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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what information her Department holds on the effectiveness of a programme of cattle movement controls and badger vaccination; and what information her Department holds on the effectiveness of such a programme when badger culling is also carried out.

Defra’s Strategy for achieving bovine TB free status for England involves deploying a package of interventions informed by scientific and veterinary advice to address all likely routes of disease transmission. Due to the complexity of the disease, most effects of interventions will only be seen several years after their introduction and it will be difficult to assign cause and effect to any particular intervention. Consequently, success is measured through the combined impacts of a national system of intervention, rather than looking at individual components in isolation.