The table below shows the total value of dairy focused science projects for each of the last 5 financial years. This does not include proposed spend for this financial year.

2012/2013

2013/2014

2014/2015

2015/2016

2016/2017

£ 1,551,115

£ 1,325,926

£ 709,378

£ 652,394

£ 639,389

Savings from core Defra’s programme evidence budgets have contributed to reducing the fiscal deficit along with all areas within the department. Defra’s Chief Scientific Adviser ensures investment in evidence is targeted at key priorities, offers value for money and maintains our critical capabilities required in emergencies. In addition, the primary responsibility for R&D funding for the dairy industry rests with AHDB Dairy which spends approximately £4.1 million a year on research and knowledge exchange.

This Government is supporting the farming industry’s efforts to improve efficiency and competitiveness. Through the Agri-Tech Strategy launched in 2013, we have made a £140 million investment to increase the pace and scale of uptake of agricultural innovation by farmers. We are working with industry to treble the number of apprenticeships in food and farming by 2020, helping young people into an increasingly high-tech, rewarding sector.

Excess regulations and red tape reduce the competitiveness of farmers. We have already cut 4,000 farm inspections this year and aim to remove 20,000 by 2020; by the end of this Parliament, we will have saved farm businesses £470 million worth of unnecessary costs. A total of £138 million is available in England between 2015 and 2020 under the LEADER scheme aimed at supporting farm productivity amongst other priorities.

Leaving the EU provides us with an opportunity to redesign our agricultural policy so that it works for the UK, making farming more profitable, competitive and environmentally sustainable.

In the most recently published figures the UK production to supply ratio for all food is 61% and for indigenous food 76%. These figures have been relatively constant over the previous 10 years.

All food %

Indigenous type food %

2005

60

73

2006

59

72

2007

60

73

2008

60

73

2009

59

72

2010

61

75

2011

64

78

2012

63

77

2013

60

73

2014

62

76

2015

61

76

The Production to Supply ratio is published annually in the “Agriculture in the UK” statistical publication.

We are committed to publishing both a 25 year environment plan and food and farming plan during this Parliament to support our twin ambitions of being the first generation to leave the natural environment of England in a better state than that in which we found it, and to become a world leading food, farming and fishing nation: to grow more, sell more and export more British food. The plans are closely linked and we are starting a period of extensive engagement with a wide range of stakeholders to inform development of the full plans.

Work is ongoing to understand the implications for the UK of leaving the EU under a range of scenarios. We are determined to get the best possible deal for the UK in our negotiations to leave the EU, which allows frictionless trade in goods and services and the opportunity to reach new agreements with countries around the world.

I refer the hon. Member to my answer of 24 March to question number 68042.

One of the challenges of TB is that it is a bacterial disease, and it is notoriously hard to get vaccines to work in that context, whereas with a virus, if the vaccine is cracked, the virus is cracked—as with, for example, the Schmallenberg vaccine. We have to recognise that despite decades of medical research, the best TB vaccine available is still the BCG. As I have said, however, we are spending millions of pounds on research to develop an oral bait that badgers would take and that would immunise them. As the hon. Member for Newport West pointed out correctly, if we can get the vaccination right, a herd effect in badgers could pass on the immunity. We are also in the very early stages of looking at the notion of self-disseminating vaccination with a positive, contagious vaccine that could spread through the badger population. My hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds is right that that is an important area of research, but I go back to what I said at the beginning: vaccination is only one of our tools for bearing down on the disease. I am afraid, however, that a badger cull is an essential part of any coherent strategy to eradicate TB. That is why we are continuing with the policy.

A number of hon. Members mentioned the BVA and its comments on the free shooting of badgers. As I said before, I live quite near Bushy Park, across the bridge from Kingston, and every autumn a sign is put on the gate stating, “The park is closed today because a deer cull is going on.” No one bats an eyelid. People do not say, “This is terrible”, and we do not get protesters running around dressed up as deer or in the middle of the night, trying to disrupt things. People seem to accept that.

I put it to hon. Members that we have to keep some sense of perspective. We are trying to fight a difficult disease and the veterinary advice is clear: a badger cull has to be part of any approach to eradicating that disease. Is it really that different from the approach that we take to controlling other wildlife, such as foxes, or deer in royal parks?

I extend my gratitude to everyone who has returned to the debate, as some hon. Members will have detected that I was getting towards the end of my contribution. I have gone through my notes to check whether I overlooked anything earlier.

To pick up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds on the culls that have completed their four years, as I explained just before we suspended the debate, at the end of last year we consulted on having low-level maintenance culling to keep the population in check. That would very much be a small operation with much-reduced numbers—not like the culls we had for the first four years. My hon. Friend also mentioned deer and other species, and he is right that wild deer can carry TB, but our veterinary advice is that their role in transmitting TB is significantly lower than that of badgers, because of their nature and how they move about. TB spreads less freely among deer, because badgers live underground in close proximity to one another. Nevertheless, deer are a potential concern, but we believe badgers to be far more prevalent in spreading the disease, and do so in far greater numbers, in particular in the south-west, the high-risk area, so that is where we are focusing our attention at the moment.

The hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross asked us to learn lessons from other parts of the UK. As I pointed out in his debate on badger culling and bovine TB, Scotland is officially TB-free, but Scotland has an incredibly low badger population. It is the only part of the UK not to have a large badger population.

