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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what progress her Department has made on commencing field trials for a cattle vaccine for bovine TB.

Before a decision can be made to make an investment in field trials, we need to be confident that we have an effective DIVA test (a TB test to differentiate infected from vaccinated animals). The work we have already done shows that the blood test DIVA is unlikely to be good enough, in that it will yield too many false positive results leading to slaughter of too many uninfected cattle. So we are now investing in the development of a more promising skin test DIVA.