Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what plans he has to test for bovine TB (a) those badgers culled as part of the culling trial, (b) those badgers remaining in the high risk areas and (c) a sample of badgers in the low risk area.

We have started exploratory work on the use of tissue sampling to test badgers in some cull areas to identify trends in disease prevalence. In addition there has been a long standing surveillance programme run by APHA which monitors the prevalence of the disease in one highly infected population in Gloucestershire. Post-mortem testing of found-dead wildlife carcasses is also deployed in the Low Risk Area in a targeted way where a cluster of TB cases in cattle is suspected to be linked to TB in wildlife.