The Badger Cull Is The Biggest, Planned, Public-funded Intervention In The British Countryside In The Past 50 Years

Campaigners have taken out a Judicial Review against Natural England, which questions the processes that the public body followed in relation to the badger cull.

- James Fair

The campaigners who are taking Natural England to court believe it has failed to follow rules laid down under both European and British legislation. Court scrutiny will also examine what some professional ecologists describe as a “culture of secrecy” within the organisation that forced them to take t matter to the Information Commissioner (ICO) and a regulatory court in order for certain evidence to be released.

Documentation was originally supplied in a heavily redacted form. Before a hearing with the ICO tribunal where he won access to the detail, ecologist Tom Langton said, “For all the use these documents are, the blacked-out assessments frankly might as well have been carried out in complete secrecy.”

In order for NE to grant licences for badger culling, it had to carry out Habitats Regulations Assessments, o HRAs, in any areas where proposed activity might impact on wildlife in a protected area such as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Special Area of Conservation (SAC), or Special Protection Area (SPA).

From the autumn of last year Langt who is heading a move to make NE’s processes more transparent, has been working with Dominic Woodfield, who is the managing director of an ecological consultancy called Bioscan. He has carried out thousands of impact assessments, including HRAs, on behalf of commercial clients. “I wasn’t involved in the anti-badger culling campaign at the time,” he recalls, “other than having a general misgiving about it not being run on scientific principles.”

Langton asked Woodfield to help because of his HRA experience, and they set out to discover what NE had done in its HRAs to assess the possible side effects of badger culling.