CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 725-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

ENVIRONMENT, FOOD AND RURAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

BADGERS AND CATTLE TB:

FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT SCIENTIFIC GROUP

 

 

Wednesday 20 June 2007

DR RICHARD YARNELL, MR TREVOR LAWSON, MR COLIN BOOTY

and MS CLAIRE ROBINSON

 

MR MEURIG RAYMOND, MR JAN ROWE, MR MARTIN HAWORTH,

MS CATHERINE McLAUGHLIN and PROFESSOR ROSIE WOODROFFE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 108 - 247

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

 

1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.

 

2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 20 June 2007

Members present

Mr Michael Jack, in the Chair

Mr David Drew

Mr James Gray

Patrick Hall

Mrs Madeleine Moon

Sir Peter Soulsby

David Taylor

Mr Roger Williams

________________

Witnesses: Dr Richard Yarnell, Chief Executive, and Mr Trevor Lawson, Media Adviser, Badger Trust, and Mr Colin Booty, Senior Scientific Officer (Wildlife) and Ms Claire Robinson, Government Relations Manager, Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), gave evidence.

Q108 Chairman: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to see so many people here. Just in case anybody is under any illusion, we are not dealing with venture capital trusts, we are dealing with something just as interesting, which is TB in cattle and the relationships between cattle and badgers. So, if anybody wants to leave now, please go! If not, we would welcome your attendance. In that context, may I particularly welcome our first panel of witnesses from the Badger Trust, Dr Richard Yarnell, their Chief Executive, and Mr Trevor Lawson, their media adviser, and from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Colin Booty, their Senior Scientific Officer, and Claire Robinson, their Government Relations Manager. Thank you very much indeed for coming. This is the second oral evidence session that we have had on this subject following the publication of the Independent Scientific Group's findings. We have, as colleagues will know, also got the National Farmers' Union with us this afternoon. Could I put to our panel, to start, a very simple question? What is your reaction to the ISG's report?

Dr Yarnell: The Badger Trust's reaction to the ISG's report is that it is a very in depth and well put together report. We find the science that has been conducted has been done very well.

Q109 Chairman: Could I ask you to speak up a little bit because the acoustics in these rooms is not brilliant and we would love to hear what you have to say.

Dr Yarnell: The scientific evidence presented in the report seems sound, the majority of it has been published in international peer reviews and we have no qualms with the quality of the science. In terms of the recommendations, we are particularly pleased to see that they recommend a further focus on cattle testing and highlight the large reservoir that remains within the national herd, and, on those bases, we are very pleased with the scope of the report.

Q110 Chairman: Does that go for the RSPCA?

Mr Booty: We would agree with much of that, yes. I would perhaps preface my remarks with a caveat that the report is a weighty report, in both senses of the word.

Q111 Chairman: It is.

Mr Booty: I personally have not had a chance to fully absorb and analyse the 300 pages yet. I think it needs and merits a proper consideration rather than hasty examination and hasty judgments, but, that point aside, our view is that it is a solid piece of work, very sound science. As my colleague from the Badger Trust pointed out, much of the work is already in the scientific domain, it has been in international peer review journals and is regarded, in a sense, as very good quality science, and as the RSPCA we are accepting overall the conclusions and recommendations of the report.

Q112 Chairman: You made an interesting observation a second ago when you said it is a weighty tome and it needs, effectively, careful evaluation.

Mr Booty: Thank you very much.

Q113 Chairman: What needs to be evaluated from it if it has got the clarity of result which you would, effectively, say from your standpoint goes in the right direction? Certainly Mr Yarnell was unambiguous in saying that he was praiseworthy of the document; he accepted its conclusions and he underscored its scientific validity.

Mr Booty: Which I would endorse. I made the caveat because, in a sense, there is a lot of data in there, a lot of complex argument, et cetera, which I think would merit close examination. The broad approach is yes.

Q114 Chairman: Who should do that?

Mr Booty: In the first instance, it falls to Defra to do that, and Defra have argued that they are going to base their policy on sound science. This, in our view, gives Defra the sound science on which they have the opportunity.

Q115 Chairman: It gives Defra the sound science which was, if you like, initiated by virtue of the Krebs trials, the work that has gone on, the scientific criteria which the ISG have been working to. When I heard that it is going to be based on sound science the question that came into my mind is: is there any other science that might be considered to be scientifically sound but which might come up with another view? I could not immediately think of any, but it was, if you like, a logically consistent question to ask. Perhaps you can help me. Is there any other science lurking out there?

Mr Booty: I can see how you might be of that point of view, but perhaps Defra can offer a definition of what they regard as "sound science". I think in the scientific field some science is regarded as more equal than others; it has a higher standing. Journals have different weightings, they have different scientific criteria, they have different credibility and the journals in which some of this work has appeared-we are talking about the journal Nature, The American Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Journal of Applied Ecology-are all top-flight, top-rank journals, and that is what I would regard by sound science.

Q116 Chairman: Certainly Professor Mollinson, having now had the chance myself to read his little treatise, is quite clear that the science is good in terms of the way the analysis of the statistics of this has been carried out, but you will not be surprised to learn, and some of them are sitting behind you. They are still sitting there, do not worry.

Mr Booty: I cannot feel anything just yet!

Q117 Chairman: They have a very different view. In fact, the, as usual, robust Mr Anthony Gibson of the National Farmers' Union said "Sir John's report is a council of despair", and he said, with his novel robustness, "We are not prepared to accept it." What is your reaction from your respective organisations to those kinds of comments from those who are actually in favour of culling as a solution as opposed to the principal findings of the ISG?

Mr Booty: I think my inclination is to leave the NFU, in the follow-up session, to explain how they get to their particular point of view. I would like to go back to your question about sound science. You mention Professor Mollinson. Professor Mollinson is part of the process which this trial and associated work has gone through and not only have you had this Independent Scientific Group putting the work together, it has been independently audited throughout with Professor Mollinson being the statistical auditor (the field work was also audited and the humaneness aspects were audited by three different individuals). When the results were available they were submitted to these internationally recognised journals, subjected to critical peer review-that is all part of the process of why this is sound science-and, in addition, the data on which the ISG drew those conclusions has been made publicly available in the appendices in supplementary documents to those published papers, which I am sure the ISG may well have explained to you in the previous session.

Q118 Chairman: Dr Yarnell and Mr Lawson, you have had a chance to consult, what would you like to tell us?

Dr Yarnell: First of all, I do not see this as a document for despair, I see this as a huge step forward in terms of common strategies to control the spread of TB, and there are some very sound recommendations that Defra needs to consider and investigate fully to see how they can possibly implement some of these decisions. Trevor, you were going to add something.

Mr Lawson: In terms of the NFU's perspective, having dealt with the NFU on a media basis for a long time, what we have not seen, as far as we can tell, is a scientific argument against the conclusions in the report from the NFU, and I think that is a critical factor. The data is there. Other scientists are at liberty to take the data, examine it and come up with other conclusions, but we have not seen other scientists doing that and, moreover, we have not seen the NFU doing that, so it does come back to this question of what the scientific arguments are.

Q119 Chairman: Professor John Bourne, I think we interpolated, was somewhat frustrated that Defra appear not to be paying sufficient attention to his work. There certainly seemed to be a dearth of meetings between himself and the ISG and ministers, and he was quoted as being critical of Defra's failure to incorporate the ISG's suggested amendments into their badger culling consultation document. Against that particular background, do you think, from what you have read in the report, that there would be any basis, notwithstanding what is in it, for the Government to now come up with some kind of strategy to control bovine TB where culling played a part?

Dr Yarnell: Absolutely not.

Mr Booty: One of the strengths of the report is that, not only did it, as one would expect, report the results of the trial and analyse the results, but it then spent a section of the report applying the implications of what was found to a whole range of "what if" scenarios-what if badger culling was done this way, or that way, or the other way? All those are explored in depth in the report, the pros and cons of those are explored, and they explain why they come to the conclusion that it has no meaningful role.

Q120 Chairman: Even if, for example, somebody came along and said, "Look, I live in an area which entirely replicates the circumstances of the Irish trial-small area, self-contained, impermeable boundaries-and we have got a real problem on our farm. I want to do something about it. I want the right to apply for a licence to cull", I do accept that this is a creative argument example for the sake of just discussing the point, but would you say that if somebody came along and said, "Look, that is the argument, I need to do something about it. I have ticked all the scientific boxes, it is exactly the same as what happened in Ireland", would you still say that Defra should not consider a strategy that could involve culling, for example, under those circumstances?

Mr Booty: Shall I take first strike on that?

Q121 Chairman: By all means?

Mr Booty: I am always wary of hypotheticals, and I might resist your temptation. You referred to the Irish work. It is commonly referred to---. I am referring to the four areas removal there. The geographical structure that was chosen for those with lochs and coastlines, et cetera, might start to fall within that sort of scenario that you were painting and, in those areas where there was not a natural boundary, they tried to complete the loop by having a six kilometre buffer zone, but, notwithstanding those natural boundaries and the buffer zone, they still had inward migration of badgers. There was a paper published in The Veterinary Record last November, reporting work carried out by two teams of researchers from Ireland, looking at the four counties results and looking at the different strain types that were found in the badgers removed during the trial. They found that the strain types within the badgers removed in subsequent removals were different from those in the initial removals and the researchers are interpreting that as evidence that there was inward migration of badgers into that area and that they were bringing the new strains of TB with them. So, in a sense, even in that scenario, however closely confined that was, there was still migration, there was still perturbation; it was not quite so neatly circumscribed as the hypothetical you posed to us.

Dr Yarnell: I think, in addition to that, the Irish study is flagged up quite a bit by pro-cull lobbyists. One of the problems with interpreting the results of the badger culling in Ireland is that there is an awful lot of improved cattle testing that has gone on alongside the cull, so it is very difficult to attribute the reductions they have had in TB over the last four or five years purely to badger culling. They simply do not know the level of the reduction in the disease that has been caused by badger culling as opposed to their improved testing regime. Trevor has written an extensive report on the Irish study. Maybe he would like add a little bit further.

Mr Lawson: It is certainly the case that in recent years (and this goes back approximately five years now) the Irish have introduced a number of very rigorous cattle-based measures which, in large part, can explain that 40 odd per cent reduction, and further evidence of that comes from across the border in Northern Ireland where they had a similar level of TB and tightening up on cattle to cattle transmission has achieved a similar reduction without a badger culling strategy. The thing that we thought was most interesting in Ireland was that the greatest ever recorded increase of bovine TB in Ireland occurred between 1996 and 1999 from 27,000 to more than 45,000 reactors in three years. They were culling badgers throughout that period, but in 1996 they stopped pre-movement testing of cattle.

Q122 Chairman: So both of you are unequivocal that the strategy that Defra adopts now that the ISG has reported should be consistent with the results of their work. Is it something that, if Defra did produce a strategy in which some form of culling was an element, that you would wish to challenge them in the courts?

Mr Booty: I think I might want to keep my powder dry as to what we may or may not do in terms of a potential challenge.

Q123 Chairman: So you have not ruled it out but you have not ruled it in?

Mr Booty: Well said.

Q124 Chairman: Would that be the same position?

Dr Yarnell: We would agree.

Q125 Chairman: Finally, before I bring David Drew in, you obviously have had a chance to think about the findings of the ISG report, and it may be that you still have more work to do; so let me ask this question in two parts. Are you, or when would you be, in a position to give a considered response to Defra by way of your observations and recommendations in the light of this final report as to what Defra now ought do? If you are able to help the Committee by giving us back some initial observations, that would be to our advantage.

Ms Robinson: I am happy to take that. I think, as Colin has pointed out, there is an awful lot to consider in the report, but we are very keen that the report actually provides a very useful basis to actually start looking at the possibilities in terms of a strategy of dealing with TB. In terms of our consideration and work on that front, we are going to look at it over the next month or so. We are obviously very wary of recess dates and things and people wanting comments and views as soon as possible, but we do hope to be able to contribute fairly shortly where we see a viable way forward.

Q126 Chairman: I was going to ask whether you had either heard from your contacts in Defra as to what their timetable of action was, or whether in fact you would prefer them not to make an announcement so that there was a period for proper reflection and discussion?

Ms Robinson: I think the latter is necessary. We have got a chance now to actually come up with some good proposals. I think any quick reaction to such a document would be quite foolish, and I think it is important now that all parties go away, think about this and actually look at what opportunities there are for the interested parties to work together, because there will be some areas where there is a need for collaborative work and opportunities for collaborative work.

Q127 Chairman: Dr Yarnell, do you want to respond on that?

Mr Lawson: Just picking up on that, one of the key things that comes out of this report - the badger culling question - is largely answered by ISG. That is done and dusted. Where there is uncertainty is which of the cattle-based measures are best implemented. That is the big question. Certainly the Badger Trust is not in a position to analyse the best of those from the point of view of which will deliver the most economic benefit, and that is what this debate ultimately comes down to. If the Government wishes to get on top of bovine tuberculosis it is which of the measures on offer gives it the biggest bang for the buck that is being paid out by the tax payer, and that requires some fairly robust analysis by Defra of the economics of that in partnership with the industry. What I would add is that this is not really new. Defra advised its partners in industry, back in December of last year, that the current TB testing regime was not sensitive enough to prevent the spread and movement between cattle. So, this has been on the cards for some time, and we would have liked to have seen further ground work done on that. Moreover, the predecessors of this Committee argued, virtually five years ago now, that there was concern in the absence of a plan B from Defra, and that is a concern for us too.

Chairman: Once again, we are ahead of our time but it is nice to do that. David Drew.

Q128 Mr Drew: We would like to hear the news about plan B. I would welcome your impression, because two of you, at least, were here on Monday to hear the four representatives of the ISG. What the ISG did in the session with us, and later in the Animal Welfare All Party Group, was to be very clear of what science they were willing to talk about and what they were not willing to talk about. Is there a real danger (and this, I think, applies to the NFU) that people pick the bits of science in the report that fit their agenda and the other bits, which are less satisfactory as far as they are concerned, they leave alone? I am worried that either the report is read as whole-it is a detailed report and we are, all of us, trying to digest it-or, effectively, it is just one more piece of evidence which goes along with many other bits of evidence that we have had over many years. I would welcome your views on that, perhaps starting with Colin Booty.

