Bovine Tuberculosis (Hansard, 20 December 2004)

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Whitty)
My Lords, we have no plans to allow badger culling outside the Krebs trial areas while the culling research is still ongoing. However, we have repeatedly made it clear that we are prepared to consider culling badgers as a policy option if the evidence emerging from the trial, or from other research, suggests that it would be successful in reducing bovine TB in cattle and that a cost-effective policy could be developed and implemented.

§ The Countess of Mar
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply, which he will understand from my point of view is not very satisfactory. I declare my interest as a farmer in a TB hot-spot area. Does the Minister appreciate the strain that farmers are under when they are losing cattle that they have bred over many years? It is causing suicides and nervous breakdowns all over the place, as far as I can make out. Is it Defra's intention that England should become a large badger sett with no cattle?

§ Lord Whitty
No, my Lords, and I have repeatedly said from this Dispatch Box and elsewhere that TB is 1528 clearly the most important and difficult animal disease facing us in this country. The Government are spending £88 million a year on trying to control it. Simply allowing the non-trial areas to destroy badgers would not necessarily be effective and is certainly not a proven means of controlling the problem. Within the trials, the reactive culling has had to be suspended, because, counterintuitively, the amount of TB has gone up where the reactive cull was being carried out. Nothing is straightforward in this area.

§ Lord Livsey of Talgarth
My Lords, will the Minister initiate a scheme to eradicate bovine TB county by county and to ensure that deer, badgers and cattle are treated with equality and culled appropriately, so that we can clear bovine TB from the entire United Kingdom systematically over a period of years?

§ Lord Whitty
My Lords, whether a county by county approach is exactly the right strategy, clearly we must take account of the outcome of the trials, and if it involves culling badgers we must operate that selectively, aiming at the areas where there is the greatest problem. We do not yet have the outcome of that research, and it is important that the developing TB strategy, which we announced in November, should be given a chance to operate.

§ Lord Walton of Detchant
My Lords, as a young house doctor in paediatrics in the 1940s, I saw the ravages of bovine tuberculosis in children, which commonly caused paralysis due to affecting the spinal bones and other long bones. Does the Minister agree that following the pasteurisation of milk, bovine tuberculosis as a human infection has almost disappeared from the UK? I admit that the risks of human infection arising from the infected badger population are limited, but nevertheless it is surely right that that reservoir ought as far as possible to be eliminated.

§ Lord Whitty
My Lords, the human risk from this is pretty limited, and in so far as it exists, it' is from contact with cattle. The badger population, and other wildlife populations—deer in particular—carry this disease. Clearly, we must limit the effect on livestock. We must also try to develop ways to ensure that by vaccination, or by other means, the reservoir in wildlife is limited and minimised.

§ Viscount Bledisloe
My Lords, will the Minister explain why in the Government's relative moral scale the badger rates so much higher than the cow? To preserve a few badgers we are imperilling an enormous number of cows, and having their slaughter merely on the basis that so far there has not been conclusive proof of the degree of connection between badgers and bovine tuberculosis. I cannot believe that the Minister would imperil his children to risk of something from badgers merely because there was some doubt as to the extent of the connection. Why are badgers so much more important than cows?

§ Lord Whitty
My Lords, badgers are not more important than cows. Cows have a direct connection 1529 with the human population, and therefore the control of TB in cattle is absolutely essential. That has been a fixed point of agricultural policy and disease control for decades.
The research is not so much directed at the degree of connection—clearly there is some degree of connection—but it is also true that much bovine TB is spread by cattle to cattle contact. By and large, badgers do not travel from Somerset to Cheshire; and yet we get disease as a result of cattle movements. The research is directed to see whether culling, of itself, would cause the disease incidents to be more limited. Currently, that is unproven. I referred to the reactive trials. In those areas where there have been reactive trials culling the badgers where it was known there was disease, the effect of the mass culling has been an increase in the disease, largely because unhealthy badgers moved into areas where healthy badgers were being slaughtered.

§ Lord Lewis of Newnham
My Lords, when does the Minister anticipate that there will be an answer to this problem? When is there to be a report, and can he set out the timing of the report?

§ Lord Whitty
My Lords, the likely outcome of the Krebs trials will now be 2006.

§ Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, I know that the Government are not complacent on the subject. However, the reality has to be that the longer the situation goes on with tuberculosis increasing, the greater the risk becomes that the disease will overcome the barrier that we have put in its spread to human beings through pasteurisation. In realistic terms, allowing for Krebs—which may in any event be inconclusive—when can we expect to see inoculation against tuberculosis in cattle, so that the disease comes under control? Either we do that or we take absolute steps to ensure that the disease can be eliminated. If that means slaughtering all forms of tuberculosis-carrying livestock, it has to be done.

§ Lord Whitty
My Lords, I have already described the time scale of the outcome of the Krebs trials. At that point, we will have to take a decision on where the strategy goes. In the mean time, we have introduced a number of restrictions and controls. The noble Lord still speaks as though the problem was inevitably growing, whereas there are fewer herds under restriction from TB and fewer incidents of TB at the moment than there were last year. That is not an indication of complacency, but an indication that there is some slowing down and reversing of the impact of TB under the present policy. If we need to change the policy, particularly in relation to badgers, we will do so in the light of the evidence.

§ Lord Mackie of Benshie
My Lords, I will not take as long as the previous question. The Minister said that, in the areas largely clear of badgers, there was an 1530 increase in TB thereafter due to the influx of badgers from other areas. Surely the answer is to extend the areas under control.

§ Lord Whitty
My Lords, I was referring to a particular subset of the trials in which reactive action to cull the badgers where there was an incidence of disease led to a counterintuitive outcome, probably because other badgers had moved in. The logical conclusion of the noble Lord's position would simply be to destroy all badgers everywhere, which is not an acceptable policy either. There are arguments on the other side, such as those put to me today, and longstanding legislative restrictions on what we can do in relation to badgers. If we need to look at that in the light of the evidence, we will do so. However, it is important to recognise that badgers are different from deer and other livestock because of the legislative position.