Will the Cabinet Secretary confirm that this has been a real consultation, that she’s listened to farmers and to their representative groups and that the policy has firmed up as this has developed? Some months ago, I was sceptical of the Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee doing an inquiry on this; I feared that people would have entrenched positions and that there wouldn’t be much movement in response to quite a lot of evidence taken from witnesses. I found the absolute reverse, and it’s been the same with the Cabinet Secretary and what she’s done with this consultation.

We have had press releases from the NFU and the FUW. The NFU welcome the positive measures to address bovine TB in wildlife and say it’s a step forward to achieving a TB-free Wales. The FUW have, I think, re-released their press release, but, nonetheless, it has a statement in it that the programme continues to focus almost entirely on cattle controls without significant measures to tackle the disease in wildlife. Does she agree with me that that is not a fair assessment of the programme? Perhaps if you look at the volume of it and how much is written, I can see where they’re coming from. But, on the delivery paper you’ve put out today, it says that

‘where the Welsh Government views that badgers are contributing to the persistence of disease in chronic herd breakdowns, badgers will be trapped and tested on the breakdown farm and test positive badgers will be humanely killed. ‘

That is a real development, that it does address TB in the wildlife population, and is not an easy step for her to take and won’t meet with universal approval within her party—but that she, like the committee, have looked at the evidence. I had a certain frustration with the way that some witnesses and others described the Krebs report and the randomised badger control trials almost as if they’re tablets being handed down from on high, and, yes, an awful lot of money was spent on those trials, but there are actually some serious problems about how they were conducted, and they were stopped—when it seemed that there was a perturbation, in fact, they stopped actually measuring it, and there have been other trials and other evidence that has shown that that perturbation effect dies down. I think, as the committee looked at this more, we found that Christianne Glossop, your excellent chief vet, was sceptical of the degree of emphasis put on the perturbation out of the RBCT. In particular, three members of the committee that I then chaired, we went to the Republic of Ireland and found that, actually, for their approach, their assessment had been that perturbation was significantly less of a problem than the RBCT had said.

So, will she confirm that we’ll continue to find and develop evidence? And, actually, science is about looking at, and testing, and doing new things and assessing how you’re doing that. A key part of the strategy is going to be in seeing, when badgers are removed in this way, what impact that has, checking that the perturbation effect isn’t too great, and taking things forward in a decision by the Government that responds to evidence, responds to farmers, responds to the committee, and on which I’d like to congratulate the Cabinet Secretary.