Badgers

Mr. Frank Field
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what his most recent estimate is of the badger population in England.

Jane Kennedy
[holding answer 17 October 2008]: Surveys of badger populations in Great Britain were undertaken in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. In the mid-1980s the badger population was estimated to be 250,000 and in the mid-1990s a survey estimated the population to have increased by 77 per cent.