Part of 2. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:02 pm on 29 June 2021.
Llywydd, I repeat for the record that assessment of disease report forms show that eight in 10 confirmed breakdowns in low TB areas—and it was a low TB area that I was being asked about—are primarily attributable to cattle movements. So, it's important to get that on the record as well.
I'm grateful to the Member for his question, though, because it allows me to say that, of course, farmers in Wales work very hard indeed through the biosecurity regimes that they put in place to try and protect their herds against TB. And they need to go on doing that, and they need to go on doing that alongside the Welsh Government and everything we've put in place in order to go on bearing down on the scourge of TB in cattle, the harm it does to animals themselves, but also the very real impact that contracting TB in a cattle herd has on those who've worked so hard very often to build up those herds, and to look after them. None of that can take away from the known facts that in low-incidence areas, it is cattle movement rather than, as I was being asked by Janet Finch-Saunders, badger-driven spread of the disease that lies behind additional outbreaks.