I thank the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) for securing this important debate. I have several questions and concerns about this year’s cull, as well as long-standing concerns about the culling policy.
First, the Government said that they plan to use the results of this year’s culls to decide whether to roll out culling to new areas, but they have cut back massively on the data collection and expertise that they need to make an informed decision. They have scrapped independent oversight and the methods recommended by their independent advisers for assessing the humaneness and effectiveness of culling. In so doing, they have
undermined their ability to make a well-informed decision. Their chosen methods seem to be completely inadequate, and they have undermined public confidence in a future roll-out decision, not least by fighting two legal battles to avoid independent scrutiny.
My views on the cull are well known. I have always argued that we need to take an evidence-based approach, so it is deeply disappointing that DEFRA has ignored the facts before it and, this year, has even done away with the independent panel, presumably because it did not like its conclusions last time round. I appreciate that the Secretary of State has expressed the view that independent auditing is sufficient, but I stress that that is not the same as peer review. The audit explicitly concerns adherence to DEFRA’s chosen methods, rather than the robustness of the methods themselves. Peer review would have taken that much broader perspective.
This year, there has been no attempt to count badgers in the cull areas, either before or after the culls. The time taken by badgers to die was not recorded, and there has been no oversight by independent scientists. Instead, the effectiveness of the culls has been judged on key data collected by the marksmen. Let us remind ourselves that in 2013, the data they collected were so unreliable that they were considered unusable by the independent expert panel. Available information suggests that any future claim that the 2014 culls have reduced badger numbers sufficiently to control TB will be baseless. Moreover, it will be difficult to believe any claims that this year’s culls are safe, humane and effective, based on the available evidence.
In that context, it is welcome that the British Ecological Society has offered to check the Government’s badger culling trials, as the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) said. I would be interested to learn from the Minister whether DEFRA will accept that offer, and the reason for its decision.
I hope that DEFRA will make every effort to be completely transparent about the information it has gathered on this year’s culls. To that end, I would welcome the Minister’s comments on the humaneness of the culls. A non-governmental organisation in Somerset carried out a post-mortem on a badger that had been shot and wounded and showed that it would have suffered for many minutes after being shot. Yet the Government are not issuing any report this time round on the humaneness of their culls. That is a scandal and means that we have no proper means of assessing whether the culls are humane, despite that long being one of DEFRA’s stated objectives. I would like clarification of the number of badgers culled in Somerset. Was the target reached, and is the Minister satisfied that it was the right one, given that the methods used to calculate it have been described by Professor Rosie Woodroffe of the Zoological Society of London as “very crude”?
I understand that officials estimate the Somerset population by counting setts and multiplying by a fixed number. That estimate suggested that the target should be between 316 and 1,776 badgers killed. Perhaps not surprisingly, DEFRA chose the lower figure. In Gloucestershire in 2013, 39% of the target was met. This year, we understand that it is 41%, according to information that has come out. Will the Minister tell us whether DEFRA expects any increase in bovine TB in
the edge areas around the Gloucestershire cull? Given all we know about perturbation in areas where less than 70% of badgers are culled, how will they monitor that?
We know that ineffective culling can make a bad situation worse. By failing to collect the evidence needed to evaluate future policy, DEFRA is failing farmers, taxpayers and wildlife. I hope that the Government will at long last stop blaming the badgers for moving the goalposts and admit that it is time for a complete rethink of their so-called strategy for tackling bovine TB.
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