TB in Cattle and Badgers

Owen Paterson Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson. I congratulate the hon. Member for High Peak (Ruth George) on securing this important debate and the measured manner in which she spoke.

I take issue with the idea that there is a battle between badger welfare and culling. I have told numerous people this, and many of them laugh, but I am probably the only person in this Chamber who has had one pet badger, and I am definitely the only person in the Chamber who has had two pet badgers. I am very pro-badger. I am pro-healthy badgers. Ever since I began working on this, when I was the junior shadow agriculture spokesman, I have set in train, I hope, a series of policies to ensure that we have healthy wildlife living alongside healthy cattle.

There is not a single country in the world that I have visited—whether the problem is white-tailed deer in Michigan, wild feral cattle in Australia, the brushtail possum in New Zealand, or, in particular, the badger in the Republic of Ireland—where there is a reservoir of disease in wildlife that has not been tackled at the same time as it has been tackled in cattle. It is so obvious, and it has worked; when we had a bipartisan approach in the 1960s and 1970s, we got the disease down to 0.01%.

It is absolutely tragic that we threw that away, and it has caused great misery. The hon. Lady was right to highlight the hideous cruelty of shooting a pregnant cow, so that the calf suffocates, which is rarely mentioned. The Badger Trust always shows beautiful black-and-white photographs of badgers, like my dear old badgers—never a revolting picture of a diseased badger in the last stages of TB, covered in lesions, driven out of the sett, covered in bites and dying a horrible, long, lingering death.

There is also a human element. My hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) mentioned the mental trauma of being tested—the sheer trauma for farmers, the tension, the nightmare of waiting to see whether they will fail the test—and the physical danger. I am afraid that one of my constituents was killed while doing a TB test, when a young bull threw his head up and smashed my constituent against the crush.

All that is completely unnecessary if we can get rid of the disease in cattle and in wildlife, but we have to address both together. It is not either/or. We cannot go on with the expense: we are spending £1 billion on a disease that has been eradicated in other countries. The Germans take out 70,000 badgers a year. We can look at what New Zealand has done on the brushtail possum. My question is this: can we please acknowledge that this is working?

I was in charge of introducing the first two trial culls. We had intense saboteur activity, with hunt saboteurs coming from all over the United Kingdom, some of them with convictions for violent offences. I pay tribute to the farmers who, with incredible bravery, got those first culls going in Somerset and Gloucestershire. The Downs report shows a reduction of 66% in the cull area in Gloucestershire, where we had intense activity—we had saboteurs camping out on badger setts—and 36% in Somerset, where I went to a public meeting about 18 months ago to discuss what could be done on floods, and I had people coming up to me almost in tears, saying, “Mr Paterson, I just want to say thank you. We’d been closed up since my grandfather—for 40 years we’d been closed up. We’ve gone clear.”

My last point is to ask whether we can look at the basic reproduction number of this disease. Can we look at the level where the disease peters out, when we get the badger population low enough to have a healthy population? I would like the Minister to look at the basic reproductive ratio, R₀, which represents the number of cases that one case generates on average over the course of its infectious period, in an otherwise uninfected population. Could we make it the target of our policy to get the disease down to a level where it is not sustainable in the wildlife population and end this hideous trauma for wildlife, cattle and our farmers?

--- Later in debate ---

[George Eustice]

We have a number of approaches. We do some roadkill surveillance in areas to identify where there is disease. Also, whenever we have a breakdown on a farm, an assessment is carried out by APHA vets to try to establish the most likely cause of that breakdown. So there are breakdown epidemiological reports.

The hon. Lady also raised an issue about herd size. In addition to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin), the fact of the matter is that it is an epidemiological reality that the more cattle there are in a herd, the more interfaces there are with the environment and the more likely they are to pick up infection. I remember that some years ago our chief scientist in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs got very excited and thought that those with small herds must be doing something right. However, we concluded that it is simply a mathematical fact that a small herd has fewer interfaces with the badger population and therefore has a lower propensity to have a breakdown.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) raised an important issue about slurry. I can tell her that I have had meetings with Dick Sibley and that he has attended roundtable discussions we have had on this issue. However, as long ago as 2015 we launched a biosecurity plan that included slurry management best practice guidance, so this is an issue that we recognise and that we try to improve. The evidence is a little mixed, because the reality is that if we are testing and removing cattle, we would tend to remove them before the disease shows up in slurry, unless the test is ineffective and is missing those cattle. So this is an area that we are keen to look at further and, as I have said, we are in dialogue with Dick Sibley on some of these matters.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire made a point about diagnostic tests. He is absolutely right—we are now allowing the use of unvalidated tests and, again, Dick Sibley is using one of those tests. We have also dramatically increased our deployment of the more sensitive interferon gamma test.

My right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire made an important point about epidemiology and, crucially, how we get daughter infection below one, so that we can put this disease into permanent retreat. The R₀—the reproductive number that he mentioned—is notoriously difficult to calculate, but we have a track record in our own history of taking this disease from a very high prevalence in the 1930s down to zero in the 1980s. So there is a point whereby, if we keep going, we can put this disease into permanent retreat.

[Mr Paterson]

rose—

[George Eustice]

I will take a brief intervention and then I will conclude.

[Mr Paterson]

I will make a point briefly. Will the Government look at evidence from other countries, particularly Ireland, where the evidence is quite contrary to what the SNP spokesperson—the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock)—said, in that there is no intention of eliminating a species? This process is about getting the population per kilometre down to a level whereby the disease simply cannot reproduce itself, and then we will end up with a completely stable, healthy badger population, and this whole nightmare will go away.

[George Eustice]

We will look at that evidence, but this is a difficult issue. My right hon. Friend is right that our aim, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby pointed out, is to get the badger population down by 70% in the four years of the cull; it is not our intention at all to eradicate the badger population. This is an issue that we will continue to look at because, as we plot how to get from where we are now to being officially TB-free by 2038, it is clearly an important issue.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby also pointed out some of the challenges of vaccinating badgers and the further challenge that we have had with an oral vaccination. However, if we can use such a vaccination, there are also some advantages. It provides herd immunity and there is some evidence that cubs born in badger populations that have been vaccinated have a higher degree of resistance to the disease than other badgers.

Finally, the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith asked about Scotland. The approach taken in Scotland is very similar to the approach that we take in a low-risk area elsewhere. Scotland does not have a large badger population and nor does it have a presence of the disease in the badger population, which is in common with the north of England. Therefore, the nature of the challenge in Scotland is very different from that elsewhere.

The badger population has more than doubled in this country over the last 20 or so years. In the cull areas, which we are targeting because the disease is rife there, we simply look to reduce the badger population by 70% for the duration of the cull.