Labour's Shadow farming minister gave a damning indictment of the badger cull in a speech delivered on Monday.

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Speaking in Stroud, Gloucestershire, near to where one of the government's acutely controversial badger culls resumed a fortnight ago, Huw Irranca-Davies said a Labour government would abandon the Coalition's "failed" badger cull if elected in 2015.

In earlier speeches, Labour politicians suggested that a future Labour government may allow the two pilot culls to run their course, but would not roll culls out to new areas, which the Tories plan to do.

Meanwhile, farming minister George Eustice told industry paper Farmer's Weekly that any decision on the expansion of badger culling into new areas would be made after the general election in May. Eustice said that before rolling culls out to other areas, "What we really need to do is focus all of our efforts on getting these [pilot] culls right."

Eustice stood by the government's chosen policy, repeating the claim that no country in the world has brought bovine TB under control without tackling the 'wildlife reservoir'.

However, in an acerbic address in Gloucestershire, Irranca-Davies said that any expansion of the culling policy would be "based on two chaotic pilots last year which were a catastrophic, unscientific and costly failure."

The shadow minister promised that TB control policy under Labour would focus on cattle-based measures and vaccination programmes, borrowing from TB control work in Wales, which Irranca-Davies said "Has stringent scientific monitoring" and which early indications suggest is "assisting a reduction in incidence of bovine TB."

He said, "[Recently appointed environment secretary] Liz Truss missed a golden opportunity to rethink Bovine Tb. She has led the government back into the same disastrous cull-de-sac as Owen Paterson.

"This year's culls will be every bit as catastrophic for farmers, taxpayers and wildlife as last year's pilots. The lack of independent oversight is just the latest shameful indictment of this government’s lackadaisical approach to science and monitoring."

Irranca-Davies: 2013 Culls Failed, were extended. Failed again.

Irranca-Davies, who is MP for Ogmore, South Wales, said "Do bear in mind that the culls were designed to test the effectiveness of free-shooting of badgers, not least because this was regarded by the government as a more cost-effective way of culling.

"Yet it was realised within days of the initial pilots that this method was failing badly, and the more expensive method of cage-trap and shoot was urgently resorted to in order to boost the cull numbers. So the very method which the pilots were set up to test – the free-shooting of badgers – was in effect abandoned. It does not work. The government have given up on testing it."

The Ogmore MP asked, "Can we at least learn anything from the culls last year about the prevalence of Tb in the culled badger population? Not really. Of the nearly 2000 badgers eventually killed only 4 were tested for Tb, and only one had the disease."

He continued, "There is now a long and growing list of eminent scientists speaking out against the culls, on the evidence that not only are they failing, but they could indeed worsen the spread of Tb in badgers and heighten the risk of spread to cattle. For these eminent scientists, leading experts in fields such as badger ecology and the epidemiology of Tb, observing this government’s approach to policy is to see the world turned upside down."

The shadow farming minister added that, "The Chair of Natural England's Science Advisory Committee, Professor David McDonald, has called the cull an 'epic failure'."

"Policy-makers must listen to farmers," he concluded. "And farmers do not hold one view on this – but then base the way forward on evidence not intuition, and on the probability of success, not on political expediency."

The main political parties are gearing up for their last party conferences ahead of the general election next May. It is at these party conferences that manifestos for the upcoming election campaigns will be produced.