In June of this year, DEFRA’s Bovine TB Partnership committee for England published a new strategy recommendations document (see here). On 10th November, this was transposed into policy by Minister Dame Angela Eagle – see here.
Badger Crowd considered the ‘new strategy’ here in July. It was written by hand-picked paid Defra contractors, advisors and industry representatives from farming and veterinary interests, all of whom are embroiled in the controversial publicly-funded disease crisis.
The Strategy avoids any mention of recently published science that disagrees with DEFRA’s now infamous and long-standing faulty interpretation of the scientific evidence on cattle testing and badger interventions. There is no explanation of this position – the controversy is ignored. Several of the committee members have long been involved in supporting RBCT-based policy, so it is perhaps not surprising.
Instead, the Strategy continues to cite out-of-date work and media claims by its own members, that favour the historical view upon which over 250,000 largely completely healthy badgers were needlessly shot over the last 13 years. With shockingly, and despite several promises to the contrary, no hard evidence available that badger culling had any effect at all. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that it might not have done.
Relying on a new ‘binomial’ analysis of the RBCT data produced in the Godfray et al (2025) review (see here), it continues to claim a weak benefit (demoted from a previously reported robust benefit) for badger culling from the historical dataset. This is despite multiple problems with this new attempt to salvage badger culling disease benefit (see here), that have now been further detailed in a comprehensive new ‘computational analysis’ of the RBCT, preprinted by Prof Paul Torgerson in September 2026 (see here).
The RBCT authors, like government, continue to decline discussion of the fundamental issues, despite a Royal Society independent call in 2025 (see here) for them to actively engage. Definitively, the binomial approach is invalid for the RBCT data because of the ‘repeat breakdowns’; it is simply not a binomial set of data. This shows very clearly that key aspects of the Godfray review update was not properly thought through or conducted. The peer-review process claimed was neither independent, nor properly informed.
The public interest need to scrap the 2025 Godfray Review findings and those of the new policy keep growing. Ironically, Under-Secretary of State Sue Hayman talks of the importance of people working together. But how can they when her Ministry refuses dialogue with independent scientists that have discovered the reasons for disease epidemic control failures? All official engagement with those discovering basic mistakes in DEFRA’s work is prevented.
In addition to the flawed binomial analysis, the strategy continues to cite scientific papers that use multiple flawed analytical methods that the original RBCT analyses used – the analyses that it now accepts were not the most appropriate – that were actually biologically implausible; (e.g. Brunton et al 2017 and Downs et al 2019). It ignores published analyses that show that industry-led culling led to no measurable disease benefit in cattle (Langton et al 2022) referring only to anecdotal criticism.
The strategy fails to recognize that the multiple simulation studies upon which economic benefits are calculated are simply primed by invalid expectation, as documented in a further new analytical report, due shortly.
Angela Eagle has now said that there is enough evidence to adopt the new strategy in England. This is likely to mean that attempts to use targeted badger culling in the High Risk and Edge areas (that has failed in the Low Risk Area, see here) may yet be attempted.
Northern Ireland too is using the DEFRA RBCT-based thinking to justify pushing ahead with a TVR (Test Vaccinate Remove) badger culling experiment and general control policy.
And on 10th November 2026 the Welsh Government suggested in Senedd briefing papers that it too may use RBCT science to guide badger interventions: see here.
So the same cabal of RBCT promoting scientists, with their complete refusal to discuss or engage on the science, are yet again enabling badger blame and culling or other useless interventions to continue on their ‘nothing to see here’ agenda.
Look out for two new pre-printed systematic reviews of the badger intervention field trials, control simulations, transmission models and whole genome sequencing transmission inference, coming soon.