Bovine Tuberculosis: Disease Control

(asked on 15th October 2021) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made for the implications of his policies on badger culling of its review of the government’s 25 Year Bovine TB Strategy.


Answered by
Victoria Prentis Portrait
Victoria Prentis
Attorney General
This question was answered on 25th October 2021

Intensive badger culls were only ever envisaged as a phase of the TB eradication strategy. As set out in the Government response to Professor Sir Charles Godfray’s review of the strategy[1] [2], the next phase of the strategy focuses on developing a deployable cattle vaccine, wider rollout of badger vaccination and improvements to TB testing. The Government will retain the ability to introduce culling where local epidemiological evidence points to an ongoing role of badgers in the disease.

Badger culling will not be halted immediately – as set out in the Government’s response to the January 2021 consultation[3], no new intensive cull licences will be issued after 2022 and supplementary badger culling will end in 2025.

Routine and targeted TB testing of cattle herds, movement restrictions on infected herds, and rapid detection and removal of cattle testing positive, remain the foundations of the Government’s strategy, supported by statutory pre- and post-movement testing of cattle and slaughterhouse surveillance.

As part of our move towards wider badger vaccination, we are introducing several schemes and initiatives. Training courses have been streamlined to make these less time-consuming, more accessible and affordable. A new 'Train the Trainer' (TtT) scheme, which allows experienced cage-trappers and lay vaccinators to qualify as trainers and form their own local training hubs, will enable more people to be trained as vaccinators than ever before. In East Sussex, we are funding a five-year vaccination scheme, where deployment of large-scale vaccination delivered by the local farming community commenced in August. The scheme will help refine delivery models and approaches, ensuring future badger vaccination is deployable at scale.

We are continuing to bolster government capability to deploy badger vaccination in areas where intensive culling has ended, building on those gains achieved through culling to create resilience to future infection. As well as financially supporting vaccination in the edge area through the Badger Edge Vaccination Scheme (BEVS), we are exploring new ways and opportunities to incentivise more targeted approaches to vaccinate badgers to deliver greater disease control benefits. We are also reviewing the licensing system, taking steps to make it more straightforward and less administratively burdensome for those who are suitably trained to vaccinate badgers.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-strategy-for-achieving-bovine-tuberculosis-free-status-for-england-2018-review

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-strategy-for-achieving-bovine-tuberculosis-free-status-for-england-2018-review-government-response

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/bovine-tuberculosis-proposals-to-help-eradicate-disease-in-england

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