Mr Booty: I think you used a phrase there towards the end, "Is it just another piece of evidence?". There is a sort of exploratory view there. I think it is much, much more than that. It is the compilation of ten years' work by a team set up for the purpose, and I think this should provide the bedrock on which policy is formed. There are other pieces of evidence, sure. Most of those complement the work that has been done. I was at the ISG's open meeting yesterday, and I think Professor Woodroffe referred to some of the Irish work and saw the Irish studies as complementing their work, so not a conflict in that sense, but I would see this as the mainstay of policy formation, although I am aware that there are other pieces of research that are not yet finalised and in the public domain that were part of the associated programme of the work.

Dr Yarnell: This scientific report is quite clear to me. The badger side of the issue is dealt with quite clearly. The underlying problem with any badger control is the perturbation effect, and, as Professor Woodroffe mentioned to you on Monday, there is no getting away from that. So, we are at this position now where you are looking at a plan B, but there are things that can be done with the Wildlife Reservoir, which Defra are investigating. For example, husbandry, reducing the contact rates at farm buildings, which I think is possibly quite a great transmission risk. Also in this report it states that, if we can start to control the TB in cattle, there is also a chance that the incidence and prevalence of TB within the Wildlife Reservoir itself will also be reduced. There is no timescale given to that, but that is something to look forward to in the future and possibly, if a vaccine is developed, that could be integrated into the strategy.

Q129 Mr Williams: Before the ISG report was produced there was considerable speculation in the press as to what Defra's response would be, and, indeed, there was a suggestion that the Secretary of State had written to his fellow Cabinet members, indicating that there may be progress towards larger area culls. What was your reaction to those press speculations?

Ms Robinson: I think the critical thing is that was then. It was alleged that a letter was sent. We are certainly unaware of any kind of letter. We had not seen anything. I also understand that there were discussions about quite what was in the alleged letter, possibly even looking at certain options rather than just one view or another, but I think the critical thing is that we now actually have the sound science that Defra has asked for and I think the way to move forward is to use the ISG report as a basis, and, obviously, Defra will have to discuss with Cabinet colleagues, with other ministers and work out a way forward on that basis.

Q130 Mr Williams: Do you want to say anything?

Mr Lawson: We noted that The Sunday Times did not say that it had seen the letter, which we thought was interesting, but the curious thing for me was that the letter quoted a figure of 100 square kilometres for culling as making a difference. John Bourne mentioned to you on Monday that that was in the Government's consultation in 2005, but the ISG has rejected that and made it clear that it was at least 300 square kilometres in early 2006. I have to say that we felt it very unlikely that the Minister would be arguing that culling over 100 square kilometres would be effective when it had been rejected more than a year ago by the scientific advisers.

Q131 Mr Williams: Would you agree that science is never complete and that actually the scientific method is about achieving results, then developing another hypothesis and conducting further experiments to test that hypothesis? To say that this is the complete science is not a proper scientific approach?

Mr Booty: There is always more research to be done, there are always more questions to answer, so in that sense there is always more science to be done. I think, the ISG has successfully undertaken and completed what they were charged with doing and from the outset, from our first interactions with Professor Bourne and the ISG team, we as an organisation were impressed by the approach that they were taking to this problem, not only in the badger culling trial but looking at the problem in its broader perspective. They were going to investigate the cattle disease aspects as well, a wide range of things, so they were not going to take the narrow remit of just overseeing a culling trial and seeing whether it did or did not do certain things, and that approach applied. I suspect that some of the people at the ISG themselves would say there is more work to be done, but this now gives a sound basis on which to base some policy.

Q132 Mr Williams: I think Dr Yarnell said that the real problem with culling as an integrated approach to dealing with bovine TB is perturbation, the edge effect, and that the evidence from proactive culling is that actually you get an increased reduction of breakdowns and reactors as the process goes on, and, of course, the bigger the area the lesser the edge effect and the less perturbation in proportion to the area that you are culling. Would you not say that that leads you to the premise that actually increasing the size of the culling gives you a better effect and less problems with perturbation?

Mr Booty: As I mentioned earlier, one of the strengths of part of this report is that it looks at other badger culling scenarios, not just the ones that were operated during the trial, and one of those scenarios was: what if the area was big? What if it was 300 square kilometres? Yes, in certain respects, the bigger area proportionately the smaller circumference you have and proportionately the smaller edge. It is still a big edge, there are still a lot of neighbouring farmers to that edge that might be affected, but the larger the area the more your practical and logistical problems of---

Q133 Mr Williams: But that is not a scientific problem, that is a practical problem.

Mr Booty: No.

Q134 Mr Williams: So, looking at the science, would you agree that that hypothesis is worthy of investigation?

Mr Booty: The ISG takes the view that that is not worthy of consideration.

Q135 Mr Williams: For practical reasons.

Mr Lawson: Do you mean a scientific investigation?

Q136 Mr Williams: Or a practical test, or whatever.

Mr Lawson: Presumably that would be another scientific experiment. Let us draw the logical conclusion out from that. If you look at the bovine TB area, a couple of years ago Mr Bradshaw said in Parliament that within about one and a half kilometres of TB infected farms at that stage, if you added up that land area, it was in excess of 25,000 square kilometres. So, you cannot just do a bit, you cannot say, "Let us just do the first 300 square kilometres." What is clear about the science is that you have to do the whole lot in one hit and you have to do it consistently. Even from a scientific point of view, it is significant because of the resource implications. Science does not operate solely in a vacuum. The other difficulty with that is that the areas were selected and the research was undertaken in so far as it was practicable. We know that in some areas there was less landowner co-operation than in others, but, of course, as you go beyond that, you are going to encounter large areas where culling is not possible, so the edge effect within the culling area, as well as outside it, could also be exceeded to the point where the negative effects are so much greater. So, you need to take all of that into account. It is very difficult. I think it is wrong-headed, if you like, to say that if the world was different, if the landscape of the West Country and Western England was different, would this work? It may well do. But even if you take into account the simple modelling of the ISG, you would only be dealing with 30% of the problem, and, again, if you come back to the economic argument, which is what the political argument is all about, "How are we going to get the most bang for the buck?", it is quite clearly going to be on cattle.

Q137 Chairman: The south-west of England is contained on two sides by sea, so you could surely run a bit of a trial by delineating part of that, could you not?

Mr Lawson: What, the whole of it, or just putting a line halfway down the West Country?

Q138 Chairman: Depending on how many square kilometres you wanted to have as a trial to try out the large-scale effect which the ISG report says does actually have some beneficial outcome, you could draw your line moving, if you like, from Lands End upwards, where it was practical so to do.

Mr Lawson: I am sure Professor Christl Donnelly could give you more on this, but you have to bear in mind that one area is not a very effective scientific trial. The strength of the ISG's work was that it was a large-scale randomised culling trial. As you pointed out earlier, the Irish selected areas because they had boundaries.

Q139 Chairman: We are going to talk about Ireland in detail in a moment.

Mr Lawson: That suggests that what is going on in the rest of Ireland is not going to be what they found in those areas, so you generate problems of your own. Do not forget that TB does not stop in the West Country; it carries on up the west coast. It goes up into Shropshire, it goes into Staffordshire, it goes into Derbyshire and it is down in Pembrokeshire, so you would be sectioning off a very large part of the country if you were looking round that route as a practical solution to bovine TB control, and, of course, there is Sussex.

Chairman: There are many that do not see it spreading further than that, but I am sure we will hear from them fairly shortly. David Taylor.

Q140 David Taylor: Political parties have spin doctors and pressure groups have media advisers. In your battery of responsibilities there will no doubt be one involving the drafting, approval and distribution of press releases. Would that be true?

Mr Lawson: Yes, that is right.

Q141 David Taylor: I do not know if you recall one less than three weeks ago which seemed to reveal that you do not think much of the State Veterinary Service. Would that be true?

Mr Lawson: I will qualify that. We looked at the State Veterinary Service because we noticed in recent weeks very public statements by officers of the State Veterinary Service claiming that they knew what the problem was, in others words badgers, that they knew how to deal with it and that they were frustrated at being unable to deal with that. We have noted that this has been a trend for some time, as our report makes clear, but we looked in detail at what the SVS was saying and whether or not the claims that state vets were making were supported by the facts at their disposal, and we found that they were not. I would clarify our position by saying that we do not have a problem with the SVS, or Animal Health as it stands per se, because it has long been an under-resourced organisation which has suffered problems as a result, but we do feel that at that level they were insufficiently qualified to make the claims that they were making.

Q142 David Taylor: It was not just 'for some time', though, was it, your remarks were a bit more long term? You are too young to be familiar with the Queen in Lewis Carroll: verdict first, trial later. That is what you are really saying about the State Veterinary Service, are you not? You said that many of them have devoted their careers to, and stake their reputations on, blaming badgers. They were your words, were they not?

Mr Lawson: That is the case.

Q143 David Taylor: So, it is more than just in recent times. You believe that they have been of that opinion for a very long time?

Mr Lawson: Yes, and I might add that the predecessor of this Committee was critical of the State Veterinary Service for its failure to use a scientific approach in analysing the problem.

Q144 David Taylor: There are not too many common people on both Committees, I do not think, but you went on in that press release to paint a fairly bleak picture of the Minister. You said that he would be in a science vacuum at the mercy of state vets, as if he is some poor, simple sap baffled by scientists with a hidden agenda. That seems to be the underlying theme of that press release, does it not?

Mr Lawson: We were concerned about the lack of scientific rigor as applied within the State Veterinary Service. I might add that we are not the only ones to have expressed concern about that. The Science Advisory Council at Defra has also expressed concern about that.

Q145 David Taylor: I will come on to that in a minute. Okay, in seven days time, or whenever it is, the ISG will be no more. That is the scenario you were looking forward to, was it not? You were suggesting that there would be particular difficulties for the animal welfare minister at that point. Could you go into a little bit more detail as to what difficulties you anticipate?

Mr Lawson: Sure. We have been aware for some time within the State Veterinary Service at a senior level of the Minister being advised that the veterinary advice is to deal with the root cause of the problem by removing it. That was the major justification for badger culling. That position has not changed. The state vets at a senior level are still arguing that, both on a regional basis and on a national basis.

Q146 David Taylor: So you think that, after the ISG have gone over the horizon, the state vets will be arm-twisting the Minister back to their point of view. Is that what you are suggesting?

Mr Lawson: The Science Advisory Council, because, do not forget, we take this whole picture into account---

Q147 David Taylor: What is your own view? We will come to the Defra Science Advisory Council in a moment. What specifically do you feel or in what ways will the Minister be vulnerable to this type of deal in smoke-filled rooms, as it were?

Mr Lawson: For example, proposals which would suggest that a different kind of culling regime might yield results, not identified by the ISG. I have to say that since we wrote that report, we did not know at that stage that the ISG was going to be so thorough in addressing the full range of culling options. One of the things that we were involved in, in 2005, was the citizen's panels which Defra ran, where I sat alongside Meurig Raymond from the NFU and two representatives from the State Veterinary Service, and one of the things that was of interest there was that the state vets were making it very clear to the members of the public there that, for example, the badger culling in the trial was inefficient, only 20 to 60% of badgers culled. That was what the state vets were telling members of the public at that event. That has since been shown to be factually inaccurate, but that was a very serious cause for concern to us.

Q148 David Taylor: Now that the ISG report is out, you are still not reassured that the bleak picture that you have predicted is less likely to take place, are you?

Mr Lawson: Because the scientific advice has analysed all those possible culling scenarios.

Q149 David Taylor: So it is not as bad as you predicted 20 days ago?

Mr Lawson: That is right.

Q150 David Taylor: To come back to the point you were trying to make when I interrupted you (and I am sorry about that) the Defra Science Advisory Council has agreed with you to an extent by saying that the Government should have established a bovine TB science advisory body rather earlier. That is not going to be available until 2008. Do you think that Professor Bourne and his team should be put on life-support until 2008, until that body exists? You did not want the ISG to be closed down at the moment. You have said that you wanted a bovine TB science advisory body to be set up. Would that be a way of bridging the concerns you have got?

Mr Lawson: There are two issues there. First of all, we think that the Government needs to have continued broad spectrum scientific advice and how the Government goes about that is its decision. Whether the ISG would want to continue doing so is hard to say, but it is not exactly either what the Science Advisory Council has requested. The SAC has requested a more broad-brush approach that focuses on the bacterium itself. That was not the ISG's role. The ISG's role was far more specific than that with relation to badgers and bovine TB.

Q151 David Taylor: In your view, but not theirs, would the continuation of the life of the ISG be desirable in the absence of the science advisory body that you refer to?

Mr Lawson: I would think so, in the absence of that, but I do not see why it should take until 2008 to formulate a science advisory body. This has been on the cards for over a year already. There is no obvious reason for it to be taking that length of time, other than a lack of interest in Defra for establishing it.

Q152 David Taylor: Mr Booty, you look as if you want to say something.

Mr Booty: Yes, if I may, I was going to pick up on that point, because the way your questioning was going, I was wondering whether we needed to accept the presumption that this new strand of independent scientific advice need not come on stream until 2008. There have been a number of years' discussions between the Science Advisory Council and Defra, so the question might need to be asked, why do these need to be prolonged for another six months? At yesterday's ISG open meeting, in the margins to that, I was speaking to Professor Gaskell, who is the Chairman of the TB Sub Group of the SAC, about what they saw as important, and they do see it as important, as it being a single strand of independent science advice on the TB issue going into Defra; and I questioned him in relation to Peter Jinman's TB Advisory Group and he said he has had discussions with him and he sees it being quite distinct. The TB Advisory Group, which is already in existence, is considered to have much more liaison with stakeholders and a policy implementation role, not as a strand of independent scientific advice, and it is how Defra gets hold of that. They were airing these issues in one of the many consultation documents that have come out of Defra in recent years. So, I think we go back to the point: what is magic about 2008?

