the sensitivity to make sure that we deal with the matter properly.