TUESDAY 9 FEBRUARY 1999

PROFESSOR SIR JOHN R KREBS

  80. Over seven years.
  (Professor Sir John Krebs) I believe the compensation level has been increased, has it not, for farmers taking part?

  81. For the cattle that are down to 100 per cent, yes, but that does not stop the consequential loss. You have other pressures on you financially.
  (Professor Sir John Krebs) In my view, MAFF should be doing what it can to encourage farmers to participate fully in the trial.

  82. What about on the other side? That is diplomatic but I have to say in some ways on the ground that is not always going to be easy. The other situation is that very many people that live in the countryside want to preserve and conserve our wildlife. A symbol of that wildlife in the south west is the badger. There will be many people on small holdings who will not go along within the site for non-compliance and there may also be other people that feel that, in order to protect the wildlife of the UK, it will be necessary to interfere with the trial. I think we would be fools to imagine that this may not go on over five years and I just wonder if you would like to make some comments then about the robustness of the science being carried out. It is a bit like my comment, going back, about we have turned the landscape into a lab and it does not always want to respond properly because it involves people and emotions.
  (Professor Sir John Krebs) I accept what you are saying and I think it is certainly going to be the case that the experiment will not be as clean as it would be if it were a laboratory experiment in a laboratory in a building, as opposed to in the countryside, because there will be various factors, including the ones you have mentioned, that will influence the way in which the different treatments are carried forward. However, I think that the statistical experts on the Bourne Group are satisfied that even with some disruption of the trial, the trial will have enough statistical power to demonstrate whether or not the effects that we are looking for are there. Now, that is a matter of judgment. It could be, and I do think it is a matter of judgment, that in two or three years' time one finds that the trial is so heavily disrupted that it is not going to have much power at all, but I cannot judge ahead of time what is going to happen.

  83. And the last question from me on this one is that obviously in order for it to go smoothly, we have to have sufficient resources both of trained personnel and of finance. Do you actually think that the Ministry has provided this for the culling experiment?
  (Professor Krebs) Well, I know they have put significantly more resources into bovine tuberculosis, and, as I said earlier on, I believe an additional œ11 million a year as a result of my report and that obviously is important. Coming back to your earlier question, though you did not put it this way, but I interpreted it this way, about whether we could recruit more sites into the trial faster to get the thing over with more quickly and diminish the chances that it would be disrupted because it was dragging on too long, well, I would think that is certainly something that one should be pressing for, but again I cannot judge how MAFF's competing demands on their resources are being weighed up.

  84. Then do you think that the auditing and monitoring systems put in place during the first cull were adequate?
  (Professor Krebs) Yes, I am satisfied with those.

  85. Were you happy also about-I do not know if you saw it-the advert for the extra personnel that were required? Did you see the advert?
  (Professor Krebs) I did not see the advert, no.

  86. It was put in the Shooting Times and local newspapers?
  (Professor Krebs) No, I did not see that.

  Mrs Organ: Well, if you did not see it, then it is pointless to ask for a comment about it.

  Mr Mitchell: "Sensitive gunmen required"!

  Mrs Organ: Yes, I think it was, "Bring your balaclava and your Kalashnikov"!

  87. I just wanted to ask you about whether you considered or whether we should not consider the political consequences of all this because you have delineated an experiment and inevitably you have got to do that as a scientist if you want it proved statistically, but in each of these areas, and I am thinking of it from the point of view of local MPs, they are going to be faced with a hell of a mess, are they not, because you are going to have, let us say, tension, let us say, conflict, let us say, pitched battle between farmers wanting to get rid of badgers because they accept the correlation which you have put in your report and that message has got through and animal lovers wanting to protect them, so it is just going to be a real mess, is it not?
  (Professor Krebs) I think it would have been difficult whatever the outcome of the review had been. It was not my role to seek politically expedient solutions, and that was not what I was asked to do, but if you thought about what would have been the politically expedient solution, would it have been to stop culling altogether throughout the country, or to cull badgers on a massive scale because you believe they cause TB? I do not think either of those two would have made life easier for the constituency MP than the approach which says, "Let's find out what is going on".

  88. But this approach does prolong the agony, does it not?
  (Professor Krebs) Well, which agony?

  89. Well, the argument.
  (Professor Krebs) It prolongs the argument, but I believe it might actually resolve the argument. If you had adopted any other approach, the agony would have carried on forever because no one would have ever come to a firm view about the case one way or the other.

  90. You do not think there is a possibility that the experiment will be disrupted or could be disrupted by this kind of battle?
  (Professor Krebs) I accept that that is a possibility, as I said in response to Mrs Organ, and I cannot eliminate the possibility that disruption would end up destroying the experiment, but I guess that is a matter in part for the public on both sides of the argument to examine what they believe is the right way forward.

