It is a pleasure to serve once again under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone, and to speak in a debate on this important
topic, secured by petition. I also declare an interest, because I have sponsored a badger. I named it Dennis, after the former hon. Member for Bolsover, who was an excellent help to me when I first arrived in this place. He gave me some tips about its peculiarities and how to try to get on top of it and do my best by my constituents. He was respected across the House.
It is a shame that we are not allowed to bring props into Westminster Hall, because alongside my sponsorship of Dennis I have received my very own personal fluffy Dennis, who now watches over my constituency office while I am here down in London. I will post a picture of Dennis at some stage today. He is a kind beast of Cheshire and a law unto himself at times, and he is passionate about scurrying around Cheshire. People will see a picture of him in his natural habitat.
I sponsored Dennis after visiting the Cheshire badger vaccination programme—or CBVP for short—a volunteer group that, after receiving professional vaccination training, works with landowners and farmers to map locations of badgers and trap them over a 10-day process. It is labour-intensive and includes some very early mornings—my office manager had the pleasure of going on one—but it means healthy badgers, healthy cattle, which is vital, and humans happy in the knowledge that they are avoiding badger culling in favour of a more humane approach.
Badgers, unfortunately, do not respond well to national public health campaigns to get them vaccinated. We do not see them marching down to their local vaccination centre; the CBVP informs me that peanuts placed in traps works much better. The CBVP does excellent work, working together with farmers and landowners to protect livestock and create a long-lasting, stable population of TB-resistant badgers in the Cheshire area. Bovine TB is an incredibly difficult disease to counter, as the hon. Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) mentioned, and we lose tens of thousands of cattle to it every year.
I represent a semi-rural constituency in Weaver Vale, with many farmers as well as many wildlife lovers, and I am keen that we should work hard to find a solution that protects cattle, livelihoods and local ecosystems, as well as protecting wildlife welfare. We also need to be mindful that the evidence points towards direct transmission from badgers to cattle making up only a minority of transmissions—I think the hon. Member said about a quarter. Ensuring that cattle are vaccinated, as well as healthy, will ensure that we rid the countryside of TB. Not only does culling not respect animal welfare, but it disturbs the overall composition of badger communities, meaning that badgers are likely to move more frequently and over longer distances, which risks higher disease transmission between badgers and cattle.
We need to take into account the cost of culling, which was £6 million in 2020 alone. The Derbyshire badger vaccination programme estimated that killing a badger costs £1,000, compared with £82 for vaccinating each badger that they trap. It is clear from the amount of support that the Cheshire volunteers receive, as well as the number of constituents who have contacted me and other hon. Members who are in the Chamber, that there is support for the badger vaccination programme, and more than half the public oppose culling. There are
even deeper concerns, particularly about the shooting of badgers. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us specifically how the Department plans not only to phase out culling quickly, but to stop the use of culling licences altogether.
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