conservativerural action

When I am not in Westminster I try to get to as many farms as possible and speak to those at the muddy end of food production.

I cannot remember the last time I met a group of farmers who didn’t mention the problem of bovine TB, even in places many miles from the so-called ‘hotspot’ areas. This is hardly surprising.

The disease is having a devastating impact on the cattle industry and shows absolutely no sign of abating. Recent figures slipped out by the Government reveal a 40% increase in the number of infected cows slaughtered in the last year alone, now up to a staggering 40,000.

In fact, since Labour came to power over 200,000 animals have been culled at a cost to the taxpayer of over £600 million – and the problem is getting worse not better. More and more counties across the country are affected and worryingly domestic pets are increasingly falling victim to the disease.

For many farmers this is the last straw. Over 100 dairy farmers a month have left the industry under the current Labour Government and there is no doubt that the failure to get a grip of this terrible disease has been one of the drivers.

So what can be done? Vaccination is an important long-term tool to develop but there will be no vaccine available for widespread use for some years yet.

Beating TB requires addressing the vectors of disease and that means not only cattle but wildlife, particularly badgers, which are responsible for the majority of breakdowns in cattle. Without removing sick badgers (who let us not forget suffer dreadfully with TB) we can never hope to eradicate this disease.

The Conservatives want to see healthy wildlife living alongside healthy cattle. In many areas of the country we have neither.

On Monday morning I went to Policy Exchange to speak at the launch of a new report on the problem of litter. 

‘Litterbugs’ was launched by the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Bill Bryson, who is leading their ‘Stop the Drop‘ campaign and recently made a passionate documentary on the issue, ‘Notes from a Dirty Island‘.

We were joined by a Government Minister, Lord Hunt, who wasn’t even sure that litter is a growing problem.  Just about everyone else knows that it is.  There is five times as much litter dropped now than there was in the 1960s, and it’s costing councils a staggering £500 million a year to clean it up.

So what’s the solution?  Tougher enforcement can’t be the only answer, particularly when – as Bill Bryson has pointed out – there is about a 1 in 500,000 chance of detection.  As a general rule, I think a better approach in environmental policy is, wherever possible, to give people incentives to do the right thing.  For instance, the Policy Exchange report points to international examples where bottle deposit schemes have been introduced and littering has reduced as a result.

And instead of automatically reaching for a regulatory solution, we should be looking at encouraging responsibility at all levels – individual, civic, governmental and corporate.  So we should look at producer agreements to help deal with litter and change behaviour.  The businesses which make a profit from products like gum have a shared responsibility to help stop their waste product from disfiguring our streets and being picked up on our shoes.

Successful campaigns to change behaviour need another element – leadership.  The Policy Exchange report pointed out that there used to be high profile campaigns to clean up Britain, but we don’t see much of them now.  A cleaner Britain would make a huge difference to people’s quality of life, but we need a government which cares about the issue and is willing to show a lead.