  91. As happened with fox-hunting.
  (Professor Krebs) It is also a matter, I believe, where the Government should be persuading the public and explaining the significance of the trial.

  92. The Government seems to be having some second thoughts already. With the reports last week of a meeting between the Ministry of Agriculture and, I think, the Devon Branch of the NFU suggesting that more needed to be done, the clear implication was that there would be some widespread and general culling again outside trial areas.
  (Professor Krebs) Yes.

  93. What view do you have of that?
  (Professor Krebs) Well, I think I would say three things about it. One is that one would ask on what basis this decision was being made, what kind of advice was coming forward to guide that decision. The advice that I gave in my report was, I think, based on the government principles which have been established by the present Government for scientific advice, namely that it should be open and transparent, that it should involve the best experts available and that it should admit uncertainties where they exist, and those are the so-called May principles that were enunciated by the Chief Scientific Adviser, so that would be my first comment: if the Minister is changing his tactic or basing it on the same advice principles, where did the advice come from? The second thing I would say is that I would find it difficult to justify in my mind, on the one hand, doing a trial which asks whether culling is an effective way forward and, on the other hand, to be culling because you think it might be an effective way forward. You either accept that you do not know, in which case you do a trial, or you think you do know, in which case you do not do the trial and you get on and cull them, so there is an internal inconsistency and you cannot have it both ways. The third point I would make, which is one I made earlier, is that culling of any kind could only make sense in areas where there are repeated outbreaks of TB because the whole point of culling, if you believe culling has an effect, is to prevent a recurrence, and there are plenty of areas in the country where there are single and very severe outbreaks, but not recurrences.

  Mrs Organ: What would your comment be if after a year or 18 months into the trial and there has been considerable difficulty, all sorts of pressures on it, considerable disruption, the trial was abandoned and we said, "Right, we are not going to do this. We are not going to go down this route. We are going to give it up, it is far too difficult, too many conflicting interests"? What would your scenario be then of if we just went on and said, "Well, we have herd breakdowns and we don't know whether it is badgers or not, but we are not going to cull badgers"? What would your scenario be over the next decade after that?

  Mr Mitchell: Suicide!

  94. It is a double hypothetical.
  (Professor Krebs) Yes, I am trying to figure out which hypothesis to address.

  95. Well, we have abandoned the trial, so what would your comment be on that? Secondly, having abandoned the trial, we are still in the ignorant state, and we started off here today, saying, "Well, we don't know. There are so many unknowns" and we are in ignorance about so much of this, so we cannot have brock in the dock and say, "It's your fault", so let's not cull the badger, so what should we do?
  (Professor Krebs) Well, first of all, what would happen if the trial were abandoned, well, I would say that MAFF, having agreed that this trial is the way forward, should do everything they can to ensure that the trial is carried through, with all the difficulties and all the imperfections that it will have. The analysis that I did I believe still holds and I still believe that there is no alternative way forward in relation to badger culling or non-culling that can be justified. It is not justified to stop, it is not justified to do a mass cull because the evidence is not there, so if MAFF decided to abandon it, then they would be in great difficulty because they would have to start all over again with a further inquiry and I do not believe that is appropriate.

  96. So let's say we say, "Let's just wait for a vaccine"?
  (Professor Krebs) Well, you run the risk then of first of all the vaccine never turning up and we say that it is a long and uncertain --

  Chairman: I think we are getting rather fluid here and I think we might actually bring Mr Marsden in at this stage to ask specifically about the vaccine.
Mr Marsden

  97. The report notes that in 1993 the consultative panel on badgers recommended to Ministers that they should begin research into developing a badger vaccine. Do you know if this recommendation was acted upon by MAFF and, if so, what the results of this work were which would then assist in both cow and badger vaccinations?
  (Professor Krebs) MAFF, I know, up until the time of my report had a research programme on immunology and vaccine development focused on a badger vaccine, spending, I believe, about œ400,000 a year on that research programme. The research that has been carried out is really underpinning research looking at the basic background of the immunology of badgers and some work on the bacterium itself. That research, if, as has happened, MAFF is switching its emphasis now to cattle, that research will not be wasted because it is the basic scientific understanding, but I think that in order to progress the work on a vaccine to a stage where we are likely to make significant progress, MAFF needs to invest more and I understand that they have increased their budget from about œ0.4 million to œ1.3 million per year.

  98. Is that enough?
  (Professor Krebs) Well, I cannot answer that question. I do not know whether it is enough or not.

  99. You do not know if it is enough, but surely you have a view on what speed and, therefore, what resources would be needed in order to hasten the development of the vaccine because this could be the solution, could it not?
  (Professor Krebs) Yes.