Q153 David Taylor: You still remain concerned that the pro-cullers will identify some amenable independent advisers who will then whisper in the Minister's ear in the absence of an equivalent to the ISG?

Mr Lawson: I would say that is a very genuine concern based on our interactions with that part of Defra up until now.

Q154 Sir Peter Soulsby: I was interested in what you said about the Irish experience and the decline in the number of reactors from 1998 through to 2006. The Irish Minister of Agriculture and Food takes a very different view as to the reasoning behind that drop. Why is she wrong?

Mr Lawson: Briefly, there are two parts to the Irish question. That is probably not the best way of describing it, but you know what I mean. There is the Four Areas Study, which was a scientific experiment which, if you look at the ISG's report in detail, raises some questions about the conclusions of that in terms of how the research here suggests that the results might have been exaggerated. Alongside that is the wider question of TB control policy in Ireland and how it has changed over the years. In Veterinary Microbiology there was an interesting paper, published in the wake of the International TB Conference held in Ireland by Professor Simon More and Margaret Good from Ireland, where they looked in detail at the history of TB policy in Ireland. What that showed was a range of different measures. It showed that they had been culling badgers for 20 years at various levels and the ISG's research here, compared to the Four Areas Study, showed that when the science started they had very low levels of badgers in terms of population density compared to Britain. But what it also showed that when, as I said earlier, they abandoned pre-movement testing in 1996, TB went right up. It then gets a little bit more sketchy towards the latter end of the timeline as it is shown (and it is harder to tell, and we have not been able to find any figures on this as yet, only a general statement from the Minister) to what extent additional measures, including gamma interferon, tighter controls on farms under TB restriction, restrictions on animal movement, various restrictions in terms of across the border, and so on, have had an effect; but I can recall an interview with Margaret Good from the department in 2003 on Radio Four saying that they had had very significant benefits as a result of using gamma interferon, and that is the problem. The NFU has referred to the Irish success, but that does encompass (when they talk about those figures) that period when the Irish were doing a great deal of cattle-based TB measures. In addition, a report from the University of Reading for Defra published in 2005 made it clear that in Northern Ireland they had a major reduction in bovine TB of 40% in one calendar year by focusing on cattle-based measures, particularly with the roll-out of gamma interferon and clamping down on farms under TB restriction.

Q155 Sir Peter Soulsby: Looking at the Minister's own views on this, she said, not just that there were a number of factors, but that her department was satisfied that the badger removal policy made a significant contribution to the improvement of the situation. You are saying that she is totally mistaken, are you?

Mr Lawson: Well, we are of the view that the view expressed by the Minister is influenced as much by the politics of the situation as the science, and one of the reasons for that is that---. Let me give you an example. In Ireland the view now is that badgers roam very widely, in areas in excess of 15 kilometres, on a regular basis. It is a bit like what happens when you have the perturbation effect here. As you reduce badger population density, the animals roam more widely. So you have got a wide-roaming badger population, which, according to the Irish Government, is responsible, in very large part, to the problem of TB in Ireland. They are the majority factor, it appears. Yet, when you look at bovine TB in cattle by strain type, it is very tightly clustered. Those two facts do not add up, do they? If you have got badgers roaming widely and, supposedly, spreading the disease over very long distances, why is TB very tightly clustered in cattle herds? Another problem we found with the Irish data is that during the 1990s the average level of bovine TB identified in badgers was 12.8%. In the Minister's statement I think you will find it has gone up to 40% now. In other documents we have seen it is described as in the order of 20%-in statements by the Minister-so there is that significant variation in the definition of what proportion of badgers are infected with TB, so there is another problem there. Finally, picking up on that issue, the assumption that because there is X percentage of TB in the badger population that indicates that they are the agents, in other words more TB in the population means that they are spreading it at a greater rate, is not necessarily the case, because in epidemiological modelling being susceptible to TB is not the same is being infectious with it. Certainly what we do not see in Ireland are clear statements about the infectivity level of badgers in Ireland. There are lots of figures about the supposed level of infection within badgers, but not the extent to which they are supposedly infectious.

Sir Peter Soulsby: Thank you, Chairman. I think I will leave it there, because no doubt the NFU have been listening to that---

Chairman: I can see they have.

Q156 Sir Peter Soulsby: ---and I will be interested to hear their perspective on that later on.

Chairman: Sitting where I am, I can see the body language of the audience, so I can see we are in for an interesting session. I would like to move on, Roger, please.

Q157 Mr Williams: Thank you, Chairman. Could I just ask the RSPCA about your assessment of TB in badgers, in terms of the percentage of the population that have it, but also in terms of the effect that it has on badgers themselves in terms of their general health and well-being?

Mr Booty: The percentage of the badger population that will be infected with TB obviously varies from area to area. I think the figures from within the badgers that were removed in the culling trial varied between of the order of about 4% up to about 40%, so there is obviously a range within that. Within the Road Traffic Accident Study that was undertaken, I think the average figure was that about 12% were infected. Of the badger population that is infected, a relatively small percentage will go on to develop acute clinical signs of the disease in which they will be perhaps emaciated, have severe lesions et cetera. In that handful of animals, perhaps, yes, there will be a degree of suffering, if that is, I suspect, where you were endeavouring to go to.

Q158 Mr Williams: But if you say there is 12% or 15%, how many badgers is that? What is your estimate of the badger population?

Mr Booty: That is one of the $64,000 questions in this equation.

Q159 Mr Williams: You say there will be a handful of badgers that will suffer serious effects from TB?

Mr Booty: Yes.

Q160 Mr Williams: Can you put a number on a handful?

Mr Booty: No, my recollection is that something of the order of 1 or 2% might go on---

Q161 Mr Williams: How many badgers. It is very easy to talk in percentages, but are we talking about 50,000 badgers having serious effects of TB?

Mr Booty: No, you are probably talking about a matter of hundreds.

Q162 Mr Williams: So more than 100?

Mr Booty: Probably in that region. Why I said it was one of the $64,000 questions in this equation is because the last national badger survey that was undertaken was over ten years ago, so there is no current baseline data to inform that part of your question. There is a range of estimates that are put out that are between 300,000 and 400,000-it is in that sort of area-and the population in some areas has shown signs of increase, in some areas has shown signs of stability.

Q163 Mr Williams: Anecdotally people would say the badger population is increasing rapidly, but you do not believe that that is the case?

Dr Yarnell: The long-term studies have very accurate data on publishing dynamics of badgers. In the Woodchester Park study, which I am sure you are all aware of, the population did increase in the 1990s, it plateaued off around 2000 and I believe that now the population is actually starting to decrease, and I believe they are going to publish that data shortly. It is very difficult to know what is happening with the badger population. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and a feeling of what is happening based on what people see on the roads and so on, but it does not correlate very well to actual numbers.

Q164 Mr Williams: The behaviour of badgers visiting cattle sheds, for instance, is a relatively new phenomenon, or not? Some people would say the increase in the badger population is forcing badgers into positions and territory that they have not taken up before.

Mr Lawson: It is new in the sense that is has been filmed for the first time. What was curious about that research at Woodchester Park is that the farmers, when they were asked by the scientists, said that they did not think badgers were getting into their buildings, and when they were shown the footage they said, "My goodness." They had no idea what was going on on the ground. On the issue of population, let us be clear about one thing, there are two factors that are going to govern badger population dynamics in the round. The major one is habitat availability. Unless there are major shifts in habitat availability in the countryside as a result of major changes in agricultural practice, then populations will remain largely stable, unless you cull them or some other large scale element from outside, say, for example, climate change leading to more prolonged, dry summers having a negative impact on badger reproduction, but even then wildlife will compensate and take advantage of the habitat to the maximum by breeding faster; so it is unlikely that there is a major shift in that regard. We have seen figures bandied around of badger populations in excess of one million, then it goes up to two million the next week and three million the next week, but on average the overall figures coming in are around 300,000 to 350,000. Can I just add, on this issue of how many badgers are ill with bovine TB, when you look at the ISG's data one of the other things that that makes clear is that TB varies enormously in terms of its intensity in both time and space, and so badgers in one area may have higher levels of TB than in others but that is not consistent over time, so you could not look at an area of the country with any degree of accuracy and specify whether three badgers or ten badgers in that thousand square kilometres had TB at that time.

Q165 Mr Williams: Do you believe that bovine TB in badgers is an animal welfare issue and, if it is, do you think there should be any priority for developing a vaccine to deal with that animal welfare issue?

Mr Booty: There are two related elements to that question. I will take the first one first and come back to the vaccine. Generally speaking, we take the view that TB in badgers is not a significant animal welfare issue. Society at large (and I do not mean just our society but it was a point that came out in one of the Defra consultations on the wider animal health and welfare strategy) takes the view that disease in wildlife is part and parcel of wildlife, it is one of the challenges and one of the drivers behind what causes species to evolve. Society does not get involved with wild animals that have many diseases intrinsically. There is, particularly from our perspective, a nasty little parasite that burrows away into the nasal cavity and brains of stoats and weasels, but there is not an animal welfare strategy to deal with that parasite that has that effect on stoats and weasels. Society becomes involved with disease in wildlife really for two reasons. One is because it has a zoonotic effect. In the case of badgers it is having implications into cattle disease and, potentially perhaps, human disease. The other scenario is where a wildlife disease is having a biodiversity impact, something like the squirrel pox virus. Those are the situations, not usually because of disease per se in the wild animal. The other element of your question was about a vaccine.

Q166 Mr Williams: For badgers?

Mr Booty: I think for badgers, yes, but not just from the perspective that it would be good for badgers. I think, broadening it out, ultimately a vaccine may help provide a solution for this problem. It is the approach that is being developed and researched in New Zealand, it is also the route that the teams in Ireland are investigating and it is also a route that is being investigated in this country and, fortunately, there is collaboration between the various parties and I think that ultimately is the route that we need to go down. I am aware not only that the Chairman is watching the clock, or whatever, but that one must be wary about making simplistic comparisons, but if you consider the situation with the rabies virus in Europe, where for many years the problem of wildlife rabies occurred and it was attempted to be dealt with by a slaughter policy of various species of wildlife on the Continent, that singularly failed to address the spread of rabies and it was not until an oral bait was developed to deal with it that we have seen a dramatic decline in the incidence of rabies throughout the European mainland?

Chairman: Mr Drew had a question on wildlife.

Q167 Mr Drew: Again the problem is, and this is one of the difficulties, in a sense we are obsessed with bovine TB in badgers, but, of course, bovine TB is carried by a number of species, particularly roe deer. I know you do not like hypotheticals, but if we were to see domestic animals become more subjected to bovine TB, which would then have an impact on the human species, would that change your mind? I know that is a difficult one for you to say yes or no to, but there are reasonable scenarios out there if the spread of bovine TB was to carry on uninhibited?

Mr Booty: If I can take the element: does the spread of bovine TB cause us concern? Yes, of course it causes us concern, but I think what follows from that is how does one effectively address that spread of TB, and that is where we wish to get to; so action that would effectively prevent that spread is where we need to be.

Q168 Patrick Hall: There has been speculation about possibly the effect of a Government decision not to cull. In fact, as long ago as December 2005 the Deputy Chairman of the ISG, Professor Donnelly, was reported as saying that if the Government banned badger culling it could end up with a serious problem of patchy, illegal culling. As we all know, the badger is a protected animal species and there are possible criminal sanctions, including imprisonment, if someone is found guilty of an offence. I am glad to see that Mr Raymond, the Deputy NFU President, said last October that some badger culling was already taking place in certain parts of the country by desperate people. Could I ask the two organisations before us now, does illegal badger culling take place and, if so, would a ban put the pressure on to increase that and, if so, what should be done to tackle that? Maybe Mr Booty could start.

Mr Booty: In relation to your question about patchy, illegal culling, the evidence that we have before us shows that organised legal culling can make matters worse, and, therefore, it follows from that that anything less than that in terms of patchiness or illegality is likely to make a situation worse rather than better. One can certainly sympathise and understand the concerns of farmers, we are not unsympathetic to farmers, who are in a mess on this, but what I think has not been well undertaken so far is the translation of the sort of science that is coming out of this work. What is this perturbation? What does that involve? What are the implications for that? I think that needs to be more clearly and concisely conveyed.

Q169 Chairman: Can we just come back to the question that was asked instead of having a lecture on perturbation?

Mr Booty: I am sorry, my train of thought wandered from where it started.

Q170 Chairman: You perturbated. Can you come back now to the question Mr Hall asked you. Have you got any evidence that any illegal culling has been going on?

Mr Booty: The RSPCA routinely, throughout the course of the year, receives a number of complaints about illegal badger activity and persecution. It is always, in whatever field of endeavour you are talking about, difficult to judge how much illegal activity is going on? How much of the iceberg are you picking up?

Q171 Chairman: Simply, the answer is you have had some complaints but you have got no evidence?

Ms Robinson: In terms of illegal badger culling or just general complaints about badger---

Chairman: Illegal badger culling.

Q172 Patrick Hall: The question is illegal badger culling. You are an organisation that would be at the centre, I guess, of hearing about this and may in fact prosecute.

Mr Booty: The RSPCA regularly undertakes prosecutions of those involved in illegal badger digging and illegal badger baiting. That has been the case for a number of years. There are not a large number of cases each year, but there are a steady number of cases.

Q173 Mr Gray: Those people that are allegedly badger baiting, that is quite different?

Mr Booty: Yes, I said badger digging and badger baiting.

Q174 Mr Gray: That is quite a different thing, a different group of people.

Mr Booty: Oh yes.

Q175 Chairman: Before we get into too much speculation, the short answer is you do something, but you have not got any specific examples of what Mr Hall was asking you about?

Ms Robinson: I am not aware of any cases having been reported.

Q176 Chairman: So the answer is no. That is very good. What about the Badger Trust? Have you got any proof that there has been illegal badger culling going on? It is yes or no. Have you got any?

