Police resisted pressure from the Home Office to provide cull contractors with radios, it was revealed on Monday.

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In an effort to restore faith in the police, who he acknowledged came under fire from both protestors and cull companies in the wake of last year's badger cull, Gloucestershire Police Commissioner Martin Surl opted on Monday to broadcast a meeting with senior police officers, scrutinising the police response to badger culling in Gloucestershire on the internet.

The aim of the publicly broadcast meeting, the Commissioner said, was to increase transparency of the police's role in the badger cull. Speaking ahead of the meeting in Stroud on Monday evening, Serl said,  "part of my role is to hold the police to account on behalf of the public… to give [the public] the opportunity to hear from them about this very divisive event which took place in the county" last autumn. He added, "I think we need to hear directly from the police as there are very diverse views as to what the role of the police was… last year."

Chief constable Suzette Davenport said the police had only planned for a six week cull, so resources were stretched when culling was extended until the end of November. "The number one responsibility [of the police] is public safety," she added, "What we are not there to do is facilitate the cull… this is a private event, on private land, for private purposes. It's been difficult for the communities of Gloucestershire; it's been difficult for this constabulary."

Response to accusations of biased policing

In the build up to culling and during the initial six week 'pilots', there was a noted lack of transparency from government, police and the NFU about the situation in the two zones of the South-West. On Wednesday, it was revealed by NFU President Meurig Raymond that a media blackout on the part of the Union was in response to an order from the top levels of government (though Defra has denied this). As a result of video taken in the cull zones, police officers were accused of bias in their handling of the deeply unpopular cull policy.

Evidence surfaced in September that police officers in Gloucestershire had handed out notices on behalf of the NFU and threatened to pass on protesters' information to the Union, a private trade group, in relation to its civil injunction. Police officers claimed they were merely "warning" protesters that the NFU had an injunction in effect.

Dealing with the issue of the injunction on Monday, Assistant Chief Constable Richard Berry claimed, "We absolutely had no involvement with the development with this injunction… we had no prior knowledge of it." Commissioner Serl countered, "I don't think it went well, the injunction;" he acknowledged that it led to criticism of the police, both from the cull companies, who thought it would give them greater protection, and protestors who claimed the police were acting impartially by enforcing it.

The Gloucestershire Commissioner asked Berry, "If it was that unhelpful, why did you go out of your way to make protestors aware of it? I'm told you would read it out to them, leave it on their cars, pin it on gate posts… [Why], if it wasn't worth the paper it was written on?" He added, "It didn't come across well. It did rather look like you were doing the NFU's work for them."

In Somerset, close relationships between the police and NFU reportedly extended to an NFU advisor being present in the police control room. A police review leaked earlier in the year appeared to confirm this.  

Police refused cull companies radios

Senior officers in Gloucestershire also defended their use of stoop and search. Superintendent Jim McCarthy said that, given the long time period over which culling stretched, the number of searches linked to the 'pilots' was quite small. He added that cages for trap-and-shoot – supplied and paid for by Defra – were damaged and stolen (320 cages were damaged and 120 were stolen by protesters, according to the Superintendent), which justified police stopping those they suspected would engage in criminal damage.

However, the Superintendent was forced to reveal that the only successful prosecution related to Operation Themis – the operation to police the pilot culls – was of David McIntosh, a contractor who crashed a van-load of dead badgers into a Gloucester bus stop. This led Commissioner Serl to quiz officers on their communication with cull contractors in the field; McIntosh initially claimed to have been in radio contact with the police control room – keeping tabs on protestors' movements – at the time of his crash.  

Superintendent McCarthy said McIntosh's vehicle was not in contact with the police, but rather the cull company, Gloscon's, control base. All senior officers stringently denied any contact between themselves and the cull contractors.

In an effort to demonstrate the Constabulary's neutral stance, ACC Berry said he had been approached in early July by the Home Office about use of the police airwave, and claimed he had refused to provide handsets or use of the airwave to cull contractors, for fear of the effect this would have on the perceived impartiality of the policing operation.

Berry and Serl suggested elsewhere that police came under pressure from certain areas of government to play a greater role in facilitating cull activity. The pair also clarified that Defra Secretary Owen Paterson's claims, made after culling came to a close in Gloucestershire, that contractors had behaved "impeccably," did not come from the police. Serl went further, saying "Some cull operators actually enticed people off the footpaths to trespass and their behaviour in the centre of Gloucester was not particularly great."

Police in Somerset took 'blinkered approach' to cull

Though senior officers in Gloucestershire acknowledged cull contractors may not have behaved "impeccably," as pro-cull ministers have claimed, much of Commissioner Serl's questioning still revolved almost exclusively around intimidation by anti-cull protestors, and failed to deal with the police response to transgressions by the pro-cull community. Police in Somerset were found to have taken a "blinkered… approach" to acts of criminality and intimidation by cull contractors in an internal police review leaked to the Independent in March.

Badger culling is set to resume in Somerset and Gloucestershire this year, though it will not be rolled out to new areas. The Independent Expert Panel tasked with assessing the performance of government and cull companies found that the culls had failed on Defra's own terms; though Defra officials said there would be "lessons to learn" from last year's culls, last month farming minister George Eustice announced that there will be no independent oversight of this year's culls.

Including the extension – which Commissioner Serl publicly criticised – policing the the cull is thought to have cost £2.3 million in Gloucestershire alone. Richard Berry said the lengthy extension of cull activity in Gloucestershire, granted in October, "took us by surprise." Natural England initially green-lighted an eight week extension, longer than the intended culling period, though this was cut short in late November when closed season on the trap-and-shoot method put an end to the cull company's hopes of meeting its targets.  

NFU responds to officers' criticism

On Tuesday, NFU Deputy President Minette Batters hit back at the police criticism. She said, "Any suggestion that the injunction obtained by the NFU was of no value is absolutely wrong. We're confident the injunction had a significant deterrent effect in stopping people taking part in illegal activity by making them aware that legal action could be taken against them if they breached its terms."

Batters, a beef farmer from Wiltshire, said the NFU is currently considering its options on an injunction ahead of this year's culls. She continued, "The pilot badger cull was a lawful and legal activity that was carried out as part of a government policy to control and eradicate bovine TB. If the people trying to carry out this operation had been allowed to carry out their work without harassment and intimidation policing costs would have been significantly lower than they were. The policing costs were entirely down to the threat to disrupt this lawful activity and the actions taken by those people determined to do so."

"While I understand the police did not want to take sides on the issue of badger culling, it is not an option for a Police and Crime Commissioner, or the police themselves, to remain neutral between lawful and illegal activity."

Before the first shot was fired in Gloucestershire, Officers said there had already been months of disruption due to tensions between pro- and anti-cull activists. Accusations abounded ahead of the cull that the relationship between government agents and the NFU was too close. The main offices of Defra and the NFU are situated next to one another in London, and, when asked to release communications between its employees and the farming group in the build-up to the cull, the department refused on the grounds that these effectively counted as "internal communication".