In Northern Ireland, which was mentioned, the approach is to trap, test, and vaccinate or remove. We follow the evidence from that approach closely, but the difficulty is that there are no good diagnostics for picking up the disease, as I said earlier. The people in Northern Ireland might therefore release up to 40% of badgers that have the disease, although they would not have detected it. In addition, they could be vaccinating and re-releasing badgers that had already had the disease. That approach is by no means perfect, even though superficially it sounds logical.

The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Workington (Sue Hayman), mentioned costs. All I can say is that in year 1, the costs were higher—a huge amount of surveillance and post-mortem testing was going on, we had the independent expert panel and policing costs were higher—but the costs have been reducing as we have rolled out the cull. We also have to put that in context: every year, the disease is costing us £100 million, so doing nothing is not an option.

Defra began its review of the Trade in Animals and Related Products (TARP) Regulations 2011 with formal and informal consultation with customers in October 2015. We now anticipate completion in Spring 2017.

In November 2015, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reassessed glyphosate to take into account scientific developments since it was approved and identified no safety concerns. UK experts agree that glyphosate meets the safety standards required to be approved for use in farming.

Of the 421 carcasses of badgers culled by controlled shooting in 2013 – 2016 that have undergone post-mortem examination the distribution of these by year is as follows:

Number of carcases examined

Number with evidence of multiple shots

2013

158

8

2014

234

11

2015

28

6

2016

1

0

Total

421

25

The report on monitoring TB prevalence levels in cattle herds inside, and up to 2km outside, the first two badger control areas for the first two years of badger control is available here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/bovine-tb-incidence-of-tb-in-cattle-in-licensed-badger-control-areas-in-2014-to-2015

We understand the importance of providing certainty for farmers on funding, which is why the Government has guaranteed CAP Pillar I funding until the end of the Multiannual Financial Framework in 2020. Further details on arrangements for after 2020 will be given in due course and our intention is to do so sufficiently in advance of 2020 to give farmers time to plan.

Our ambition is to be a world-leading food, farming and fishing nation that grows more, sells more and exports more of our food around the world. To this end, we are committed to publishing a 25 year food and farming plan and in order to develop this we are currently gathering views from right across industry and all parts of the UK.

The Low, Edge and High-Risk Bovine Tuberculosis areas have only been in place since 2013. However, figures in the table below give figures retrospectively assuming the areas.

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

Edge

69

113

23

35

71

82

194

191

205

High

681

617

14

27

31

40

45

44

41

Low

36

44

42

36

22

52

32

45

42

The total number of herds subject to interferon gamma test in 2008 and 2009 are higher than in subsequent years because mandatory IFN-γ testing policy of animals that have been skin tested twice with inconclusive results became redundant and ended in 2010, when all three countries of Great Britain moved to a stricter policy of removing as reactors all those animals that failed to resolve at their first skin retest.

Between 2009 and 2016, the number of samples (animals) tested in England has quadrupled, with the largest increase taking place in the Edge Area.

IFN-γ testing of TB breakdown herds in the HRA is also about to be significantly increased from April 2017.

Response rates for Freedom of Information requests received by Defra are published quarterly on GOV.UK:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-foi-statistics

Information has been published up to September 2016 and subsequent figures will be published in due course.

The European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF), as with all European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF), run on a seven year cycle. The predecessor to the EMFF was the European Fisheries Fund (EFF), which ran from 2007 – 2013. A breakdown of payments received by the UK, for each fund are given below. The EMFF did not open for applications until January 2016 and payments for projects did not commence until later that year. Therefore, the figure for 2015 and most of that for 2016 comprise of the pre-financing element that is provided by the European Commission.

UK European Fisheries Fund (EFF) payments 2008-2016

Payment Year

Sum of EFF Payments (£)

Sum of EFF Payments (€)

2008

16,454,572.42

19,295,904.46

2012

27,267,995.24

32,650,846.26

2013

8,964,246.85

10,392,606.72

2014

25,491,459.22

32,251,658.18

2015

20,712,212.30

28,563,761.14

Total

98,890,486.03

123,154,776.76

Payment Year

Sum of EMFF Payments (£)

Sum of EMFF Payments (€)

2015

3,573,295.44

4,571,021.42

2016

5,334,537.42

6,856,532.13

Total

8,907,832.86

11,427,553.55

Information on dog attacks on sheep and other livestock is not routinely collated by Defra. However, details of the number of people prosecuted under the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) Act 1953 for each of the last four years for which details are available can be found in the attached table.

Defra and the Animal Health and Welfare Board for England (AHWBE) recently met police forces, farming and rural interests to discuss the situation. Under the auspices of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, five police forces are collaborating to pilot more systematic data collection of incidents and good response practices

Information on dog attacks on sheep and other livestock is not routinely collated by Defra. However, details of the number of people prosecuted under the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) Act 1953 for each of the last four years for which details are available can be found in the attached table.

Defra and the Animal Health and Welfare Board for England (AHWBE) recently met police forces, farming and rural interests to discuss the situation. Under the auspices of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, five police forces are collaborating to pilot more systematic data collection of incidents and good response practices

This control has been in place for some time for all pet and farmed mammals. Under the Tuberculosis (England) Order 2014 the detection of suspect TB lesions in carcases and the identification of Mycobacterium bovis from tissue or other samples (including dogs) is notifiable.