Badger Cull
Debate between George Eustice and Caroline Lucas(11 years, 11 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)
I begin by picking up on a point made by the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick): this is an incredibly difficult disease to fight, and there are no easy answers in the war against TB. There are several reasons for that. First, it is a very slow-growing, insidious disease, which makes it incredibly difficult to detect. It has been hard to get a reliable means of diagnosis. Secondly, the disease lives within the cell wall of blood cells, and that makes it very difficult to get a vaccine to work. That is why the BCG vaccine, which is the only thing that we have, is only partially effective and provides no cure. That is why the Government have been very clear that we need to pursue a range of options to roll back the disease. We are clear that no one measure on its own will work; instead, we need to pursue a range of strategies to bear down on the disease. We set those out clearly in our draft TB eradication strategy, the final version of which will be published shortly. It sets out a range of options; I want to come back to that, because this is an area in which I think there will be consensus across the House.
There is one area where, clearly, we take a different view from the Opposition. Our view is that nowhere in the world has managed successfully to tackle TB without also dealing with the reservoir of the disease in the wildlife population. A couple of hon. Members have attempted to cast doubt on that—they have mentioned possums in New Zealand and asked whether the case is the same—but in Ireland and France, cull strategies have been successfully pursued.
George Eustice
I will not give way. I want to carry on and make this point, because there were lots of issues raised. If Members do not accept that international comparisons are relevant, I say: look at the historical comparisons. We got on top of TB in the 1960s and ’70s by pursuing a badger cull strategy. Early attempts through measures such as the clean ring strategy pursued by Dunnet in the late ’80s had some success. The RBCTs that the previous Government ran also showed a 16% reduction in the disease.
I want to say a little about vaccination, because we recognise that it can provide some benefits. It can pass on some immunity to cubs, and can cause less disturbance to the badger population, but there are difficulties with it. The badgers have to be successfully trapped and vaccinated; St Ives—the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) has talked to me about this—has managed to catch only seven in the past year. We should recognise that no vaccine is 100% effective; the evidence is that it is roughly 60% effective.
George Eustice
I expect my hon. Friend will do better next year.
As I said, we are spending £1.6 million a year developing an oral vaccine. We have made some progress on the dose required for that vaccine, and it is around 10 times more than would be needed for an injectable vaccine. We have also made some progress towards identifying a bait that would be successful, and we have made some progress towards linking the vaccine to fats that can help get it through the digestive system. But there are drawbacks even to an oral vaccine. Not all badgers will take it, and some badgers may eat more of it than others, so it will never be 100%. But we accept that nothing in this challenge is 100% and that is why we are pursuing it.
On injectable vaccines, I have had representations from my hon. Friends the Members for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris) and for Brighton, Kemptown (Simon Kirby) to look again at whether we could refocus some of our vaccination efforts, either in the edge area, as the right hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Sir Andrew Stunell) suggested, or around the east Sussex area. I have said that we will look closely at that. As several hon. Members have pointed out, we are doing some work in that area now, and we would be willing to develop that further.
On cattle vaccines, the Secretary of State met the commissioner on this just last week. We are continuing to do some work to develop a DIVA test. Field trials will take three to five years, so as a number of hon. Members have pointed out, it will be eight or nine years before we can get export clearance for the use of such a cattle vaccine. However, we are committed to taking this forward.
I agree with hon. Members that improving the control of cattle movements is an important tool in the fight against TB, but I simply point out that we have done a lot already. We now have annual testing in the high-risk area, and four-yearly testing across the whole country. We have banned practices such as approved quarantine units. We now have radial testing in the low-risk areas where we get an outbreak. We have stopped cattle going to major shows since July 2012. We have introduced risk-based trading to help farmers manage the risks. We have an ongoing consultation about restricting movements and introducing pre-movement and post-movement tests to common land. We are introducing deductions for farmers who are late in having their TB test, and we have reduced the pre-movement testing window from 60 to 30 days. So we are doing a huge amount, but I accept that we should be constantly looking to improve and do more, and we are looking, as the hon. Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) suggested, at whether more could be done, for instance, on biosecurity measures.
George Eustice
I am going to run out of time and I want to leave time for the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main).
On effectiveness, we have already published the numbers of badgers that were culled in both Somerset, where it was 940, and Gloucester, where it was 921. The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) invited me to speculate on what the effect on the population might have been from the recent flooding. One lesson that we have learnt is that it is difficult precisely to estimate badger populations. The RBCT did not use head trapping of the sophistication that we did, rather it used things like sett surveys, and there is a huge amount of doubt about whether it had a clear understanding of the badger population.
A number of hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) have highlighted that the RBCT concluded that the aim should be to remove 70% of the badger population. We accept that and that is why we had that as a target. However, it is wrong to say that if that target is not hit in the first year, the disease will be made worse. The RBCT clearly showed that three of the 10 test areas where there was a proactive cull got between 30% and 40% in year one, but provided that was sustained in subsequent years, it went on to have a significant impact in reducing the disease.
Finally, on the humaneness issue, I know that this is a sentimental matter for many people. In fact, the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) highlighted the poem “The Badger”. All I will say is that I hope that hon. Members can develop some perspective, because shooting is used as a means of controlling foxes and all sorts of other wildlife. If hon. Members were to go to Bushy park or Richmond park in September and October, they would find signs up saying that a cull of deer was going on and so the park was closed. No one would bat an eyelid. I hope that we can develop some perspective—
George Eustice
I am not going to give way, but I know what the hon. Lady is going to say.
