• Landowners who wish to cull badgers would need to apply for a licence from Natural England
• The trials will assess the humaneness, efficacy and safety of the free shooting of badgers.
• Groups of qualified landowners under licence will be able to shoot badgers at night with a high velocity rifle.
• 70 % of the badgers in any trial area must be slaughtered.
• Each trial area must be at least 150 sq.km
• A cull can only spread the disease further, as it cannot be contained. The spread of the disease outside a cull zone is known as perturbation, which can only be prevented by hard boundaries and short culling periods. All lactating creatures in the wild – including rats and squirrels – carry bTB, and culling for a period exceeding five days will lead to an increase in the spread of the disease. Against scientific advice the proposed culling period has been extended to six weeks, and in the absence of hard boundaries much of the wildlife would move in and out of the cull zones.  Badgers, along with foxes and other wild animals, cross motorways every night (and most survive), so these cannot be regarded as a hard boundary. Badgers are also amazing swimmers, and can swim across large rivers and against the current. I’m sure you’re aware that 40% of farms in the hotspot areas have been TB-free for 10 years or more, and naturally they wish to stay that way.
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  Firstly Lord Krebs’ statement, made in the House of Lords on 21 October, indicated that after 9 years the “very best” possible reduction we could expect would be a 16% decrease in TB.

Lord Krebs:
My Lords, as has been said, bovine TB is a serious problem, and it deserves serious science to underpin policy. I do not want to take up too much time, but I hope that your Lordships will forgive me as an individual who has been involved in this over the past 15 years and, as has been said, instigated the randomised badger culling trial and took part in the review of the evidence with Sir Bob Watson last year. It is worth briefly repeating the facts: the long-term, large-scale culling of badgers is estimated to reduce the incidence of TB in cattle by 16% after nine years. In other words, 84% of the problem is still there. To reflect on what that means, this is not a reduction in absolute terms but actually a 16% reduction from the trend increase. So after nine years there is still more TB around than there was at the beginning; it is just that there is 16% less than there would have been without a cull. The number is not the 30% that the NFU quoted; that is misleading-a dishonest filleting of the data. The other thing that the experts conclude is that culling makes the situation worse at the beginning so it will take a long time to emerge into this Nirvana of a 16% reduction, and 84% of the problem is still there.

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  That is just the background. I turn to questions that I hope the Minister will answer. Last Friday we were told by the Minister of State for Food and Farming that between 500 and 800 badgers would be culled in each of the two areas. The number, thanks to rapid badger reproduction over the weekend, is now 5,530 over the two areas-a fourfold increase. I am impressed. What this underlines is that if the policy is to cull at least 70% of the badgers, we have to know what the starting number is. This variation from just over 1,000 to more than 5,000 in the space of a few days underlines how difficult it is for us to have confidence that the Government will be able to instruct the farmers to cull 70% if they do not know the starting numbers. So my first question to the Minister is: how will he assure us that these numbers are accurate?