Derbyshire Wildlife Trust’s CEO, Dr Jo Smith, says: 

We are disappointed the Government seems intent on allowing badgers to be culled on mass – despite making promises to end intensive culling and focus on cattle-based measures, supplemented by a badger vaccination programme.  

As reported in The Telegraph, Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey has announced that the government has “scrapped any arbitrary deadline about when we would stop culling”, “will cull for as long as we need to, in order to make sure we become bovine TB-free", and could also extend badger culling to new areas if the disease was found to have spread.

This outdated move comes despite the government’s pledges to move away from the reliance on extensive shooting and lethal control of this protected species, and instead invest in a cattle vaccine and to support badger vaccination programmes.

A 2021 consultation by Government included “plans to stop issuing intensive cull licences for new areas after 2022” and “enable new licences to be cut short after two or three years based on a review of the latest scientific evidence at that time.” While culling would “remain an option where epidemiological assessment indicates that it is needed”, the consultation clearly stated plans to “phase out intensive badger culling in the next few years and gradually replacing this with government-supported badger vaccination and surveillance.”

In 2022, 33,627 badgers were culled nationally, with 1,939 of those here in Derbyshire. Backtracking on plans to stop intensive culling could result in tens of thousands of healthy badgers being shot across England for years to come.  

We understand the hardship that bTB causes in the farming community and the need to find the right mechanisms to control the disease. There is no concrete evidence that proves culling badgers is the answer to reducing risks to cattle, and instead it is cattle-based measures that are bringing down bTB rates. England’s cattle-to-cattle disease transmission problem must be urgently resolved through cattle-focused measures such as improved cattle testing and vaccination, enhanced biosecurity, and controlling cattle movements. 

We welcome the encouraging progress and outcomes of Defra’s pilot in East Sussex which is exploring whether training landowners to vaccinate badgers on their land could be the future of badger vaccination policy across the UK. We were expecting the government to consult on how this might inform how it rolls out vaccination schemes at scale this Autumn, but now we are very concerned that policy-makers could revert to mass culling as the go to option.

This is a critical turning point. We call on the government to stop badgers being killed on mass for good and focus on cattle measures and badger vaccination instead.