To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what plans he has made for arrangements for badger culling by farmers in the event of a decision to license culling. (128105)

No decision has been made on badger culling for control of TB including on the organisational questions. Therefore, no arrangements have been put in place.

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what research his Department has (a) conducted and (b) evaluated on the separation of healthy from bovine TB-infected badgers for the purposes of culling. (128106)

We have not conducted specific research on the separation of healthy from bTB-infected badgers in order to identify badgers to be culled.

The research we have evaluated, such as the results emerging from the randomised badger culling trial, shows that bTB is a chronic disease which is endemic and self-maintained at a substantial level in the badger population over large areas of the country. This means that with the available limited blood test having to be repeated three times at intervals on individual animals, it is impractical and verging on the impossible to confidently separate healthy badgers from bTB-infected badgers. Even if a more accurate and rapid test were available, tackling bTB in this chronically infected wildlife reservoir by removing test-positive individuals is not considered a scientifically sound or practical policy.

We have also considered what use the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for detection of Mycobacterium bovis in the environment could be in this instance. While this is yet to be validated for use in the field, it is clear from the researchers that, at the most, it may be possible to use this to identify areas, such as setts, where Mycobacterium bovis is present. However, this would still mean we could not identify individuals that were infected or, at this stage, whether the bacteria detected were viable and infectious.