Mr Lawson: Can I raise the issue of the definition of "illegal", and it is an important issue, because the protection of badgers---

Q177 Chairman: Let me put it in rather more layman's language. What we are talking about is people going out with various forms of firearm on their farm and doing whatever they want to do to badgers: shooting and killing them to put it in straight language.

Mr Lawson: There have been documented cases of this behaviour taking place, on occasion broadcast by the individuals involved on the media, and the question has arisen: should they be prosecuted? Our understanding of the issue is that it poses a difficult area for the Crown Prosecution Service insofar as there is---

Q178 Chairman: Before we get into the Crown Prosecution Service, I think Mr Hall was interested to know if anything had been going on. We will worry about prosecution at another time. We are trying to get an idea if there are a lot of people going out and doing DIY culls?

Mr Lawson: I think the short answer to that is that we do not know.

Chairman: Fine. Mr Hall, back to you.

Q179 Patrick Hall: We will move on then, because if you have not got any evidence, or if the NFU seems to think it has been going on, the question was, would a total ban increase the pressure for illegal activity, but you have left that hanging in the air, which is entirely up to you. Could I turn to another matter? Mr Booty, you said a few minutes ago that the issue that we are talking about today is not a significant animal welfare issue, and that was, I think, with regard to the badger; but is this not, in fact, an animal welfare issue, certainly with regard to cattle, I would have thought perhaps badgers too, but maybe there is a different definition because some are wild and others are domesticated animals. Certainly the NFU seems to have a view about the RSPCA's position on this. There has been a recent comment from the Director of Communications saying, with regard to the RSPCA, that in resisting action to deal with the disease in wildlife, the RSPCA was turning a blind eye to the welfare of tens of thousands of cattle that are either slaughtered prematurely each year because of TB or which are subject to near intolerable levels of stress caused by almost continual testing. How should we fairly balance the animal welfare issues that legitimately arise in this difficult question?

Mr Booty: I think, in terms of animal welfare, my colleagues in the Society's farm animal welfare department would rank much higher up the scale of animal welfare issues problems such as lameness and mastitis, which affect a far larger number of cattle and have a far greater welfare impact. In terms of the cattle that are slaughtered, the question of whether that slaughter is premature or not is not in itself an animal welfare issue because the slaughter will be undertaken humanely, so the slaughter itself is not a welfare issue. There may be welfare issues associated with the consequences of the restrictions on the farmer's operations, that perhaps he will have to retain more stock for longer, et cetera, problems with sufficient feedstuffs, et cetera, those sorts of miscellaneous consequences on how they operate their farming business, but in terms of direct cattle welfare, no, my colleagues in the farm animals department do not believe that it is a significant cattle welfare problem itself. It is not as if the disease is progressing in the cattle to a clinical state. The testing mechanism is endeavouring to pick it up in the earlier stages.

Ms Robinson: To come in on the end of that, I think Colin has hit the nail on the head there. In terms of welfare, if you are looking at culling strategies or how you deal with animals that are potentially infected, in terms of the cattle it is in a very controlled environment, it is done with somebody who is competent at humanely dispatching cattle. With regard to a possible cull of badgers, obviously in the trials you have had skilled, trained people who did it humanely; whereas the concern for us in terms of welfare of the badgers and any possible cull is that there have been rumours that they might not necessarily be the same kind of trained people, but it is a real dilemma in terms of balancing cattle welfare against badger welfare.

Q180 Patrick Hall: I must say, I am fascinated by what seems to be a different definition of animal welfare to what maybe the general public would understand it to be. There is nothing wrong with there being different definitions, and it is your full-time concern, but the idea that if an animal has a foreshortened life because it has a disease but as long as it is dispatched humanely that is not an animal welfare issue is an interesting issue. Perhaps there is not time to go down that road, but I do find it quite fascinating---

Mr Booty: My colleague in our farm animal department will be pleased to discuss it with you.

Q181 Patrick Hall: ---that the RSPCA does not see this issue as fundamentally an animal welfare issue or at least include significant animal welfare implications. What does the Badger Trust think about that?

Mr Lawson: I will make a couple of observations. On the issue of cattle welfare, the Government had a report published last year on TB testing and it made the interesting observation from vets that the current trend in terms of breeds towards crossbreeds, continental crossbreeds, is posing difficulties in terms of doing the skin-test itself because those animals are particularly difficult to manage in a testing environment - they thrash about and kick about a lot and get pretty stressed out by the experience. One of the benefits of gamma interferon testing that has been mooted is that it is a quicker blood test that only requires one visit from the vet and does not require you to put those livestock through the pen twice. That has to be balanced by the fact that the scientific advice shows that the skin-test and gamma interferon work best used together; so that may not be a great benefit. Can I just add one other thing in relation to your question about illegal badger culling. One of the things I wanted to add on that, if you look at Defra's map of bovine TB, it is a small-scale map where you see the whole country and there is a big blob of red over the West Country and up the west coast, but when you go down to the macro level and you look at the distribution of bovine TB at a local level, generally there is relatively modest clustering in terms of infected herds, and when you look at parishes you get large areas where there is no TB. In other words, in a parish only maybe, at a maximum, say, 35% of the herds may be affected, and one of the difficulties is, if you have got 35% of the herds in a parish affected and the farmers on those are culling badgers, you are creating, in effect, a perturbation effect on the macro level that puts their neighbours at risk. Our view is that the NFU should seize on the scientific research that has been published and make it absolutely clear to its members that that is the worse thing that they could possibly be doing for their neighbours as well as for the farming community as a whole.

Q182 Patrick Hall: That last comment was about the previous question, which is on the record, and maybe that will help you discuss things with the NFU, but can I, therefore, conclude on the relative merits or otherwise of animal welfare considerations that both of you disagree with the NFU's view, which seems to be that you are both more concerned about the welfare of badgers than of cattle. You are both saying that it is not an animal welfare issue full stop.

Mr Booty: It would be a wrong impression to say we are not concerned, that our concern is solely related to the badgers in the context of your question and the disease and the consequences. We see the consequence primarily as not being a major animal welfare issue. That is not to say that we are not concerned, as I sense might be interpreted, about farm animal welfare.

Patrick Hall: That seems to be what the NFU has said, but we will have the opportunity to find out this afternoon.

Chairman: I am going to bring matters to a conclusion, because I think we have listened very carefully to both the Badger Trust and the RSPCA and we are very grateful to you for your contribution and observations. I suspect that the Committee's work in this area will not be concluded quite as quickly as we had thought and, therefore, that gives you an opportunity, during your period of further reflection, if there is anything else that you wanted to communicate to us to assist us in our further work, we would, as always, be delighted to hear from you, but can I thank you for your observations this afternoon. It has been very interesting to hear from you and I am now going to invite you, if you would be kind enough, to vacate the witness stand and we will hear from the National Farmers' Union. Thank you very much.

Witnesses: Mr Meurig Raymond, Deputy President, Mr Jan Rowe, Bovine TB Spokesman, Mr Martin Haworth, Director of Policy, and Ms Catherine McLaughlin, Animal Health and Welfare Adviser, National Farmers' Union, and Professor Rosie Woodroffe, gave evidence.

 

Chairman: Can I welcome representatives of the National Farmers' Union to the second half of our evidence session. As always, we are terribly optimistic about when things are going to start; we are less clear about when they are going to finish. We have spent a little bit longer on the first session than we planned to. Nonetheless, I think it was important to hear from those two organisations, just as it is now important to hear from farmers' representatives. We particularly welcome Meurig Raymond, the Deputy President of the Union, Jan Rowe, who is their Bovine TB Spokesman, Martin Haworth, their Director of Policy and Catherine McLaughlin, their Animal Health and Welfare Adviser. I am going to ask David Drew if he would be kind enough to commence our questioning.

Q183 Mr Drew: Monday's report must have been devastating news for yourselves. Obviously, there was a degree of spinning in advance of the final report of the ISG, but it did not help your perspective in that you wanted some clarity in your well-known position that badger culling is an effective tool in trying to reduce the level of bovine TB; and I know there is an argument that you could still look at this idea of a very large-scale cull but certainly in the later meetings that the ISG attended they seemed to pretty well deal with that in terms of the issue of the perturbation effects in the area around. How do you respond to the ISG now, how do you see some of the science and what is the way forward for the NFU?

Mr Raymond: Can I also point out that our President, Mr Peter Kendall, is sitting at the back, so this is an important issue for us. Yes, we were extremely disappointed, I have to say, with the report and surprised as well, particularly as far as the culling aspect is concerned. When you think back over the last couple of weeks, and I have been involved in discussions with officials, with ministers, and I do not need to say that there were articles in The Sunday Times and, I believe, in The Daily Telegraph leading up to the release of the report, we were extremely surprised when the report was made public. I have to say, we believe that that final report was very slanted. It was particularly slanted towards cattle measures and against a badger cull. It is obviously a 300-page document. We are analysing that document within house. It is going to take some time. There are some positive statements, I have to say. I think it is recognised as a statement by the Chairman of the ISG, where he does state that badgers do play a significant part in the spread of bovine TB in the cattle herd, so there are statements in that report, but I think we can actually carry on the debate, carry on the argument. Where do we go from here? We analyse, we argue the point on perturbation, we can argue the point on some of the detail. It is a scientific document and we have got to look at the practicalities from here forward.

Q184 Mr Drew: In terms of the actual science, obviously Anthony Gibson has had some points to make in general, but are there already specific points on which you would question the ISG in terms of their scientific rationale?

Mr Raymond: I get extremely confused, as I said yesterday at the presentation, because it was only about six weeks ago that I went along to the Annual TB Conference where I listened to a scientific paper put by Professor Simon More of Dublin University, and that does come up with a totally different scenario to the one we heard yesterday. Are we critical? We could question the argument around perturbation; we could question the issue around incidence in cattle herds. I think John Bourne did admit yesterday that up to 40% of the spread of the disease in the cattle herd is from the badger population, and there was a question yesterday on the reinfection of cattle herds, particularly in the hotspot area and did he have any evidence to prove that this was from the cattle population or was it from the wildlife population, and he did not have an answer to that. So, there are plenty of areas we can question. Martin.

Mr Haworth: I do not think we are in a position to question the scientific evidence that has been presented, but I think there are two points to make. One is that this was a scientific evaluation of trials that themselves may have been flawed. It may be correct conclusions drawn from trials which were inherently flawed themselves, so that would be one level of questioning one would put about the report. The other is, to go back to what Meurig said at the beginning, the actual presentation of the report seems deliberately slanted against a cull and, to take the question of perturbation, the report is at pains, in many cases, to emphasise the importance of cattle movements as the means of transmission and to downplay badgers as a means of transmission. Indeed, their final conclusion is that a badger cull has no part to play in the strategy and yet, when they talk about culling, their argument against it is that it causes perturbation. Perturbation is a prime example of a disease transmission from badgers to cattle, and so, when it suits their purpose, they emphasise the importance of badger transmission, when it does not suit their purpose they do the opposite. So, I think that is an example of, not necessarily the science being wrong, but the presentation of this report, as Meurig said, being slanted.

Mr Rowe: Coming back to the science and really picking up Martin's point, I think what we have learnt is a huge amount of detail about a method of trapping that, even after year-two of the trials, Defra said would never ever be used. What we learned right from the beginning of the trials and now real evidence is that if you are going to trap badgers, cull badgers, it has to be done in a much more efficient cost-effective way than was actually done in the trial. Having set out at the beginning cage trapping as their method, they were left with nothing else to do. I think our criticism of it is not so much about the science drawn from what they did but about actually what they did in the first place, which was to use a very cumbersome---

Q185 Mr Drew: Jan, you would agree with one of the points that was put in our discussion to the ISG that there were clear political parameters from the outset given to the ISG even though they carried out with rigour, as we know, a foresighted investigation around the hypotheses that they were out to discover?

Mr Rowe: Absolutely. I do not disagree with that at all, but it is completely different from what John Krebs proposed in his trial and what eventually was carried out. What we know now is that we have a very good interpretation of what causes perturbation and, therefore, any badger culling has got to take that into account, but it does not mean to say that it is necessarily going to happen in the same way in a different method of culling.

Q186 Mr Drew: Finally, what about this point that was again raised towards the end of the report that farmers should take more direct responsibility or ownership for the management of bovine TB? Is that something you can sell to your members?

Mr Raymond: Could I say on that (and I return to the report and relisten to the cost-benefit analysis of a possible badger cull in the way that had been outlined in the report yesterday), there was no account taken about cost-benefit analysis of the social implications to farmers, to the countryside, to the infrastructure of the countryside, particularly in the western part of the country where most of the cattle farming does take place, and I think before you can actually do a cost-benefit analysis you have got to look at all these issues from the social to the welfare of the farmer. We have heard about the welfare of the badger, we have heard about the welfare of cattle but we have not heard about the welfare of the people involved. As far as farmers taking ownership, I would suggest that farmers have been under restriction for many, many years. I believe that these farmers have taken ownership for many, many years (the pressures that are on them, the restrictions that are on them, the costs that are on these farmers), so to say that they need to take more ownership, I question, because if we put any more pressure on these people I would suggest that we are going to make cattle farming in parts of the country totally unviable. People will disappear and the net effect to the management of the countryside comes into question. I do not know if you have seen our seven-point plan which we agreed with all other organisations within the farming community. If you have not, we are happy to forward the seven-point plan to yourselves, but it is an agreement within the industry last August where we are prepared to sit down, we are prepared to work in partnership with Government and we are prepared to actually move this debate from a debate of containment.[1] I would suggest that the containment that we have of this disease at the moment is not working, that we need to move into an eradication mode.

