Will Defra advise Labour to U-turn and allow badger culling?

The Westminster Hall debate on badger culling last October, attended by Defra Minister Angela Eagle, gave the impression that under a Labour administration, badger culling was finally going to give way to badger vaccination. Intensive and supplementary badger killing licences finished at the end of January 2026, leaving just one Low Risk Area cull area in Cumbria which may or may not continue this year.

But a recent (28 February) lengthy feature article in Vet Record (VR) on BTB and wildlife, suggests otherwise. Quoting the Deputy Chief Veterinary Officer Ms Eleanor Brown extensively, a different future is being defined ahead of a new strategy consultation, scheduled for spring. In 2024 Defra Minister Daniel Zeichner promoted the concept of widespread and extensive badger vaccination at scale. Ms Brown is quoted saying ‘I don’t think badger vaccination is a like-for-like replacement on scale for culling.’

Last autumn, the ‘Godfray panel’ review update (2025) still insisted that badger intervention is necessary, and the evidence suggests APHA is now trying to get Labour to do both in equal measure. The article states: “Vet Record understands the possibility of allowing some small-scale ‘epidemiologically led’ culling may be kept open by the government as a contingency.’

So, far from being consigned to the history books, the so-called epi-culling (that resembles closely the scrapped ‘targeted culling’) is being rebranded  in an attempt to recover it as a policy option. Epi-culling, or targeted culling is very similar to Low Risk Area policy. This was invented in 2018 based upon Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) science, where the aim is to cull 100% of badgers in specific large areas around bTB ‘hotspots’, where cattle mismanagement has allowed disease spread. This has already been happening in Cumbria and Lincolnshire but without demonstrable benefit. A report on the extensive problems around this approach and its miserable inability to contribute to disease control in cattle is available here.

What happened to the extensive and widespread use of badger vaccination? It was never going to happen. It is far too expensive and difficult to implement and nobody wants it. The farmers don’t want it and the voluntary sector don’t want it, not least because it keeps a distracting finger of blame pointing at badger and wastes huge resources. The VR article says that Defra claims that there is ‘a significant body of scientific evidence‘ underpinning the use of badger vaccination as a tool to control bTB in both badgers and cattle. It points to a recent published essay by APHA that quotes many outdated studies. Whilst there is evidence to suggest badger vaccination can offer protection to badgers, there is no evidence that it can offer protection to cattle. Any such claims rely on the efficacy of badger culling, which despite claims to the contrary, remains uncertain at best.

The VR article mistakenly implies that the Birch et al. (2024) paper by APHA staff in Scientific Reports, concluded a 50% disease benefit from badger culling. The reality is that the authors published that they were unable to separate the effects of badger culling from the effects of additional cattle measures that were introduced concurrently. The Birch paper incorrectly reported that Gamma testing did not take place in the first two years of culling and omitted other vital factors (see here and here). Badger Crowd has written extensively about this (see here). Prof David Macdonald’s views on this can be read here.

Prof Roland Kao, who is Chair of Defra’s Science Advisory Council, is quoted in one of the least convincing and least decisive statements yet as saying “In some areas there’s really strong evidence of a lot of circulation of the bacteria  in the badger population, and that means they are probably likely to play a relatively big part in maintaining it there. But in other places thats probably not true.” He says “..what you need is an agile response” supporting or perhaps originating the apparent Defra change of direction.

The VR Feature is sadly an exemplar of introducing a discussion on the wrong premise, so that the views of the interviewees follow a chosen narrative to conclusion. Near the start it says “Few, if any, people with even a passing familiarity with evidence on bTB would deny that badgers can become infected with Mycobacterium bovis, the causative agent of bTB, and that there can be transmission from badgers to cattle, and vice versa, as well as within populations of each.”

Perhaps few people would deny that badgers can transmit bTB to cattle because it has been shown to be physically possible if you confine the two species together in a small building for months (Little et al 1982 ). But the point is that there is insufficient scientific evidence that badgers (or any other infected wild mammal for that matter) transmit bTB to cattle outdoors at a level to warrant intervention. Recently published science shows that badger culling did not have a measurable positive or negative effect on bTB breakdowns in cattle (see Torgerson et al 2024, Torgerson 2025 & Langton et al 2022).

Speculating, the VR Feature says “It is possible that evidence arising from this (badger vaccination)  non-lethal intervention (implemented because ‘culling is ineffective’) could end up suggesting that culling may have helped reduce bTB in cattle in some areas, but we must wait and see.”

Evidence from Freedom of Information responses shows that Defra will be looking to use data being generated by recent and new badger vaccination schemes to try to show some benefit from culling followed by vaccination, over vaccination alone. It seems that they intend to do this using ‘herd based’ data; i.e. data that only Defra have access to because of (false) interpretation of rules around farm privacy and an unwillingness to share. This will give it more opportunity for selective use of data without any external scrutiny.

Meanwhile, an eight year study in the Republic of Ireland recently published here, was unable to find any difference between disease levels in places with badger culling and vaccination, and places with culling or with no-culling. A cross border EU funded scheme recently announced (see here), is nevertheless planning a Test Vaccinate Scheme (TVR) which will once again be killing badgers in what is being called an experiment.

Consultation conundrum

Defra are in a difficult position. They face legal challenge if they try to impose a new strategy without asking for views. They had planned to do this, but no one would be happy with that. The failure to involve stakeholders in co-design of the refreshed policy is a major problem. Defra have had a strategy to involve only favoured individuals, and have kept away from even talking to independent academics and issue campaigners. This is a terrible look, a result of habit rather than common sense.

Defra also have to get it past a Minister who will instinctively be suspicious. Reynolds and Eagle may just disappear with Starmer if the May elections go badly in the revolving door of Defra leadership. Not yet up to speed on detail, the Minister may spot the lack of probity in Defra’s plan and not be so easily led as Zeichner. We will see.

If the Defra civil servants win, it might lead to not so much a “renewed policy” from Labour, just culling by a different name. Which will not go down well with the public ……