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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent steps his Department has taken to develop a (a) strategy for and (b) cost-benefit analysis of the delivery of badger vaccinations funded by his Department.

Controlling bovine TB in wildlife, specifically badgers, makes up part of the package of measures of our bovine TB eradication strategy, with the aim of achieving Officially TB Free status for England by 2038[1].

HM Government policy has enabled farmers and landowners to apply for licences to cull or to vaccinate badgers. However, to date badger vaccination has been across small, spatially fragmented areas. To help support a transition toward widespread badger vaccination and build industry confidence in it as an investable and effective disease management approach, HM Government is undertaking a number of initiatives in order to encourage badger vaccination uptake:

• HM Government-funded badger vaccination in several areas where four-year intensive badger culling has ended. We are continuing to bolster our capability to deploy even more badger vaccination in post-cull areas from 2023.
• We awarded funding for a five-year project in East Sussex to support the farming community to deliver vaccination over an area of 250km². The project is now in its second year. It will help to shape the delivery model for deploying other large-scale vaccination schemes.
• Cage-trapping and vaccination training courses continue to be streamlined to make them less time-consuming and more accessible. A 'Train the Trainer' scheme, which enables experienced cage-trappers and lay vaccinators to qualify as trainers and form their own local training hubs increases the training capacity to enable more people to be trained.
• In 2022, we launched a new simplified licence for vaccinating badgers, significantly reducing the administrative burden for those who are trained to undertake this activity. We have applied a subsidy to Badger BCG vaccine which reduced its cost to almost half.

All these initiatives are designed to help, facilitate, and encourage more farmers, landowners, and independent groups to get involved and deploy badger vaccination schemes. A system to evaluate the effectiveness of badger vaccination, which would include a cost-benefit analysis, is under development.

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[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-strategy-for-achieving-officially-bovine-tuberculosis-free-status-for-england