Mr Rowe: Could I add a little bit more, coming back to the science within the report which relates to that level of TB that appears to be driven by cattle to cattle transmission and not driven by badgers. I think we would take huge exception to the conclusion that was come to there. I sat for many years on the TB Forum. We had a lot of detailed information put to the TB Forum and I think the standard advice there was that in the three and four year clean area part of the country we totally accept probably 80% or more of the TB there was from cattle transmission. It was cattle moved out of the West Country to the clean areas, and that caused 80% of the TB there. 20% was unexplained, and nobody really knows quite what that was, but that only represents about 5% of the animals that are actually removed against TB. If you come back into the one and two-year test areas, which are the hot spots, then all the information that has been collected about farm breakdowns indicates that probably less than 20% in those areas is caused by cattle movements from one herd to another, but the rest of it is unexplained; in other words, herds that have not brought in animals but have had a breakdown. In those areas very often there has been trapping in the previous period before the trials and badgers have been found to have TB. I think the majority of those breakdowns have been put down to badgers, and I think, quite correctly so. It is very difficult to see where they come to the conclusion that only 40% of TB is actually driven by badgers and the rest is driven by cattle. The other point to make is that the skin-test in the clean areas works perfectly satisfactorily. It will clear up the odd incidence of TB that are moved into there, and do not forget cattle from the West Country. Yet, when you come back to the West Country hotspots, the skin-test does not work, it seems to fail, and this is what John Bourne eventually came down to saying, "We need a tighter rein on the skin-test", but the weakness of it is that it finds itself very hard to work when you have got this constant feedback reservoir which we have in the badgers. We have an extremely low level of infection in cattle, we are constantly removing them, and we are taking away small numbers of animals and we are talking away the ones we find. Even if we are leaving a few, it is a tiny fraction of the herd that is left with a very early level of infection and highly unlikely to be infectious, whereas those cattle are living alongside a badger community which we now know, and I think this report amply shows, has probably got far more TB in it than we think. I say that because of the speed with which TB appears to develop in badgers the moment you disturb them. In other words, there is probably a high degree of latency of TB in the badger population, which is very easily stirred up; in other words, probably more than the estimated population of badgers may actually be carrying it.

Q187 Chairman: You are deeply knowledgeable on this, Mr Rowe, and one recognises that, but it is difficult for us sitting here to fully absorb process and come to anything like a rigorous conclusion from the analysis that you are putting forward; so I have been trying to distil out of it some of the general messages. Let me just see if I have got this right, and do tell me if I am wrong. You are looking at ISG's work and your first observation was that the trapping techniques after the second year seem to have some question marks about them. In other words, the way you actually capture wild badgers. Were you suggesting that the statistical results in the areas where badgers were trapped and subsequently dispatched would have been statistically different from the numbers which have come up in their final report had alternative methods of trapping been employed?

Mr Rowe: I think there is a very strong possibility that if you had used a much more efficient way of trapping, probably gassing them and removing whole social groups at a time, where you are able to move much more quickly, and having a consistency of trapping, because, do not forget, this was only done once a year for a very short period of time---

Q188 Chairman: But over a period of five years?

Mr Rowe: Yes, but it was done once a year for probably a week, or less sometimes, but no more than ten days trapping at any one time in any one area, so it was very short bursts of trapping carried out over five consecutive years, whereas if we were looking at a cull that is more likely to be effective, it probably wants to be almost a continuous cull, maybe given that you have to have a closed season, but it would be operated on a much more continuous basis in a much more efficient way and, therefore, you may not get anything like the level of perturbation that you get here. What we have learnt is that if you trap inefficiently in a random way, because they were not removing whole social groups, you get a high level of perturbation. We totally accept that there is that problem.

Q189 Chairman: Just help me as the layman in this. What you seem to be saying is that if you went at it very intensively by whatever mechanical means you care to chose to remove badgers in a particular area, if you did that with intensity, with a high degree of frequency, the badgers in their little social environment would not get the message that there was anything going on because there would not be any badgers around to transmit the messages to other badgers that life was getting tough, because there would not be any badgers around. In other words, if you were going for 100% removal of badgers in particular areas, your argument is that there would not be any perturbation because there would not be any badgers left.

Mr Rowe: At the extreme end, 100% removal, yes, that would be. Obviously you would get the incursion capabilities, but we know about that now so, having cleared, say, a middle ground, you would concentrate on the edge. You could either have a hard boundary, as we were talking about, where there are not any badgers to come in-coastlines, motorways, rivers-but if you had, say, soft boundaries, like arable land, where you did not have at-risk cattle herds but you knew there may be diseased badgers coming back in from those, you could do a more intensive follow up to try and keep the middle area clear. All I am saying is that there are probably, from what we have learnt in this trial, much more efficient ways of doing it. It may be quite demanding on manpower, but if you can get the farming community to go along with that, I think we could actually do a much more efficient job.

Q190 Chairman: I suppose the problem in the real world is what is practical, what is replicable. The message I got from the ISG was that, unless you had a trapping and subsequent culling policy, a dispatch policy, that was carried out professionally and carefully, you would not really have very much of an effective policy to be going on. I suppose we also come from the point of view that we are in something of a bind here, because the only piece of controlled work that has been done is this one. There is not an alternative model in, in this case, English circumstances where we can go back and compare and contrast. The thought was going through my mind when Mr Gibson said on your behalf, "We do not accept the findings", upon what basis do you then produce an analysis, say, "I do not accept it", and what kind of a basis of analysis do you then subsequently follow to say what is the alternative that would have the same degree of scientific validity that the peer group review of the ISG work seems to suggest? You want to put a different point of view forward. Upon what basis are you going to advance the alternative strategy, apart from the observations you have put to us today?

Mr Rowe: In essence, what we have learnt about is that culling in an inefficient and cumbersome way, as cage trapping is (and I have seen plenty of cage trapping and it a slow, tedious, difficult job, very manpower heavy, not particularly welfare friendly, I would have to say, but very inefficient), and I think it is perfectly possible to devise much more efficient ways of trapping, and we know now that is very necessary. We do have evidence that where trapping is done thoroughly-okay, it is not replicated science, but it is very strong empirical evidence from the Thornbury trials, Steeple Leas, Hartland Point, previous trapping done in this country, the Ireland work as well-lowering badger density significantly has a very big effect.

Mr Raymond: Can I follow that through? I think we can have comparisons with the Four Area Trials in Ireland, where the methods used were different, but I think it is down to the methods of control and there is no doubt that, if gassing was allowed as a method of cull, then you would have far less perturbation, it would be far more cost-effective and far more acceptable to the farming community as well. So, there are many areas around the perturbation argument on method, logistics and how you actually deliver a possible cull.

Q191 Chairman: In the light of these diametrically opposed views, yours and our previous witnesses, what should the Government do now?

Mr Haworth: Listen to us!

Mr Rowe: The big problem (and it depends on how you assess the level of TB that has been driven by cattle or that has come from badgers, and we suspect a vast amount more than John Bourne is indicating comes back from badgers in the hotspot areas) is that somehow we have got to find a way of breaking that interface, and while husbandry methods may have a place, and certainly do have a place where we know about them, that they are actually particularly capable of breaking in to a point where we can see a big diminution in the disease, I think some method of reducing the disease in the badger population at the moment, and that is only culling, has to be part of a long-term policy, otherwise I just do not think we are going to get anywhere.

Mr Raymond: I honestly believe that it is going to need a passage of measures if we are going to control this disease, and I would hope that Defra, looking to the longer term, would change its strategy from a strategy of containment to one of eradication: because this disease is out of control, this disease is spreading outwards, and that is disease into cattle, disease into the wildlife, and unless we act soon I can see a huge area of the country where cattle and badgers are diseased, and that is going to compound the problem, and so I think we need action and we need action soon. A lot of the people that we represent are going to be totally frustrated by this report, because they thought this was going to be an opportunity for Government (Defra) to change their policy and actually be seen to be serious in driving towards an eradication programme.

Q192 Mr Gray: Have you had any indication at all. Have you spoken to Defra since the publication of the ISG's report, are you planning to speak to them in the near future, or have you had any indication from them that they are ready to discuss the matter?

Mr Raymond: We are hoping to get a meeting within Defra as soon as possible. Obviously, I guess there might be a change in ministers, and so forth, as of next week, but we did have some discussions with the officials on the edge of the meeting yesterday and, yes, we do need to sit down and talk. We as an industry are prepared to play our part. I can re-emphasise the fact that we have a responsible partnership here trying to actually move this argument forward.

Q193 Mr Gray: Of course. The reason I am asking you is that there was a hint earlier on in the year that Defra considered the next step would be further consultation, but if you were Defra ministers now and you had this report, would you make an announcement now, in which case what do you think that announcement would be, or would you seek further consultation with the industry? What would you actually do if you were a Defra minister?

Mr Haworth: I think the statement by the Secretary of State the day that the report was issued indicated that he wanted a short period of time to reflect. I think that is entirely reasonable. We are very anxious to talk with the Secretary of State and with officials to try to help construct a strategy, a comprehensive package of measures, as Meurig said, which would start to reverse the spread of the disease and start to eliminate it. I think that this needs to be done in a relatively short period of time. I think we should be talking a month at most.

Q194 Mr Gray: Presumably one of the areas you might like to discuss with ministers, if indeed the NFU could do that, would be this question of the parameters; the discussion we had a moment ago on the whole question of the method of catching them but also presumably the question of the size of the area which the culls tested. You could argue that the whole report is flawed because of the parameters that were set down for it. Do you think that is likely to be a useful area of discussion to take forward, namely to say, "We do not particularly like the outcome of this report, but, had you asked different questions, you might have got different answers"?

Mr Raymond: Yes, I think that is a very important issue that we would want to speak to Government, to Defra, on. We have spoken to landowners, we have spoken to farmers in certain parts of the country. You can look at parts of the South West, you can look at parts of Sussex, where there are boundaries, and, as Jan said earlier, they do not have to be hard, physical boundaries, we can have boundaries between different types of farming, forestry and so forth, and I believe that we have templates, we have an understanding from the farming community, even the landlords, that unless we do progress this argument and come up with a different strategy, then I fear that cattle farming in certain parts of this country is going to become totally unviable and the whole industry is going to crumble. Unless we get some firm decisions and movement on policy, I fear for the future of the cattle industry.

Q195 Mr Gray: One last question before we move on. When we took evidence from the ISG on Monday of this week one of the things they said was that they found it difficult to carry out the tests because they got such a bad level of support and co-operation from the farming community. I think they said 30% or 40% of farmers allowed them on to the land. Supposing this was to change, surely we need a better level of co-operation from the farming community if we are going to carry these kinds of tests and discussions forward?

Mr Raymond: We have conducted at least three surveys in the last couple of months, one with a group of farmers in Sussex who are hemmed in with some fairly vigorous boundaries, and between 75 and 80% of the people we contacted within that area, landowners and farmers, are fully supportive of a cull in that area because they believe it is the only way they are going to eradicate the disease in that part of the world. There is a template in Devon, in the Holsworthy area, where we have contacted 230 farmers, and they are determined to move forward in a cull policy. I think it was some 12 months ago when we used the expertise of Exeter University. They did a poll in the South West of, I believe, over 1600 farmers and landowners, and we came up with a figure of 70 odd per cent who were supportive of action within their given areas. So, we have talked to farmers, we have spoken to landowners and I believe we have the evidence now in place that the co-operation is there because people are determined that this has gone on for long enough, the disease has got out of control. We do need to change the strategy, as I said.

Q196 Sir Peter Soulsby: I was going to ask why you think the Irish seem to get a higher level of involvement from landowners than apparently has been the situation in Britain?

Mr Raymond: If you look back over the last number of years at the RBCT Trials and so forth, there has been concern of intimidation, victimisation, and so on and so forth, within the farming community, I have to say, and, again, speaking to farmers who are affected, you look at the Irish trials, you look at what is happening in Ireland, the industry is convinced they are seeing a real reduction in the disease levels in Ireland through the strategy which the Irish Government have implemented, and I think this is convincing the industry that this is the only way forward.

Mr Rowe: Believe you me, as a farmer myself, if I believed in our situation that we could just cattle-test our way out of this problem (and I make the proviso that we would probably have to have the right levels of compensation in order to be able to survive the effects that might have), I would willingly do it. I just do not, from the experience that we have got in the hotspots, believe that it is remotely possible. We are testing cattle at the moment up to our eyeballs. I have just come out of virtually a six-year period of testing every 60 days, and it is just an absolute nightmare. If anybody says more testing in my herd is going to make a big difference---. It may be that the gamma interferon might have speeded up things, but if the problem is due to spill-back infection from wildlife, it will not actually cure it. It may just remove a few more animals at any one time, but the same problem will occur the next month afterwards.

Mr Raymond: We do not merely look at the experiences of the Republic of Ireland over the last few years; you can look at the way Australia tackled the problem, and they are more or less totally eradicated, but they took the decision that they had to eradicate the disease in all sectors, in cattle and wildlife, and by adopting that strategy over a period of about ten years they have moved from a highly infectious cattle herd to just about total eradication. So, it can be achieved; it just needs willpower.

Q197 Chairman: We are told that Defra wants to make whatever decision it will ultimately make based on sound science. We questioned earlier what the definition of "sound science" was, and it is probably something we could carry on talking about all afternoon and not come to an absolute conclusion. However, you have given us some technical reservations about the way in which the trials were conducted and you have prayed in aid work in Australia and Ireland and other jurisdictions to come to an alternative conclusion than that done by the ISG. Are you aware of any English scientific work, focusing on the English situation, which would provide any kind of rigorous alternative analysis to the ISG's work? I do appreciate that there has not been a parallel exercise, but there may be somebody who has done a rigorous analysis over the years of the way the ISG have operated and perhaps come to different conclusions. Are you aware of that work?

Mr Rowe: I do not believe there is any that I am aware of. We are not criticising the way the ISG have done their analysis and the work they did, what we are saying was fundamentally the method of culling that was actually used was one that was almost designed to create perturbation and, therefore, is terribly difficult to draw conclusions from. No, there is not any other work that I am aware of.

