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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether his Department has plans to apply experience gained in the management of covid-19 through the test, trace and isolate process to the management of bovine TB.

We believe that the experience of managing Covid-19 will provide lessons that can be applied more widely, including to animal disease controls. There are already similarities, however. It is a longstanding statutory requirement for TB test-positive cattle to be isolated from the rest of the herd while they await their removal to slaughter, and for the affected herds to be placed under movement restrictions pending the completion of a programme of repeated TB testing with negative results. Furthermore, any animals that may have been moved out of a TB-infected herd between the last negative test of that herd and the application of TB movement restrictions are forward-traced by the Animal and Plant Health Agency and, if still alive on the new destination farm(s), they are tested for TB.