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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to verify the levels of bovine tuberculosis in badgers.

In the 2016 badger control operations we initiated development of a TB surveillance programme on a small sample of badger carcasses obtained from the culling operations. Tissue sampling, followed by culturing and genotyping is the most reliable method for diagnosing TB in badgers, but challenges remain with this technique when the quality of the carcasses is variable. More information on the 2016 TB surveillance can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/bovine-tb-surveillance-in-wildlife-in-england-2016-to-2017. Further work is planned to refine our methodology.

During the Randomised Badger Culling Trial, detailed post-mortems of culled badgers in the High Risk Area found that approximately one-third of badgers were infected. In addition, the APHA have a long running study of the wild badger population at Woodchester Park in Gloucestershire where 25% to 30% of the population test positive for Tuberculosis. A separate study in a different part of Gloucestershire in 2006 found that 53% of wild badgers tested positive.