Environment questions

It seems from Thursday's question time that my hopes for English badgers with the advent of a new minister at DEFRA have been dashed:

Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab): I congratulate the Secretary of State on her promotion and welcome her to her new job. However, I am appalled to hear the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), confirm that she is going to continue with the discredited, unscientific, inhumane and ineffective badger cull. Is she aware that Professor David Macdonald, the chief scientific adviser to Natural England, which will have to license the culls, has described them as an “epic failure”, adding:

“It is hard to see how continuing this approach could be justified”?

Will she at least undertake to ask the independent expert panel which reported on the safety, humaneness and effectiveness of year 1 of the cull to report on year 2?

Elizabeth Truss: I thank the hon. Lady for her congratulations. Let us be absolutely clear: the reality is that bovine TB represents a massive threat to our dairy and beef industries. We are looking at the potential loss of over £1 billion of economic growth in our country. We need to look at the best scientific evidence. I have already spoken with the Department’s scientific adviser about this precise subject. We are progressing with our programme, as my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State outlined.

Meanwhile Dan Rogerson unspectacularly continues to deal with a threat which is becoming more important:

Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con): What steps she is taking to reduce the threat of disease to the UK's plants and trees. [904923]

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson): On 30 April, we published a plant biosecurity strategy, which addresses the recommendations of the Tree Health and Plant Expert Biosecurity Taskforce and sets out a new approach to plant and tree health. We have also produced a prioritised plant health risk register, the first of its kind globally; published a new tree health management plan; undertaken work on contingency planning; continued to commission high quality research; and recruited a senior chief plant health officer.

Mr Jones: Given the importance of trees to our economy and environment, not least in my constituency of Nuneaton where we recently lost a number of trees to disease, what action are the Government taking when specific threats are identified?

Dan Rogerson: My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this. We have produced a prioritised plant health risk register to identify risk and to agree priorities for action. We have also produced new contingency plans for plant diseases and we will be testing them in an exercise later this year. The measures in the new tree health management plan set out clearly the approaches that we are taking, for example against chalara, phytophthora ramorum and oak processionary moth. As soon as we were aware of a threat to plane trees, we moved quickly to impose an import restriction on them.