TB in Cattle and Badgers

Debate between Phil Wilson and Tracey Crouch

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson, and I congratulate the hon. Member for High Peak (Ruth George) on securing this important debate. Like other colleagues, I thought her speech was incredibly well balanced and truly reflected the nature of her constituency.

The hon. Lady’s constituency is very different from mine. As hon. Members will recognise, I represent an urban constituency and I therefore would not pretend for a nanosecond to understand fully and appreciate the concerns felt by other colleagues who might represent more rural constituencies. That said, I was one of the few Conservative MPs who spoke and voted against the badger cull when it first came before the House, and I have been a long-standing opponent of the cull ever since.

As I have served as a Minister for three and a half years, this is my first opportunity to speak on this issue since 2015. Although I recognise—especially looking around the Conservative Benches this morning—that I am probably in a minority on this side of the Chamber, I believe it is important that I speak. In my first speech on the issue I spoke of my appreciation of the devastating effect on farmers, which has been reflected in the debate today. It is important that the issue does not become one of farmers versus badgers. We have enough division as it is, and it is important to reflect on that.

Because of my deeply held views on animal welfare I have had the pleasure of working on the issue alongside various charities and organisations. It is important to recognise that they, too, have worked tirelessly to raise awareness of badgers and bovine TB and to provide the Government with scientific evidence that could protect both badger and cattle numbers. The evidence is clearly important, and I have worked with those, such as the Save Me Trust, who have worked for years to try to show that the scientific evidence used by the Government is flawed. Working with a farmer in Devon, the trust has helped to implement a different strategy to tackle TB in cattle, called the Gatcombe method, developed by veterinarian Dick Sibley. The method focuses on maintaining standards in cattle herds such as cleaning up the birthing of calves, cleaning up excrement as soon as it is dropped, and not pumping cow slurry on to the feeding fields. That has given the farmer an officially TB-free herd for three years, without the need to slaughter badgers.

Success in tackling bTB is not limited to that farm. We have already heard that Welsh herds are 94% free of bTB, and that it is dropping significantly without the culling of badgers, so surely there is an alternative for tackling the disease in English farms. As the Save Me Trust makes clear, the reason badgers have not been culled at the farm is that the likelihood of badgers passing TB on to cattle is low. According to the randomised badger culling trial, 5.7% of bTB outbreaks have been caused by badgers, but other scientific studies have put the figure at less than 1%. As has been mentioned, the RBCT estimates that 80% of badgers culled in England do not have bTB; so they were culled unnecessarily.

We need to look at other methods and take a more holistic approach to tackling bovine TB. I appreciate that that would require investment of time and money. I think that it is something the Government can support. A suggestion that was put to me was a Government-led grant programme, for farmers to invest in aerobic digesters to remove bTB from slurry, protecting cows and the wider environment from contamination, and, better still, providing biogas to be turned into electricity.

If we are to eradicate bTB it is clear that the current system for testing cattle needs to be improved. At present the skin test is ineffective and many infected cows remain in herds. Experiments with blood tests have shown TB organisms in cattle—

[Phil Wilson (in the Chair)]

Order.