We recognise that there are challenges with shooting badgers. That is why we issued best practice guidance that specified a range of less than 70 metres using a rifle, that they should target the chest, the type of rifle that could be used and that the animal must be stationary and over a bait point. It might be that lessons can be learnt from that to improve the proficiency of marksmen and we can obviously consider that.
I want to pick up a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Mr Amess) about monitoring. He said that it was insufficient and we do not accept that. We were required to monitor 60 of the culls but monitored 88 and we were required to carry out 120 post-mortems but carried out 150. We did more monitoring than was required.
As the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) and my hon. Friends the Members for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) and for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) said, this is a devastating disease having a devastating impact on cattle farmers. When I visited one of the Gloucester culls I met a Gloucestershire farmer who had been under restriction for 12 years. He was not moving cattle on or off; it was being caused not by cattle but by a large badger sett on his farm that was infected by TB. I saw another farmer who had lost an entire pedigree herd as a result of the disease. We know that if we do nothing it will cost us £1 billion over the next 10 years and, as I said at the start, although we are pursuing a range of options, no single measure on its own is the solution to the problem. There is no example anywhere in the world of a country that has successfully tackled TB without also tackling the reservoir of disease in the wildlife population.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between George Eustice and Caroline Lucas(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
The remit of the independent expert panel was originally restricted to the planned six-week badger cull period and my understanding is that that remit was not extended when the badger culls were themselves extended. Can the Secretary of State reassure the House today that the independent expert panel’s scope and report will cover the whole of the culling period and not just the first six weeks, because it is really important that his decisions are informed by wider experience of the whole cull?
George Eustice
The independent expert panel will cover the initial cull period, not the extensions.
Wildlife Crime
Debate between George Eustice and Caroline Lucas(12 years, 4 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)
I am grateful to the Liaison Committee and to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), who is the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, for securing this debate. It is a shame that it has taken so long to secure it. She explained to me earlier that part of the reason for that was that, with the summer recess coming, it was not easy to get a slot. She also made the point that it took the Government some time to respond to the Committee’s report. I am able to say that that was nothing to do with me, because I was not in the Government at the time. However, what I can say—a number of people have said this already—is that my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), was absolutely passionate about these issues, so I do not think anyone should read into that delay that there was any lack of interest in the issue of wildlife crime on his part.
As we have heard, wildlife crime is a matter that we all care deeply about. Hon Members are quite right to seek reassurance about what the Government are doing to tackle the issue. Efforts to tackle wildlife crime have moved forward hugely in the last 10 years, thanks to the commitment and enthusiasm of successive Governments, the enforcement agencies and the many non-governmental organisations that willingly share their expertise and experience. We should take a moment to reflect on what has already been achieved, and to put on record our appreciation of the contribution that has been made by everyone who has been involved. Their work has helped to make the UK the envy of many countries around the world on this issue.
The range and nature of the evidence submitted to the Committee’s inquiry—we heard from the Chair of the Committee that there were 57 submissions—showed how interested people are in this issue, and there was a range of perspectives. As the Chair of the Committee said, the threat from the international wildlife trade has come into sharper focus this year. I welcome hon. Members’ support for the action that the Government are taking to work with the international community to tackle this issue. The increasing levels of elephant and rhino poaching, and of illegal trade globally, are indeed very worrying. They not only threaten individual species but governance, national security and development goals.
The Chair of the Committee said that the illegal wildlife trade is the fifth biggest criminal activity globally. The figures that I have been given suggest that it is now the third biggest, behind only drugs and people trafficking. It has now been categorised by the UN as a serious organised crime. As many hon. Members have already alluded to, as part of our commitment to tackling this trade we will host a conference in London on 13 February 2014 to galvanise international efforts to tackle wildlife crime and to secure top-level global political commitment on this issue. In the run-up to the conference—
Caroline Lucas
Perhaps I will pre-empt what the Minister was about to say, but I wanted to pick up on the point that the Chair of the Committee made earlier about the London conference, which we all welcome. Can the Minister assure us that in addition to Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Ministers and officials being there and taking a lead as we would expect they would—we know the Minister’s commitment—will he ensure that the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice will play an absolutely key role at the conference too, because unless they are also on board I fear that we will not see the positive outcome that we all want?
George Eustice
I was about to go on to say that, although I cannot say exactly which Departments will be represented at the conference, in the run-up to it the Government are collaborating closely with other countries, the royal household, multilateral organisations and major NGOs to agree a way forward and to reach a consensus on the required outputs from the conference.
A number of Members have spoken in the debate. My hon. Friends the Members for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) and for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) spoke passionately about the problems of the ivory trade; it is clear that there is a very strong feeling about this issue. The Chair of the Committee asked specifically what the Government’s negotiating position on this issue was when it was discussed at the convention on international trade in endangered species conference. I must be honest; being so new to the job, I will have to write to her specifically to set out the precise position that we took. However, looking at the Government’s response to the Committee’s report I know that they obviously touched on some of these issues and made it absolutely clear that we want to maintain the existing ban on raw ivory, although they also highlight that there is a slight difference with some of the antique ivories, which tend to predate 1947; indeed, they are required to predate 1947. There is a slight difference there, but I will write to her to clarify precisely the position that was taken.