Defra Secretary Owen Paterson made no attempt to meet the Independent Expert Panel following the publication of their highly critical report into last year's pilot badger culls, according to panel member Professor Tim Coulson.

Speaking at a meeting in Westminster on Monday, Coulson, a Professor of Zoology at Oxford University, said, "It was clear from our contacts with senior Defra officials that Owen Paterson was very unhappy with our findings. It was a shame he did not meet with all members of the Independent Expert Panel to discuss our… recommendations on improving the effectiveness and humaneness of the culling operation."

Responding to Professor Coulson's comments, the Conservative MP Anne Main, who chaired the meeting, said she was surprised and disappointed that no meeting had taken place and would take up this issue with Owen Paterson. Yesterday, environment group Friends of the Earth demonstrated outside Defra headquarters in London after it emerged that Paterson had declined to meet Met Office chief scientist Professor Dame Julia Slingo for a briefing on climate science days before the publication of the IPCC's fifth assessment on climate change last year. His ill-informed response to the IPCC's findings was widely condemned.

On Monday, Main expressed the view that the farming lobby has considerable impact and that, sadly, badgers didn't vote. She said she felt strongly the Secretary of State should take on board the need for independent scrutiny and that she would be writing to him stressing this point.

The St Albans MP was clear that her issue is with the badger culling policy and not the Environment Secretary himself, although she did say that she has reservations that Mr Paterson does not recognise the huge level of public opposition to culling, or the number of Conservatives who have lost faith in the strategy.

Main said, "Having a badger cull is not about politics, it's about science."

Last week, scientists from the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge, whose work was funded by public research council BBSRC, published the results of the UK's first modelling research on bovine TB spread. They found that cattle-to-cattle transmissions account for the vast majority of cases of bTB, and that badgers play a relatively minor part – in response to the lack of specific data on 'environmental' sources of bTB infection, and the radical recommendations of the scientists, Defra officials dismissed their study.

Dominic Dyer, CEO of the Badger Trust, who was present at the meeting said, "For too long the Government and the National Farmers' Union have played the badger blame game to pursue a disastrous policy which has done huge damage to the reputation of Defra and the livestock farming industry. It's time we stopped playing politics with our wildlife and brought this disastrous cruel badger cull policy to an end for good."

"The publication of a University of Warwick report on the spread of bovine TB in Nature Magazine last week confirms what charities such as the Badger Trust and Care for the Wild have been saying all along: our focus should be on cattle, not badgers, when it comes to reducing the spread of this disease."

Although he had said in April that there would be no independent monitoring of badger culling, farming minister George Eustice assured this week that independent oversight will now go ahead if culls resume in the South West later this year. Speaking at the Livestock show in Birmingham, he claimed that analysis by government quangos AHVLA and Natural England (the cull licensing body) would provide 'independent' oversight this year.

Mr Eustice acknowledged that there will be no IEP or similar fully-independent panel, which last year's experts recommended, and on which grounds the badger cull has successfully mounted a High Court legal challenge against culling.