As chairman of the bovine TB Committee of the National Beef Association I have been asked to respond on behalf of the National Beef Association to your consultation on bovine TB and wildlife.

  Firstly, I have been asked to draw your attention to the fact that bovine TB is spreading out of control—I am sure you are aware of this. The disease spread by some 50 per cent last year and already this winter, an increasing number of farms are becoming infected, including my own.

  From what I am told by scientists involved in research into this disease, the spread will increase even faster in 1999. It is beginning to spread in the UK major dairying area in Cheshire and I understand Government is considering special measures to try to prevent this.

  The National Beef Association is not at all happy with Government's policy with regard to badgers and TB. The Krebs/Bourne experiment is completely inadequate to deal with the current situation which is becoming desperate.

  The Krebs experiment is already proving to be very expensive and completely ineffectual at containing spread of the disease—which of course, it is not planned to do. It is not even achieving its own stated aims and is taking much longer than planned. In the area of the experiment which are designated as "cull" areas, on 80 per cent of the area is trappable, due to owners not agreeing for such action to take place. Because of this and other inefficiencies we have no faith that Krebs will bring any conclusive evidence to support or disprove the effectiveness of culling badgers. Far more urgent action needs to be taken.

  The fact that there is no compensation for consequential loss in the"no-cull" areas of Krebs, is quite unacceptable. It puts farmers who believe there are TB-infected badgers on their holdings in an impossible situation. We believe some farmers are killing suspect badgers, to protect their livelihoods.

  This seems to us to be an inevitable consequence of a flawed TB control programme and this illegal action could spread, causing further division between embattled farmers and badger protection groups. The government must adopt a more positive position on badger/TB control and quickly abandon the now discredited Krebs experiment.

  We think that, as one possibly much more effective use of resources would be to follow Professor Steve Harris's proposals that as an emergency measure, only hotspots of TB-infected badger setts should be culled, and kept free of badgers for two years or more, to ensure that the disease does not persist in the soil. After that, healthy badgers could re-colonise the setts.

  Another possible alternative action might be to licence selected farmers whose herds are infected by TB, to carry out culls on their own land, under the supervision of MAFF and all the dead badgers thus obtained tested to ascertain how serious the TB is in the badgers. This would save MAFF the expense of hiring trappers and other staff.

  The Association believes that MAFF's "interim stategy" approach to Bovine TB control—that of culling badgers on an infected farm, had two major flaws: firstly it was started too long after the outbreak had started; and secondly it did not extend to badger colonies nearby, if they were on another registered holding. We believe that if the culling of badgers were to be done as proposed in Krebs' "reactive area", the method would be far more effective and could help stem this growing epidemic.

  We think that your Committee should revive and review the conclusions of the Thornbury and East Offaly reports which were conducted some years ago. (1975-1994 and 1989-1995). We would draw your attention, in the Thornbury Report's conclusion that culling of infected colonies could clear the problem for ten years before reinfection took place, even though other badgers had moved in.

  The East Offaly trial covered more than 200 square miles and trapping reduced the incidence of bovine TB by in excess of 90 per cent.

  The NBA believes that the results of any TB tests carried out on herds of cattle, should be recorded on existing cattle passports, because this would draw attention to any untested cattle being moved around the country thus spreading the disease.

  The NBA is concerned that there have been contracts for purchase of milk and beef, which exclude animals from any farm where TB has been found in the past five years. We understand that the clauses that allow this have not been implemented but we worry that supermarkets may use `TB-Free' as a marketing ploy.

  The calf processing (Herod) scheme that supposedly ends in two months time (April) has been of great importance to TB herds that have been under restriction for many years. The NBA requests that your Committee recommend that the scheme should be extended, even if only for calves from reactor herds.

  There is one further point that may not be relevant to our cattle, but is of relevance to the wildlife on our farms and our reputation as custodians of the countryside. It is generally accepted that farmers and their modern methods of cultivation and husbandry are responsible for the reduction in the population of ground-nesting birds and other wildlife such as hedgehogs. But the NBA has been receiving reports that work by the Forestry Commission in Wales has shown that explosions of badger and fox populations may have been responsible. Farming methods have not changed significantly in the last ten years, except that pesticides used are safer and more specific. There is no doubt, however, that badgers are more common than they were ten years ago.

  Professor Steve Harris of Bristol University believes that at least one more cub in a litter is surviving and actually lists the overcrowding that this causes as one of the reasons for the spread of TB in the badger population.

  Another consequence of this is competition for food. Badgers are omnivorous, often aggressive, ground feeders and the chicks of ground-nesting birds and young hedgehogs are part of their varied diet. There is some evidence to suggest that there are fewer dead hedgehogs to be found on the roadside because of predation by badgers.

  Badgers have no natural predators in this country, except humans—who have been stopped from controlling their numbers. We are now seeing the consequences.

  In the 1992 Wildlife Act, there is a clause that allows the culling of badgers if it has been proved that they are a vector of disease. Is this the only reason for conducting the Krebs experiment? If it is, we believe that this is too high a price, both to farmers, to badgers and possibly to human health.

  This a brief summary of some of our ideas and concerns and we are more than ready to expand on any of them. We await your invitation to attend a meeting of your Committee to give further evidence. Equally, members of your Committee are most welcome to attend any of our meetings.

  Finally, we would like to express our concern that unless dramatic action is taken to sort out TB hotspots, there will be thousands of farms affected by TB, if the present rate of increase continues unchecked by the time the Krebs experiment draws to a close.

8 January 1999