Q198 Chairman: Again, I am trying very hard to not, if you like, form Jack's conclusions on this but to learn from the differing points of view that are put forward. The perturbation effect is an argument which, from what we have heard, is very relevant to a smaller scale of operation. What the ISG seem to say is that, if you have really big areas, then culling is an option. In fact, my eye was caught by the statement that was put out by Professor Dennis Mollinson, statistical auditor of these trials, and he drew the attention of the reader to this sentence, and I hope I do not quote it out of context, "For that the ISG's calculations suggest that areas of at least 455 square kilometres would be necessary if you were going to have really big trial areas." I hope I have not got that wrong. I suppose what I am grasping towards is that, if you do it really big enough, perhaps you draw some comfort from the fact that large scale culling, according to this, might be effective, but that is juxtaposed by the ISG's conclusion that culling is ineffective. How have you reacted to those juxtaposition conclusions?

Mr Raymond: Again, without actually studying the report in detail, I guess they have arrived at that conclusion from a cost-benefit analysis, I would suggest. I think it is down to the perturbation effect, as we have said earlier, and the edge effect, back down to the area of boundaries, whether it is hard or whether it is soft, and I honestly believe that we can overcome this issue of boundaries if you look at the typography, particularly in the South West, and you are back to the method of culling.

Q199 Chairman: Let me come to a very simple question. How long is it going to take you to thoroughly analyse this report from the Union's point of view?

Mr Raymond: We are scrutinising and studying the report at the moment.

Q200 Chairman: I appreciate that?

Mr Raymond: It is going to take some time.

Q201 Chairman: The reason I asked that question is that our earlier witnesses felt there was merit for a period of time and reflection on the data. We are aware of political events which are going to be occurring next week and, in terms of the time for public and Parliamentary scrutiny, we have got about a month left; so I suppose what I am looking for is some steer from the Union as to whether you would be happy if hard and fast decisions were taken within a month or whether, in fact, it would be better, given the length of time this problem has been around, to perhaps reflect for a few months before hard and fast views were arrived at?

Mr Raymond: Before I ask Martin, I would suggest from a farming point of view that the farming community would want decisions sooner rather than later. They really had been led to believe that this was going to be a report that was going to deliver a change in strategy that was going to help to eliminate the disease. From an organisational point of view (and our professional people have to study this report from a timetable), Martin, perhaps you could comment.

Mr Haworth: I think the important thing would be to take a decision in principle to have a comprehensive strategy to eliminate the disease. Clearly the methodology and techniques would require a lot of discussion between the industry, and that certainly could not be done in a month, that would require perhaps quite a long period of elaboration of a detailed strategy, but I think the important thing from the farming community's point of view is that a clear signal is given that we are going to move forward to a strategy.

Q202 Chairman: I appreciate that, and I think we have gained some understanding of the very real human dimension of this, never mind the economic one, which again you have underscored, for the farming community, but what I am trying to get clear in my mind is this. The Minister, whoever that person is, has got a piece of solidly based scientific analysis, peer group reviewed, which says that culling is not a realistic alternative. That is the information that the ISG have come up with. You guys are saying, "Well, we have got to spend time looking at it." If you are going to be able to produce an alternative body of evidence argument, there has got to be a bit more rigour about it than an opinion, because Meurig gave us the view, quite rightly, from the front-line of what deeply frustrated farmers feel, and I can understand that. As I said on the radio today, they must have had steam coming out of their ears when they read this, because they have to live with it every day of the week, but a minister has got to have a solid basis to come to a conclusion once and for all. So, I come back. How are you going to develop the methodology to give you a firm footing to argue against this piece of science, this report?

Mr Haworth: First of all, I would like to come back to the comment I was about to make before, which was the ISG report has been circulating in Defra in draft for some time. We have never seen it but the persistent echo that we got back from those who had was that this report was going to show that 100 square kilometre culls were not big enough and that the conclusion is that, if you are going to have a culling strategy, it needs to be done over a larger area and be done persistently and over a long period of years. That is what we understood to be in the report. It seems to us (and this returns directly to Meurig's first comment) that this report has been slanted at the last moment to read to give a definite steer against culling.

Q203 Mr Drew: That is not true. Come on. Let us get real. If you talk to anyone from the ISG, and we have talked to them on numerous occasions, it was absolutely clear, besides the fact that they were even more adamant at the end - we knew where they were going to - they were going to come up with that rationale. It is not true to say they suddenly changed their minds.

Mr Haworth: If that were true, everybody, including me, never having seen a draft of the report, why was it the case that everybody that we talked to said that this is likely to be the conclusion?

Q204 Mr Drew: They are all spinning, that is why, and that has not helped things, has it? Everybody has been spinning on this report.

Mr Haworth: How is that going to help? To whose benefit would that have been?

Q205 Mr Drew: It has not helped at all. In other words, if people had actually waited until the ISG report had come out, they could have seen this trend. It is absolutely clear from the reports that we have done, we have our criticism of the ISG, we have our criticism of some of the ways in which they have applied the test, but no-one could criticise the direction in which they were travelling.

Mr Raymond: Can I support Martin on that, because there was that one weekend where there was the article in The Sunday Times, there was an article, I believe, in The Daily Telegraph, there was an article in The Farming Press.

Q206 Mr Drew: They were wrong, were they not?.

Mr Raymond: They were categoric that there was going to be movement, there were going to be decisions on the back of this report. If you are in the farming community and you had been led to believe that there was going to be a change of policy, it did give the industry and the people some hope. Something happened between those articles and the report. Whether it was spinning or whether we were sent up a merry avenue, I honestly do not know.

Q207 Mr Drew: Not if you talk to the ISG?

Mr Raymond: The impression for the farming community leading up to the launch of this report was totally different.

Mr Haworth: If the report had been presented in that way, which I think would still have been consistent with the results and the facts, that it would be possible to consider constructing a cull on a different basis but it would have to be over a bigger area, et cetera, then you would not have been asking the question how could a minister now make a decision on it?

Q208 Mr Williams: I think we are all wrestling with the report, and the Chairman has already quoted one sentence out of it. I think, if I had a criticism of the report, it would be that while the science on the tests that were done was good, in terms of looking at other culling operations there was a suggestion, because the edge effect gets less as you get bigger, that it was worth looking at then; but then they extrapolated it to say that that was impossible practically because of all the costs of doing the experimental work that was done. I think the NFU missed a real trick. The NFU should have stepped up to the plate and said, "In practical terms this can be achieved because we can persuade our members to undergo the training, welfare, ecology and whatever to get that work done, because if it is only a practical problem, then that can be achieved, if it is a scientific problem, then that cannot be overcome." Surely the NFU really missed a trick?

Mr Raymond: Can I pick that up, because we are moving from the science to the practicalities of a cull, and I will to return our seven-point plan. Right across the industry only last August (and I would suggest that we forward a copy of the seven-point plan to yourselves - I am not going to read it all out now) we were talking here about sitting down with Government, forming partnerships in given areas with vets, with the SVS. Here is a professional group of people, it was talked upon earlier, the SVS, the vets on the ground, here we have organisations, highly professional people who are of the same view as us. If we are going to move this argument forward, they want to be part of this partnership. So, I would suggest to you, Roger, that we have put our plan to ministers, we have put our plan to officials in Government, this has been publicised and we have argued this all the way through, and that plan is still on the table. We are prepared to pick this plan up and work with Government and officials at any time, and the same is said for the veterinary profession and all other organisations around the farming industry.

Mr Rowe: If I could add to that. I think part of what we have got to look at thoroughly is the cost-benefit analysis, which actually probably drew a lot of the decision-making that John Bourne finally came to, and I think we would actually dispute that, but the difficulty is having hard evidence to come up with different figures. If one looks at the figures that have been put in for the cost of culling, they seem extremely high. If you had significantly lower culling costs, which I think, obviously, would be the case if the farming community got involved in it, and you had much greater benefits in terms of a more efficient culling, reducing TB levels in cattle, you could very quickly change that cost-benefit analysis to be very much more favourable than it appears to be based on the type of culling they did and the cost of doing it.

Q209 Chairman: I am going to do something a little bit unusual now. You have made a number of comments about the ISG. It so happens that Professor Woodroffe of the ISG is with us, and for the basis of dealing with the factual observations that you put forward, I am going to ask Professor Woodroffe if she would not mind coming forward and commenting particularly on the methodological conclusions. I do not want us to get into a sort of debate, but there are some questions about the facts, particularly with reference to the way conclusions were drawn, which I think might be helpful. I hope the NFU do not mind, but the ISG have been mentioned. If, Professor Woodroffe, you could concentrate, and thank you for agreeing to do this, on some of the facts about methodology and the way that you came to your conclusions just to put on the record the ISG's response to the important point which the National Farmers' Union have made. I am sorry to bounce this on you out of the blue, but, as you are here, it would be quite useful. The NFU can tell me if I am wrong, but there was a sort of implication that somehow you had started out going one way but, towards the end of the game, you had been leaned on and come to conclusions which were somewhat different from the impressions as to what your conclusions were that had been gained by virtue of various public insights. Mr Haworth is nodding, and it is reassuring that I am not misinterpreting you. Perhaps you would like to start there. Were you nobbled?

Professor Woodroffe: Allow me to preface my remarks by saying that I came here purely as a tourist.

Q210 Chairman: Well, this is the ultimate tourist experience.

Professor Woodroffe: I feel like the person who has been pulled out of the audience to play Carmen! In response to your question, "Were we nobbled?", I would say, no, we certainly were not. Any of you who have met Professor Bourne and other members of the ISG would understand what a challenge that would be. I should also add, in my role here as a tourist, that, of course, the other ISG members are aware that I am here but I certainly am not here as a representative on their authority.

Q211 Chairman: Let me make it very clear that we accept entirely that you may wish to respond in a personal capacity, that obviously the ISG as a collective may not have a line, but you do have the benefit of being part of our panel of four witnesses on Monday, you were part of the whole exercise and you are better acquainted with how the ISG operated and came to its conclusions than anybody else. The points that have been raised are of a technical nature. There is, if you like, a separate agenda of the politics and the way we go forward, and I am not asking to you comment in any way, shape or form on that, but I am anxious that we clear up, from the methodological point of view, the ISG's response to some very important points that have been raised by the NFU.

Professor Woodroffe: I certainly can say that we were not nobbled. I think that perhaps one of the issues that may have caused, confusion is too strong a word, but there is a difference between the way that one writes a scientific paper (and this is something we discussed in our evidence session on Monday) and the way that one writes a report which is aimed at a more general readership. So the phrasing that one uses in writing a scientific paper is very, very cautious. If one says in a scientific paper, "This raises serious concerns about the potential role that badger culling can play in future control of cattle TB in Britain", which is the sort of thing that we say in the final paragraph of every scientific paper we have written over the last two years, that in science speak means, "We do not think this looks promising. We think it is very unlikely this is going to help", and as our conclusions firmed up and our data became greater, more numerous, our confidence intervals reduced, our certainty became greater, so over the course of those years you will have seen a strengthening of the language, culminating in what you see here today, but this is certainly not something we were pressurised to change by any party whatsoever. This is the unanimous view, and I can say that this is something that the ISG speak on with one voice.

Q212 Chairman: Can I ask one practical thing. Refresh my memory, because some comments are being made about the cost-benefit analysis. What you seem to say is that, even on a large scale basis, culling is not worth it, but that couples two different things: (1) the ability to control a disease by a process of removal of infected animals and (2) an economic appraisal of the results. I had thought that one of your conclusions was that, if you made the area big enough, culling would have a contributory element to controlling the spread of bovine TB. So, putting aside the cost-benefit analysis, am I right in saying that, if you make the area big enough, you could see, I think it was a 23% drop, was it not?

Professor Woodroffe: What I would say to that is you are absolutely right. In disease control terms, if you make the area very large, the benefit that you see in the area that you actually cull begins to dominate the system to the extent that they offset the detrimental effects outside, and that includes caveats about having to repeat it over several years. There is an issue about time as well as space. If I can finish answering that, I think, yes, we absolutely agree and recognise that in disease control terms, if done in the way that it was performed in the trial, if you just expanded that space, that is what we expect. The important point to bear in mind, though, is when you do that expansion it depends absolutely on that caveat about "if it was as it was done in the course of the trial". The cost that I think really needs to be taken into account, or that the ISG thinks needs to be taken into account, is the cost of "if you do not do it as it was done in the trial", therefore if you do not do it with the level of resource and the level of focus and attention of a dedicated team.

Q213 Chairman: So, if there is an area for debate and discussion, it is a methodological one as well as an economic one.

Professor Woodroffe: Yes.

Q214 Chairman: But in terms of the focus, in other words if you do what you did in the trial---

Professor Woodroffe: Yes.

Q215 Chairman: ---then there is a potential for reducing the incidence of bovine TB. I am going to ask another question that follows from that. If you were to couple that with the kind of rigorous testing and movement controls to which you also refer, you made an important point (which I recall) on Monday, which was, in the context of movement controls, you thought that under certain circumstances you could get on top of the spread of the disease; in other words you would start seeing the incidence coming down. I think my question as the layman is that, if you coupled very rigorous movement controls and testing with the kind of culling arrangement that we have just discussed over a big enough area, do you see the graph of incidence really starting to come down? Can you put the two together and come to a conclusion?

Professor Woodroffe: I have to say here I am speaking in my private capacity and with the acknowledgement that I am a badger ecologist and a wildlife disease expert.

Q216 Chairman: Before you answer, if you feel uncomfortable about answering, I would say stop, but if you want to go on we would love to hear you.

Professor Woodroffe: No, no. I think I can comment. All that I will say is that we have not---. One issue that has been raised is that, as you will notice, the level of experimental work done on the badger side at the instigation of the study was much more extensive than the work done on cattle. So, it is very clear that the cattle recommendations are deliberately less specific because the volume of data that we have on the cattle side is not as great, and Professor Bourne has given on the record the historical reasons for that. So, we have not explored in any quantitative way, we have not tried to extrapolate combining cattle and badger culling approaches.

Chairman: Mr Gray wanted to ask a specific question.

