26 expert scientists have written to Prime Minister David Cameron, urging him to put a stop to badger culling in the South West.

The experts, representing scientific, veterinary and agricultural professions, wrote to the prime minister to urge him to steer the government's bovine TB policy towards an alternative to the divisive cull strategy.

The experts claim that the Welsh government has vastly reduced the level of TB in the country over the past five years, whilst in England levels remain virtually unchanged. The Welsh government has, they add, achieved this by:

• Introducing a TB Health Check in 2008/09 which established with accuracy the level of infection across all the cattle in Wales in the shortest period of time;
• imposing strict annual testing and mandatory pre-movement testing across the whole of Wales since 2010; and
• enforcing robust bio-security, among other cattle-focussed measures.

In contrast, they suggest that Whitehall has "Expended considerable time, effort and resources on the promotion and implementation of badger culling," and that, two years into the four-year pilot culls, "It is [still] not clear whether the forecast net reduction of 12-16% in new herd incidence of bTB over the next nine years will be achieved or how this will be measured."

The 26 signatories of the open letter urge the Prime Minister to follow the Welsh government's example and abandon the current bTB policy, which has different testing regimes and control measures for three 'high risk', 'low risk' and 'edge' areas of the country. They warn that, "Under this testing regime there is no way of accurately knowing what the disease status of the so called Low Risk Area actually is and there is a high probability of onward transmission of undetected disease."

Instead they want to see a TB health check, similar to Wales' in 2008, to "establish the true extent and distribution of the disease" in England and drive "considerably more testing in the Low Risk Area with the implementation of nationwide annual testing."

During a debate in Parliament last week, Defra minister George Eustice attempted to defend the badger cull policy. Defra has come under fire for abandoning independent oversight of the pilot culls after the Expert Panel appointed to monitor the first year of culling judged the pilots to have been ineffective and inhumane. The decision led to a legal challenge which ran concurrently with the second year of culling, though the environment department was eventually vindicated last month.

Eustice claimed the methodology used by Defra was more rigorous than that of the Randomised Badger Culling Trials, which have informed much of the thinking around badger culling.

The government has yet to officially release figures from this year's pilot culls, though figures leaked to the Humane Society International suggest the reduced targets were missed in Gloucestershire and met by a narrow margin in Somerset.