The High Court has announced that a judicial review will be conducted this spring into whether Defra’s proposed badger culling trials will be allowed to go ahead in Gloucester and Somerset.

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High Court judge Justice Irwin today announced that a legal challenge to culling proposals, which forms part of Defra’s bovine TB eradication strategy, lodged in February by the Badger Trust had been upheld.

The trust had challenged Defra’s proposed cull, which has proven acutely controversial, on three grounds:

• That Defra’s costing is flawed, as it acknowledges that the ‘cage and shoot’ methodology will have to be adopted, at much greater cost, if its preferred methodology is outlawed after initial trials, but has not factored this into its assessment;
• That appointing Natural England, whose remit mainly covers conservation efforts, as licensing authority is invalid, as it is not an intended function of the department.
• That ‘reducing incidence,’ which Defra has promised the culls will achieve, is not the same as ‘preventing the spread of disease,’ the purpose for which legal power was granted. At best, Defra figures show nine years of culling will reduce bovine TB by 12-16 per cent.

The High Court granted a review on all three grounds. The case will be heard in the High Court in June.

The Badger Trust’s solicitor, Gwendolen Morgan of Bindmans, said, “We are pleased that the court has given the Badger Trust’s challenge the green light on all three grounds. The badger cull as proposed would make matters worse at great cost to farmers, badgers and rural communities.”

In Wales, the government recently put an end to plans passed by the previous Assembly Government to kill badgers in the country following a review of scientific evidence surrounding the issue. A previous attempt to introduce culling in Wales in 2010 was successfully challenged in court by the Badger Trust.

The latest Defra statistics covering bovine TB, which were released earlier this week, show a slight reduction in incidences of the disease compared to 2011 figures. The provisional incidence rate for January 2012 is 4.3 per cent, compared to 5.3 per cent in January 2011. There were reductions in both the number of new herd incidents and the number of cattle compulsorily slaughtered.

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