Mr Gray: I am absolutely delighted to hear your protestations that you were not nobbled. It would be quite wrong if you were, because it would be astonishing if you came along and answered the Chairman's rather rude question, if I may say so, Chairman, but there is definitely a difference in tone between what Professor Bourne said in his letter dated January 2006, where he made it perfectly plain that, under certain circumstances, a mass cull would be beneficial and, indeed, the conversation we have been having even this afternoon and Monday where you equally indicated that there are circumstances - a wider area - where an intensive cull would be beneficial, leaving aside costs and all that. There is a very great difference between those kinds of flavours and the actual report itself, where the report makes no comment at all about there being any benefit in culling. He was slightly (and was very, very clear) anti-cull. Just before we move on to the question, even as recently as 3 June when the letter from the Secretary of State went round saying that co-ordinated efficient culling over large areas might work, there were indications that it might, so let ask me this question. I know there have been quite a large number of drafts of the report over a number of months. How significantly different is the final printed version of the report to the first draft that you saw?

Mr Drew: Did Alastair Campbell have anything to do with that?

Q217 Mr Gray: Alastair Campbell has left now.

Professor Woodroffe: Nobody even resembling Alastair Campbell has been anywhere near it.

Q218 Mr Gray: How different is the final one to the first one? Were there significant changes over the course of discussions on the report?

Professor Woodroffe: No, there were not. The way the report was written was that the chapters were written as freestanding chapters with one ISG member taking the lead on each one. Obviously, we started with the data ones and then the interpretation of those were built up once we had really produced a coherent review of the data that were in place, having got the final numbers on the impacts of badger culling on TB incidence in cattle. We finalised those numbers having historically---. I think this is one thing that is important to note. To date all we have been talking about was percentages, 23% here and 29% there, and we were being told actually by Professor McInerney, who is the economist on the ISG, that 23% is not very useful to deciding economics and policy.

Q219 Mr Gray: My question is not so much about the science and the detail, my question is about the conclusion and the structure of the report. My understanding was that the first draft was pretty much the same as the printed one, is that right, in terms of general thrust?

Professor Woodroffe: Certainly. If you are talking, for example, about chapter ten, the policy options, which is probably the thing that you are most interested in, the first draft looks pretty much identical to the final draft.

Q220 Mr Gray: Final question. As far as you are aware, and you might not know the answer to this question, at what stage did ministers first see a draft?

Professor Woodroffe: Ministers were sent drafts in sections. They were not sent a spiral bound thing that looked like this.

Q221 Mr Gray: No, but that chapter you referred to?

Professor Woodroffe: That chapter, I cannot recall. I would have to ask Professor Bourne that question.

Q222 Chairman: The overview that Professor Bourne wrote, which pulled it all together, when was that put in?

Professor Woodroffe: Once again, I would not want to go on. I actually cannot remember without them here.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. It has been a marvellous bit of tourism on your part and I hope you did not mind this unexpected visit to the front row, but we are very grateful to you for coming on board at extraordinarily short notice and answering. Thank you very much indeed. It is very kind of you. Roger did you have any more questions that you wanted to raise?

Mr Williams: Not on that particular issue that we were talking about.

Chairman: Then we move on to Peter on Ireland.

Q223 Sir Peter Soulsby: As I remarked at the time, and the witnesses from the NFU have heard what was being said by the Badger Trust, in particular, about the Irish experience, it is very clear that you have come to very different conclusions about its significance. Why do you come to such different conclusions?

Mr Raymond: Could I open it up and then hand over to Martin, because Martin and I, and one or two others on our professional team, went across to Ireland this time last year, so we saw at first-hand. Over a period of three or four days we met the farmers' organisations, we met the State Veterinary Practice Government officials and we were shown figures on what has been happening since they introduced a dedicated cull, which was some three years ago. The figures that we were shown were showing a reduction of 42% in cattle slaughtered. The enthusiasm and the determination of pursuing the policy they have put in place, I thought, demonstrated to me that this was a way forward. They had full co-operation from the farming community, from the landowner community and they were fairly optimistic that over a period of time they were going to reduce the incidence and possibly get to some form of eradication. So, having looked first-hand on the ground, speaking to farmers, speaking to the State Veterinary Practice over there, I have to say, since coming back and having a long conversation with the Minister of Agriculture and her officials at the Oxford Farming Conference last year, again, she was reinforcing the line that the options and the strategy which they were implementing was having a huge beneficial effect. She found it strange that we had not followed a similar sort of policy.

Q224 Sir Peter Soulsby: The Badger Trust, in some considerable detail, explained to us the other factors that had changed over that period of time. Why do you think that they were wrong in attributing the changes to those other factors and why you are right in attributing them to culling badgers?

Mr Raymond: We have been involved in pre-movement testing of farms in one and two-year testing areas since last June. The Irish State Veterinary Practice had abandoned pre-movement testing at the time that they moved over to a culling policy of wildlife, because they felt that pre-movement testing was not working. They moved to an annual test rather than a pre-movement test. They were linking that to a cull programme and they had seen a remarkable reduction in the incidence and the number of cattle affected.

Mr Haworth: I think the Badger Trust were trying to say that the reduction is largely due to cattle measures which were brought in. As far as we can see, there is not a huge difference in the cattle measures which are in place in Ireland or in this country. They talked about the use of gamma interferon, which has now been used in this country, they talked about restrictions on herds, to break down herds. I do not believe that they are in any way different in Ireland and in England. The difference is that they stopped pre-movement testing in 1996 and never reintroduced it, whereas we have introduced it. If anything, I would have thought that the cattle measures in place in this country are probably more restrictive than they are in Ireland. I think that we would think that the reduction is largely down to a cull. It is interesting that the cull is actually effectively a reactive cull, which is the one that the ISG discounts out of hand, almost without consideration, whereas in Ireland it seems to be working. The reason that it works there, I think, is that they have a very quick reaction time, they have a much better system of cattle tracing than we do, they immediately look at any breakdown and see if it can be associated with a cattle movement and, if it in any way seems to be, then they do not take any measures against badgers. If it is not immediately explicable by a cattle movement, they do what is effectively a reactive cull. Their culling technique is more efficient than ours because they use snares rather than traps. There is no closed season in their culling, whereas in the ISG trials there were. They are rigorous, they do it often and they persist for a long time. I think all of those things lead us to believe that in the Irish circumstance that has caused the reduction. Interestingly, there is hardly any, I do not want to say no, evidence in Ireland that neighbouring farmers are concerned about the perturbation effect. It does not seem to be an effect that causes, as you would expect if it was there, neighbouring farms to be very concerned about the policy. It does not seem to happen. I think, again, the ISG tried to draw a distinction as to why the Irish experience should not be used as a comparator in this country, and the reason they come down to is that the density of badgers is much less in Ireland than it is in England, which, I think, would point to a hypothesis which they ought to have followed up. Is there a link between the density of badgers and the incidence of TB in badgers and cattle. That would have been an interesting hypothesis to have followed up, but they did not seem to do that. I do not know why. Perhaps our previous witness, as a badger ecologist, could have commented on that as well.

Mr Rowe: Could I make a couple of points. That last point is interesting because what we know about the ISG trial is that there was a plateauing out effect in their ability to lower the population levels beyond a certain point. It seemed they were catching the same amount each year after a while, and the interesting thing is that the population that the ISG ended up with is about the same level as the Irish started with. So, if we could drive that level down further than the ISG got to, we might make significant inroads into the disease transmission back to cattle much as the Irish have demonstrated. The other point that was made by the Badger Trust was about different interpretations or varied levels of TB in badgers that seem to come up in the Irish reports, and that is because they looked at badgers in two different ways. Whenever they were looking at groups of culled badgers, they would do crude pathology on them, which is where the 15 to 20% infection came, but what they found was that when they did detailed culture on those badgers it went from somewhere between 40 and 50% of badgers that they were culling were infected (carrying TB), which comes back, I think, to the point I made right at the beginning, that it appears that our infected badger populations are much the same, that they seem to be able to develop TB very quickly once they are disturbed, and they are probably latently carrying much higher levels of TB than some of the RTA data seems to indicate.

Mr Raymond: Can I follow through two avenues. Again, I return to Professor Simon More's paper at the Annual TB Conference. He reinforced the line that the policy in Ireland is working, as the policy of the outline in Australia had worked, so that, I think, was an extremely good paper, and I am just picking up percentages where we saw figures (again reinforced by Professor Simon More) that the reduction is around 42% in Ireland. Professor Woodroffe stated 23%. As long as the edge factor and the perturbation was organised, as long as the method of cull was systematic, I just sit here and I think to myself that representing the farming community, people who are at the coal face, the people who are suffering, if you were to average 42 to 23% and have a 30 odd per cent reduction in TB in the cattle herd, that would be a huge step forward. We have got to look at all this data and hopefully come to the right conclusion.

Q225 Chairman: One technical point. Would you be confident that other measures could deal with the 70% that was left?

Mr Rowe: You are only looking at cattle testing, basically, as proposed by John Bourne and the ISG.

Q226 Chairman: If you have got a 30 odd per cent reduction in the rate of incidence or an absolute drop, I am not quite certain which it is, but a drop, then, if you are going get on top of it, what you may see from the drop, following your thesis, is that, if you like, the numbers of cattle affected by it, by definition, becomes lower, but your strategy wants to lead to elimination of the disease, because that is where we are all trying to go.

Mr Raymond: Yes.

Q227 Chairman: So the question is, within the sum total of knowledge of testing, retesting, cattle movement, before and after a movement, for example, would that package, if it was properly applied, be sufficiently robust to eliminate the rest of the disease incidence over time question? I do not know the answer to that.

Mr Rowe: I think the risk---. We do not know what the effect of ramping up even further the cattle testing side of it is going to be. The big worry is that it may destroy the industry before it destroys the disease. That is the huge worry that farmers have at the moment because, even under current policy, we have a business threatening policy there.

Q228 Chairman: The "do nothing" option is a gradual painful decline.

Mr Rowe: The point I made about ramping up the cattle testing was that, firstly, we do not know what effect it is going to have. I suspect in the short-term it may take out quite a lot more animals, particularly if you applied gamma interferon at a wide level, but at a great expense both to farmers losing animals and the effect that has on the business and the tax payer paying for the test, if the tax payer is going to do that, because it is an expensive test. That may, in fact, ultimately reduce the number of animals after probably a peak, and then it will drop away, but if we do not break this interface of reinfection from the wildlife reservoir back to cattle, it may not make much difference to the herd level breakdown, which is probably happening because of one animal in 500 in the herd that has come across and infected the badger in its pasture, but we just do not know. It is hypothesis that has been presented to us, it is hypothesis whether it will work or not and what the economic effects of it are.

Mr Raymond: Can I follow that through. There are lots of cattle measures in place where the herd does break down. There is a herd restriction, there is pre-movement testing out of cattle herds in one and two-year periods, there is the total herd test, gamma interferon is now being rolled out; so there are lots of cattle measures already in place, and, unless we roll out gamma interferon across the whole country, I do not think we would have a problem with that, but there is a huge issue around the cost. I thought it was fairly strange that the ISG had done a cost-benefit analysis on the cull of wildlife when we did not see any figurers on cost-benefit analysis of further cattle measures and who is going to pay. Because one thing I can assure you, the farming and industry people, who are suffering in these hotspot areas, are in no position to pick up these extra costs and, on top of that, we also hear of total herd dispersals in herds that have been persistent with TB for years. We are talking about destroying lots and lots of cattle, and I have to say at this point, when you start looking at the valuation system and the compensation system that is in place at the moment in England, a lot of these people are just going to disappear out of cattle farming. Again, I return back to the cost-benefit analysis that has been done on a possible cull. You have got to look at the whole social, economic basis, the infrastructure and the countryside management and the whole food supply chain, because I think this is a much big picture than just pounds, shillings and pence and a possible badger cull. I think the same definitions should appear in any cost-benefit analysis on these cattle measures.

Q229 Sir Peter Soulsby: I wonder if you would forgive me if I return for a moment to the NFU's attitude to the ISG report. I entirely understand the disappointment at its conclusions, and also I understand the very deep concern that there is amongst their members of trying to find a way forward about this issue; but they have been very critical, not just of the report but of the authors of the report. On three occasions, on my count, they have described the report as slanted, they have described it as flawed, they have described the authors as having approached a part of the drafting of this report in a way that, to use their phrase, "suits their purpose", which certainly implies that they have been less than rigorous in their approach, and I think at one point described them as having slanted it at the last moment. Those are very serious criticisms, not just of the report, but of the integrity of its authors. These are respected scientists. They are impartial and rigorous in their approach insofar as we know. I wonder really whether you might want to reflect on what you have said about the report and its authors and whether you really feel that there is sufficient evidence to make those very serious allegations about their integrity stand up?

Mr Raymond: I do not believe that we have questioned the integrity of the authors at all.

Q230 Sir Peter Soulsby: With respect, if you accuse a respected scientist of having produced a slanted report, that is a fairly serious attack on their integrity.

Mr Raymond: When you think back to the remit that was given to the ISG ten years ago, which is probably not where we would have started from, it was the information that we were being fed, I have to say, leading up to the presentation---

Q231 Sir Peter Soulsby: That is very different from accusing them of having produced a slanted report. It is a serious accusation.

Mr Rowe: Could I add, I personally have not done that at all, and I am not quite sure whether the NFU have.

Q232 Sir Peter Soulsby: I have been counting. On four occasions (and you can look at the record afterwards) you and your colleagues have used the word "slanted" in your description of the report.

Mr Rowe: Is this in press releases?

Q233 Sir Peter Soulsby: No, in evidence to us today, and I invite you to look back at the transcript when it is produced. You have on four occasions used the word "slanted" in your description of the report.

Mr Haworth: I think what we said was not that the report was flawed but that the trials themselves on which the report was based was flawed, and that in presenting their conclusions we were inevitably led to the conclusion that somehow the presentation of the evidence, the presentation of the conclusions, had been, let us say, strengthened rather than using the word "slanted", possibly at the last moment. That may be explicable by what Professor Woodroffe said.

