Badger Trust meets with Minister Dame Angela Eagle

Defra confirms end of badger culling, shifting to prevention-led bTB strategy. Badger Trust urges stronger protections and cattle-focused solutions.

Badger Trust and Wildlife LINK met with Defra (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) Minister Dame Angela Eagle and officials on 26 March and welcomed her confirmation that badger culling has ended (with the Cumbria licence still to conclude), and that it will not be included in the refreshed bovine TB (bTB) strategy. This signals an important shift away from decades of widespread culling toward more effective, prevention-based approaches, including improved cattle testing and a stronger focus on tackling disease within cattle.

Although routine culling is being phased out, lethal control of badgers remains legally possible under current legislation, highlighting the urgent need for much stronger and clearer policy guidance. The widespread, indiscriminate, legalised killing of badgers is something that must never be allowed to happen again. While badger vaccination is often discussed, it is not supported by Badger Trust and partners as an effective solution for controlling bTB in cattle.

Badger Trust also raised concerns about longstanding internal pressures within Defra and its agencies that have favoured culling, alongside a lack of full transparency to Ministers.

Addressing the true scale of disease within cattle remains both a scientific and political challenge. The Trust will continue working with government to secure lasting protections and science-led, long-term solutions that support both badgers and farmers, who have been misled by governments for too long.

Please find below the reflections and observations made by Rosie Wood following their attendance at the meeting: 

As a former Defra Minister under a previous Labour PM who had the immensely difficult job of managing the Foot and Mouth Outbreak, Dame Angela is no stranger to the Department, how it (really) works, or how the farming industry really needs to operate.

And that really matters.

It also really matters that we all understand that, as long as the Protection of Badgers Act includes a provision for lethal control (as a last resort) for reasons such as preventing the spread of disease, lethal control remains a legal option.

But there needs to be policy guidance and protocols that decision-makers must follow. Currently, that's pretty weak.

What we need the Minister to work on now is to greatly improve the policy guidance so that any form of lethal control is genuinely the very last resort after every other approach has been tried and shown to fail, as is the case now.

Culling, the widespread, indiscriminate legalised killing of badgers which we have all witnessed continuously since 2013 (and has been repeatedly used for well over 50 years without effect), is a particular form of lethal control we must never see happen again. Without very substantial improvements to policy guidance, it could all too easily.

One Minister (even a courageous and energetic one) is not going to be able to achieve that single-handedly, so the defence of badgers is far from over. But they do have a well-informed Minister who knows their way around the subject, the politics, the industry, and the financing necessary for the permanent solution. 

That's a step forward well worth celebrating and well worth congratulating the Minister on. 

We must now look forward to the follow-up we agreed on, including the Minister's personal undertaking to look at a couple of issues where we have struggled to get traction with officials so far.

We must also be ready to support the programme necessary to roll out greatly improved cattle testing and restore agency to farmers who have been very badly misled by Governments since 2010. It's easy to blame farmers, but it's also wrong to do so. They have been legally required to follow Defra policy, which includes Defra's woefully inadequate cattle testing regime.

The Government could choose to own the mess it has inherited, or set out the right policy and, in doing so, expose the poison chalice it inherited from its predecessors. I don't know yet what its appetite is for exposing the sins of the past. The officials have shown no such appetite so far.

Aside from being a technical problem to solve, for the Government coming clean about the hidden disease reservoir in cattle is a political nightmare if it doesn't get the messaging right the first time.

If they do get it right, the messaging alone is a game-changer for farmers, badgers and taxpayers. Instead of endlessly spending £20 million a year on compensation, they could eventually spend it on preventing the disease from getting hold of the national herd.

And that's the Minister's ambition - she doesn't want to keep spending money to pay for the damage caused by bTB if she can invest in preventing it instead.

Accurate cattle testing, which avoids repeated cattle slaughter, can achieve that. Just as Badger Trust, Save Me, Born Free, RSPCA, Humane World for Animals, forward-thinking vets and others have been advocating. It hasn't been lost on this Minister at least.

What was especially gratifying for me personally was that the officials didn't keep trying to tell us that badger culling 'worked' when their own evidence and their own lawyers confirm they have been unable to show this.

What was surprising was that the Minister didn't realise that none of us supported the vaccination of badgers as a means of controlling bTB in cattle - officials should have told their Minister that this is the official position of the LINK bTB Working Group.

Most impressive was the Minister's grip on her officials. Refreshing.

Pro-cull officials are, and have been, driving the kill policy across DEFRA and APHA (Animal & Plant Health Agency), and - frankly - have not been sharing sufficient information with Ministers or the Secretary of State to enable them to do their jobs or fulfil the Government's manifesto commitment to end the cull.

Ordinarily, in meetings with officials, they argue up is down, claiming culling badgers has worked and that vaccinating badgers will also work, despite the evidence they themselves have had to release to us under FOI (Freedom of Information) or through legal correspondence.

I have recently taken to sharing the Department's responses to FOIs and legal enquiries with the Minister. It isn't reasonable for any Minister to see the hundreds of FOI responses from the Department.

But when officials are legally compelled to disclose significant information to us, which they plainly haven't shared with their Minister, something has gone very wrong with how the Department is working.

"Ireland won't give up its addiction to badger culling until key senior officials leave." We have all heard that said.

Sadly, I think the same might be true in the long term at Defra.

Ministers are always at risk of a reshuffle. Often the best ones, too.

Officials are not.

Entrenchment, alliances with powerful industry interests, and being philosophically unable to change since they were originally hired to support the policy of the former Government are all inevitable when they are left in post - and in power - for too long. Makes for bad policy and tragically slow reform and delivery. At least this Minister knows exactly what she is up against and recognises that, from time to time, she needs to go looking for where the policy and science bodies have been buried well away from prying eyes.

Thank you for continuing to support us at Badger Trust.

Nothing we do could be accomplished without your support, including your generous donations.

As a volunteer, lucky to have a good pension, I don't need to claim back any of my expenses like rail fares from Badger Trust. I am pleased to represent us, and it's a privilege to do so. But I can't represent us without the team's backup - their research, advocacy, and intelligence-gathering are what give me the credibility to hold the line in meetings with officials, MPs, Peers, and Ministers, and secure the policy changes badgers need just to survive.