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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the likely perturbation effect on the spread of bovine tuberculosis following the extension of the badger culling programme to Derbyshire, Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire.

Applicants for a licence to cull badgers to control the spread of bovine TB (bTB) must meet Natural England's strict licensing criteria, which specifically includes measures to guard against the potential risk of perturbation effects as a result of disturbed badger social groups.

The independent, peer-reviewed academic study into the effectiveness of badger culling (Downs et al. (2019) Nature Scientific Reports) which showed a decline in bTB incidence in the first two cull areas of Gloucestershire and Somerset, also showed a lack of evidence of a 'perturbation effect' in these areas, unlike the findings of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial, where culling led to an increase in bTB incidence rates outside of cull areas.