Q234 Chairman: Hang on just a minute. This almost gets the impression that you were given indications by others, possibly from within Defra, that the conclusions which the ISG were coming to were of a different analysis to the one that emerged. Hence the basis of your observations that what you thought was coming turned out to be different from what arrived. The reason I invited Professor Woodroffe to come on to very kindly give us the benefit of her observations was to address precisely that particular point, and the impression gained from her helpful observations was that the ISG had remained true to their last. In other words they reported what they found, and they did it in a way that was not interfered with by other parties. That was clearly the view that I formed from listening to what she had to say. I do not want to make life unnecessarily uncomfortable for you, but who in Defra has been giving you this sort of insight: because I did not hear from Professor Woodroffe that they had been giving in little dollops to the Defra official so that they had some idea but only a partial view. The impression I got was that when they reported, they reported there and then; they gave them some principal findings and then they got the final version.

Mr Haworth: Yes. Let us go through this. In the first place I think, yes, we did at various levels in Defra firmly get the impression for a period of time that the report was going to conclude that there were circumstances in which a cull could be beneficial.

Q235 Chairman: But I have just clarified with Professor Woodroffe that there were circumstances, in the mechanical sense, of a relationship between culling badgers and a reduction in the incidence of bovine TB. She said that I had got that right. So that bit, no difference really.

Mr Haworth: Yes, but I think there is a difference of tone, which is probably why we used the word slanted. No-one is accusing anybody of being nobbled, but the impression given (and this has to be an impression, obviously, from the outside with imperfect knowledge) that at least the people who had seen earlier drafts of the report had got the impression that it was much more nuanced than it was, and that may be explicable by Professor Woodroffe's observation that initially it had been written in scientific language and, in the end, it had been more written for the layman. That maybe the explanation. No-one is accusing an outsider of interference, but at some point it seems that the Secretary of State wrote to other Cabinet ministers announcing the fact that there was a likelihood, or probability, or possibility that there would be a cull, which must be a conclusion which was based on having read earlier drafts of the report. We are not saying that the report was nobbled by outside interference, but maybe, in the light of that, the authors of the report themselves were at pains to write the report in a way that would prevent the conclusion that had seemed to have been reached.

Mr Rowe: Could I add a slight qualified---

Q236 Patrick Hall: Could I just ask a question? I have not followed it all in great detail for several years, but there has been some recent comment in the press on 3 June in The Sunday Times, for example, flagging up that ministers are likely to allow a large-scale kill. The media does have a role to play in this country, it does not always mean, though, that the sources of its information are clear and unknown, and we can all suffer from this whatever walk of life we are in. Maybe what the media were saying is something that the NFU liked the sound of and is disappointed, but the real report is not what the media said. Is that not possible?

Mr Haworth: No, the report was never denied by anybody - that this letter had been written.

Q237 Chairman: I will tell you one thing, we have asked for it because I think it would be helpful for us all to know. So far we have had about one sentence from an alleged letter, and the sort of numerical bit of it does not quite stack up with all the evidence that has actually arrived. I do not know which version the Secretary of State is alleged to have seen and based this on. It is quite unusual that secretaries of state sit down and spontaneously write letters to Cabinet colleagues just because they thought, "I will just drop a note to the rest of the Cabinet and say, 'I am just browsing through a partial copy of an unfinished report, so I thought I would just write you a letter telling you what is what." So far we have had one sentence of a letter. We do not know what else it said. Do you?

Mr Rowe: No.

Q238 Chairman: No.

Mr Rowe: Could I slightly clarify where the sense of feeling comes from. All the way through this report there is a qualification which put over a lot of statements about "as in the culling done by the RBCT method", and that is fairly constant throughout the report, and they qualify it, that all the data is from that particular method of culling. There are lots of other methods of culling that could be employed with greater degrees of efficiency and yet we have this absolute definitive statement: "Culling badgers will not work." I think that is where the confusion has come from.

Chairman: I will tell you what we will do, because there are one or two areas we want to move on to, and you have been very patient and we have extended this session because of Professor Woodroffe's fortuitous presence here. I think that we will analyse very carefully the reservations that you have had about the way in which the report was put together and I think that the Committee will be minded to do two things, one of which will be, with greater rigour, to play this back to the ISG as a whole to seek their observations, notwithstanding the very helpful comments from Professor Woodroffe, and secondly, and again you will be unsurprised to learn, I am sure, that this will form part of the basis of the questioning to a minister, once we get a minister, whichever that person may be, in front of us to find out where the Government have actually reached at whatever time we get hold of a minister. So, I want to move our questioning on and ask Mr Gray if he would take up future prospects.

Q239 Mr Gray: Let us imagine that the Government accept the recommendations on their face value and say, "Fine, no culling", what would the NFU advise people to do? There are really two parts to that. First, I remember back in 2006 the NFU said that, if that were to happen, there would be civil disobedience with regard to pre-movement testing and, secondly (rather than keep asking different questions perhaps you could answer them all at the same time), what would you say to farmers some of whom might conclude that if it is not going to be done officially they should do it themselves? In other words, this whole question of illegal culling. What would your advice to members be?

Mr Raymond: Obviously we would not advise any of our members to disobey the law. If there was a decision against culling, we would have to accept that, but I would put a proviso on that because there is so much frustration at the moment. There is a determination within the farming industry that they want decisions, they want to move this debate forward, but I do fear for the industry, for the people involved in the industry, I return to the welfare of the farming families involved, and I just fear that, at the end of this, if people do not move this strategy forward, I can see a mass exodus from the livestock industry, particularly in the South West, particularly in the West Midlands and particularly in parts of Wales because I think people are at the end of their tether. I do not need to say to any of you the pressures that there are on the livestock industry, whether it is dairy farmers or even beef farmers at the moment; and this could well be the final nail in the coffin for those farmers because I think they have put up for many, many years with economic hardship with the pressures of restriction, and a lot of these people that I speak to have been waiting for a change of direction. If that is not forthcoming, I can see this exodus happening and I do fear for the infrastructure, for countryside management in certain parts of the country.

Q240 Mr Gray: One other thing about pre-movement testing which the NFU Council said they might interfere with if you did not.

Mr Haworth: No, we did not actually say that. The Council said that, unless the Government had a comprehensive TB eradication strategy, it would be difficult for us, perhaps impossible for us, to co-operate with the Animal Health Strategy the Government has got, which is not a matter of breaking the law, that is just a partnership approach that we have got with the Government, which we are anxious to pursue, we do not want to do that. We are also anxious to have a proper partnership and responsibility sharing agenda across the whole animal health sphere. If you look at our public evidence, that is what we have said, but if the Government is not prepared to act in partnership with us on TB, it will be very difficult for us to deliver the industry for the rest of the responsibility sharing, but there was never any threat not to participate or not to co-operate with pre-movement testing. That is the law.

Chairman: Roger, could we move to vaccines.

Q241 Mr Williams: Much has been hoped for in terms of developing vaccines, both for badgers and for cattle. When you read the report it does not seem desperately hopeful. I cannot remember the last couple of lines in the report relating to vaccines, but should Defra now put a deal of effort in terms of science and resources into supporting the development of a vaccine? After all, the cost to the country of TB is absolutely huge. Have you got any ideas perhaps about where we are in terms of developing a vaccine and any costs that could be incurred in making sure that that development is accelerated as much as possible?

Mr Raymond: We have advocated for many, many years the use of vaccines, the R&D around vaccination. I will hand this across. Point number six in our joint agreement with the rest of the industry states, "The industry and Government to work together to develop a strategy that would allow healthy badgers and cattle to co-exist post clearance. Full support to be given to the ongoing development of vaccines." It is very much part of our plan, our priorities. What I find very sad about the vaccine debate is that, whenever I speak to people within that sphere, we keep getting told five to ten years, five to ten years, and I fear that the industry does not have that five to ten years at this stage. Again, we see the incidence level in the cattle population increasing, but as we see the hotspot areas develop and move outwards, there is no doubt in our mind that the wildlife has been contaminated, that disease is spreading and the longer it goes on the greater the problem is going to be. That is why we would suggest that we need action now rather than in five years' time. Yes, vaccination, yes, develop the vaccines and we will support that whole-heartedly.

Q242 Mr Williams: It has been suggested to us that the problem is not one of technology of developing the vaccines but of taking the vaccine from the laboratory to use and all the regulatory hurdles that such a process would involve. Do we know anything?

Mr Rowe: I do not know in detail all the legislative procedures, but at the moment there is a trial going on very near to where I live, in fact, which is actually looking at the efficacy and the safety of an intradermally used vaccine using BCG.

Q243 Mr Williams: Is that with cattle or with badgers?

Mr Rowe: That is with badgers, and it is involving matched sets of badgers, some are rejected every year and some not, and comparing whether it has any effects, how long that effect lasts, whether it is safe in terms of other animals around. Provided you have got through that hurdle, and I believe David knows as much about it as I do, probably that is a three-year period that that is running over, of that sort of magnitude. One then has to go through the various legislative licensing procedures. There is also the fact that it has to be put into an oral form of bait which is protected so it will go through and work effectively within the badger. The Irish are doing some of this work. That is where this sort of eight to ten-year timescale comes in and then, fingers crossed, if it works, you then have to start applying it in the field, and, of course, its effect would not be immediate, it would take quite a lot of time to build up, which is why you are probably looking at nearer a 15-year timescale, even if everything goes to plan, before you get any beneficial effect in a large scale from a vaccine; and that is where we come back to Meurig's point. The industry will have gone by then if we do not do something different now.

Q244 Mr Williams: There is the other problem, of course. If you use vaccination in cattle, how do you develop an appropriate test?

Mr Rowe: There is a lot of work. There are huge problems with even developing new vaccines for human beings. A lot of the cattle work is riding on the back of huge investments from pharmaceutical companies going into developing a TB vaccine, but it is a very strange disease to develop a vaccine for, and you have to be able to identify animals that have been vaccinated and infected and be able to say, no, it is one or the other. There are huge difficulties, but science is changing all the time. There are some amazing developments going on and that may be possible, but at the moment if the only vaccine they have available is BCG or variants of it, put that into a cow, you can no longer use the skin-test and nobody in the world would want any of our products or trade with us at all. It is not very effective in a cow, it might work with very young animals if it is used repeatedly, but, of course, as you say, you cannot then use them in any testing.

Q245 Chairman: One of the things that have intrigued me about Defra's approach to this is that in all of their strategy documents they have produced these tables projecting the ever rising costs, and we are running anywhere between 80 and 90 million pounds a year. The only reaction so far from Defra has been the valuation issue, which has been aimed at reducing the amount of cost to responding to this. I find it very odd that in many areas of government activity spend to save is a regular part of the thesis. In the tax world they employ more inspectors to get more money in, but in this area there is almost a penny pinching. Just looking at the breakdown. Let me see if I can find the table in here. The cattle testing regime - this is the 2004/2005 figures - was costed in a forecast figure around 36 million and the compensation figure was again 36 million. So, 72 million just on testing and compensating. I have not seen anybody say, "If we threw a shed load of cash in this, could we actually crack it?" Even if you said, let us take 100 million, one year's cost, and throw that at vaccine, testing the whole lot, that is a huge budget, but if you do not do it this thing seems to have a life of its own. I do not understand. Perhaps you could help me. Why is it that Defra have not said spend to save?

Mr Raymond: Can I add to that as well? It is the cost on individual farmers and farmers under restriction, increased costs, increased cattle numbers, the cost of testing. Farmers have to carry the pre-movement test costs, so there are additional costs on the industry, on the individuals who can least afford it, on top of those figures that you have just quoted. If you follow through some of the recommendations on further cattle measures, I think we are going to see a huge increase in the costs. If you are going to roll gamma interferon out, I am led to believe that the cost of the skin-test is between five and six pounds per animal, whereas the cost of gamma interferon is about £75 per animal and, obviously, from a veterinary point of view, it is going to take a lot longer. The cost implications on the additional cattle measures are going to be fairly huge; so at some stage somebody is going to have to do the cost-benefit analysis on that, but I honestly do believe that if we are going to see a reduction, if we are going to reduce this graph that is constantly going upwards, then it is going to take a lot of resource and a lot of determination as well and a change in strategy.

Q246 Mr Drew: The point is that even the Irish with their much more favourable view towards culling, have stated (and I am not sure this is stated scientifically or this is a judgment) that the only answer is a vaccine. We all know where we are going, and obviously there is some interesting work being done in New Zealand at the moment. I do not know why there is not---. I think we actually know where plan B is now, and plan B was what we were actually calling for, it was effectively a subtext for vaccination, except that we are clear (at least I hope we are clear) as a select committee, it has got to be a badger vaccine rather than a cattle vaccine. Why do we not try and fight this? Why do we not all try together to get this and, for once, move forward and say it has got to be a vaccine and we have got to crack it sooner rather than later? I know what John Bourne said on Monday. He said science has to take its natural consequence, whatever actions you would want to have it take, but there must be some logic in that argument.

Mr Rowe: I totally agree with you, and this shed load of money should have been spent 15 years ago, but it has not been and I am not sure a shed load of money would actually make much difference to the speed a vaccine would develop. It might help a little, but I do not think it would help a lot. I think we are quite a long way down the road towards an effective vaccine, but there are a number of hurdles that have to be jumped, and they all take time and money is not necessarily going to speed that up. I wish it would and if there was a way it would, let us look at it.

Q247 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Thank you for your forbearance at the slightly unusual nature of our proceedings, but I think it was to our advantage to have the benefit of a special tourist giving us the benefit of her views. May I thank, again, Professor Woodroffe for her contribution. Can I thank our earlier witnesses and may I again reiterate our thanks to the NFU. You will gather that the Committee perhaps have got themselves into a slightly bigger area for further inquiry and questioning than we perhaps realised. I think we had all hoped that we might be getting somewhere towards the development of an alternative strategy and I suspect that we will all still be scratching our heads for the foreseeable future. Anyway, we have much to reflect upon. Thank you very much for coming and giving evidence to us this afternoon.

Mr Raymond: Can I thank you, Chairman, and the Select Committee, and can I hand this across. It is the seven-point plan.

Chairman: Thank you very much. We will ensure that all members of the Committee get a copy of it. Could I ask colleagues to stay behind for a couple of minutes for reflection afterwards, but if members of the public would be kind enough to vacate the room, we would be most grateful.

 

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