21 Oct 2025
Defra minister vows to end badger culling in England “safely and credibly”, but some opposition MPs cast doubts about the Government’s aim.
Allister Webb
Job Title
A Defra minister has vowed to end badger culling in England “safely and credibly” amid renewed demands for an immediate halt to the programme.
The pledge was made during a Westminster Hall debate on 13 October, held in response to an anti-cull petition signed by more than 100,000 people.
But some opposition MPs cast doubts about the Government’s aim, insisting that scientific evidence does support the use of culling to help reduce bTB levels.
The dispute over how best to reduce disease levels has intensified again following the release of a Defra-commissioned evidence review last month.
New farming minister Dame Angela Eagle restated the Government’s commitment to ending the cull by the end of the current Parliament in her response to the debate.
She said: “We will replace it – safely and credibly – with vaccination, strengthened surveillance, better biosecurity and, crucially, we hope, a cattle vaccine and a DIVA test that can build resilience into the herds.
“That is how we will reduce disease, costs and stress, protect a much-loved native species and restore hope to the farming families who have lived for too long under the shadow of bovine TB.”
Labour backbencher Irene Campbell, who opened the debate, urged her party to fulfil its manifesto commitment to ending the cull programme, arguing the evidence was available to act “immediately”.
Another, Olivia Blake, argued: “Badger culling has proved to be ineffective, unscientific and inhumane.”
But vet and shadow Defra minister Neil Hudson warned no single method could combat the disease.
He said: “Bovine TB is a very complicated situation, with complex epidemiology that, I am afraid, still very much implicates wildlife reservoirs such as badgers in the spread of the disease.”
DUP MP Carla Lockhart also maintained the evidence showed a “sustained badger cull” did reduce disease levels as she argued culling was necessary as a first step.
But Labour’s Cat Eccles countered: “The evidence on whether [culling] works is at best deeply flawed and at worst deliberately ignored.”
She highlighted a parliamentary presentation by musician Sir Brian May and vet Dick Sibley earlier this year which argued the link between badgers and bTB had been “overstated and misrepresented for years”.
Their approach also sparked major controversy last year when it was featured in a widely criticised BBC documentary.
Meanwhile, Liberal Democrat Sarah Dyke warned ministers they could not “continue to kill their way out” of the present problem and they were not communicating confidence to the industry. She argued the UK was still behind other countries in its progress to tackle the disease, despite the culling of almost 250,000 badgers since 2013.
Ms Dyke added: “We must look beyond culling and focus on testing cattle, while investing in further research into badger vaccination.”
Her party’s environment spokesman, Tim Farron, also described it as “ludicrous” that culling would be halted in relation to bTB while still being allowed in the Government’s proposed new planning laws.
