Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment his Department has made of testing measures carried out to reduce the spreading of Bovine TB through movements of infected cattle.

Routine and targeted TB testing of cattle herds, movement restrictions and more frequent testing of infected herds, and rapid removal of positive-testing cattle, remain the foundations of the Government’s TB eradication strategy. This is supported by statutory pre- and post-movement testing of cattle moved between herds and slaughterhouse surveillance of all cattle commercially slaughtered for human consumption.

To reinforce those measures, in January 2022 we increased the frequency of mandatory surveillance testing throughout England’s High-Risk Area from annual to every six-months, with some exceptions for lower risk herds.

The single intradermal comparative cervical tuberculin (SICCT) test, commonly known as the skin test, is used in routine and targeted TB testing, together with pre- and post-movement testing. It has a very high specificity, giving on average only one false positive result for every 5,000 or 6,000 uninfected cattle tested, although it is only moderately sensitive (with about one in five to one in four TB-infected cattle potentially missed by the test). The skin test is a good herd screening test in that we only need to find one test reactor animal in order to declare a TB breakdown and place that herd under movement restrictions.