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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent changes her Department has made to licensing criteria for badger control in England.

Following a public consultation, the following changes to licensing conditions were published on 17 December 2015:

• Enabling Natural England to keep the duration of annual badger control operations under review rather than limiting them to six weeks.

• Reducing the minimum size of an area from 150km² to 100km².

• Removing the requirement for at least 70% of the land in candidate areas to be accessible but retaining a requirement that approximately 90% of the land in the control area be either accessible, or within 200m of accessible land.