It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I congratulate all the petitioners. I understand that more than 108,000 individuals signed the petition, led, as has been said, by Mr King. That shows that this is an emotive, but incredibly important, issue, and it is right that we spend this time debating it.
The hon. Member for Penistone and Stockbridge (Angela Smith) declared an interest, in that she is a member of the Wildlife Trusts. If that is considered an interest, I should probably join her by declaring that I am a member of the Wildlife Trusts in Cornwall. They do some fantastic work, but it has to be said that this is one area on which I and my local Wildlife Trust have to agree to disagree. The truth is that TB is an incredibly difficult disease to fight. It is slow growing and not easy to detect. We are constantly trying to improve diagnostics, and I will come on to that. No vaccine is fully effective. The best we have is the BCG vaccine, which we know is only about 70% effective.
The disease has a huge impact on our livestock industry. Last year, we slaughtered about 29,000 heads of cattle. This is a disease that costs us £100 million a year to manage and fight. There are no easy solutions and there is no single measure that provides the answer to a disease of this sort, which is why the Government have set out a comprehensive 25-year strategy that involves us using all the tools at our disposal to bear down on the disease.
The hon. Member for Penistone and Stockbridge pointed out that the previous Labour Government decided not to proceed with a badger cull. I have to say that had they acted as one should with any animal disease—swiftly and assertively to get it under control—it might have been easier to turn the situation around. The reality is that we had 15 years that can be best described as a period of dither, when clear action was not taken on all the available fronts to tackle the disease.