The government has announced a review of its 25 year Bovine TB strategy to be chaired by Sir Charles Godfray, a population biologist and Fellow of the Royal Society.

Four years after the 25 year strategy was first published, Environment Secretary Michael Gove has said he believes now is a good time to review progress and consider what additional actions might be necessary now to ensure other tools and interventions are ready to be deployed in later phases of the strategy. The government has said it also envisages future reviews at five yearly intervals.

This follows new figures released this week revealing TB cattle slaughtering exceeded 40,000 in one year ( up 10% on the previous year) 

The 25 year strategy outlined a very broad range of interventions to fight the disease including tighter cattle movement controls and removal of infected cattle from herds, improved diagnostic tests, enhanced biosecurity measures, the culling of badgers in areas where disease is rife, vaccination of badgers and work to develop a viable vaccine for use in cattle.

So far, the principal elements deployed in the first phase of the strategy have been cattle movement controls, the removal of infected cattle from herds and the badger cull which covered more than 20 different areas in 2017. Michael Gove and Farming Minister George Eustice have said they want to ensure other elements of the strategy, such as cattle vaccination or developing genetic resistance, are ready to be deployed in the next phase of the strategy in order to ensure the government maintains progress towards its target of becoming officially TB free by 2038.

Farming Minister George Eustice said:

"Bovine TB is a slow moving, insidious disease which presents many challenges.  It is difficult to detect, can be harboured in the wildlife population and no vaccine is fully effective.  There is no single measure that will provide an easy answer and that is why we are pursuing a wide range of interventions including cattle movement controls and a cull of badgers in areas where disease is rife.

"Now is a good time to review progress to date and identify steps we could take now to accelerate some of the elements of our 25 year strategy that might be deployed in later phases.  While the badger culls are a necessary part of the strategy, no one wants to be culling badgers forever."

Bovine TB has a negative effect on the health and welfare of affected animals and dealing with the disease costs the taxpayer an estimated £100 million a year. Over the last year alone more than 30,000 infected cattle had to be slaughtered in England.

Keith Taylor MEP, the Green Party’s Animals Spokesperson, has responded with dismay that the scope of Defra's 'Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) strategy review 2018' explicitly states: "It is not a review of badger culling."

He said: “Despite the expense and extensive cruelty, not to mention the systematic destruction of a protected species, the Government still fails to provide any evidence that killing badgers is having an impact on reducing bovine TB infection rates in badger cull zones."

"The scientific evidence and economic analysis tell us that the cull is an irrational and failed project. In fact, the latest government-funded report concluded that the UK’s bovine TB ‘control’ programme is nothing more than mass cruelty supported by a bad reading of the science."