England's New Bovine TB Strategy Explained
Defra's newest bovine TB strategy is less about badgers and more about cattle than anything published in years. Here is what actually changes for testing, movements, and a herd with a breakdown behind it.
Defra's newest bovine TB strategy is less about badgers and more about cattle than anything published in years. Here is what actually changes for testing, movements, and a herd with a breakdown behind it.
On 10 June 2026, Defra published a new bovine TB control strategy for England, shifting emphasis from badger culling toward cattle-to-cattle transmission control. The recommendations include wider use of the interferon-gamma blood test for breakdown herds, more frequent testing of cattle herds in the Edge Area, and mandatory post-movement testing for cattle moved into a Low Risk Area herd from higher-risk areas. Industry-led badger culling in the High Risk and Edge Areas ended after the 2025 season, with government committed to ending the cull entirely by the end of this Parliament.
On 10 June 2026, Defra published the Bovine TB Partnership Steering Group's recommended control strategy for England. The headline change in emphasis is a move away from badger culling and toward cattle-focused measures, intervening earlier to prevent disease spread through strengthened cattle controls, improved surveillance, enhanced testing and vaccination, rather than treating badger population control as the primary lever. That is a meaningful shift in direction after more than a decade in which culling was the most visible, and most contested, part of England's bTB policy.
Three specific changes matter most for day-to-day herd management. If a herd has a bTB breakdown, the strategy recommends stricter testing protocols including wider use of the interferon-gamma blood test alongside the standard skin test, a more sensitive tool that can catch infections the skin test alone sometimes misses. If a herd sits in the Edge Area, the zone between the High Risk West and the Low Risk East, more frequent routine testing is recommended than applied before. And for cattle moved into a Low Risk Area herd from a higher-risk area, mandatory post-movement testing is now part of the recommended approach, an extra check after arrival on top of whatever pre-movement testing already applied.
None of this replaces the existing statutory movement and passport rules, covered in the movement reporting guide, it sits alongside them as an additional layer of disease control specifically targeted at bTB risk.
On the culling side specifically: the 2025 season was the final year of industry-led badger culling in England's High Risk and Edge Areas, and government has committed to ending the cull entirely by the end of this Parliament. The strategy's framing treats this less as an isolated welfare decision and more as a rebalancing of where the evidence points, toward cattle-to-cattle transmission as the dominant pathway the policy should be targeting, rather than badger population control carrying the weight it has for the past decade.
If your holding is in or near the Edge Area, check your herd's current testing interval against the new recommendations rather than assuming last year's schedule still applies. A testing frequency that was compliant twelve months ago may already be behind where the strategy is heading. Your local APHA field office or vet practice is the most reliable place to confirm the interval that actually applies to your specific herd.
A bTB breakdown is already one of the harder things that can happen to a herd, movement restrictions go on immediately, the herd cannot trade normally until it clears a set number of clear short-interval tests, and the whole process can run for months rather than weeks. The strategy's push for wider interferon-gamma testing on breakdown herds adds a second layer to that process rather than replacing the skin test: the gamma test is typically used alongside the standard skin test, not instead of it, specifically because it can pick up infections at a different stage of the disease. For a farm already dealing with the practical and financial strain of a breakdown, that means more vet visits, more blood samples, and more individual test results to keep track of against each animal, on top of everything the breakdown was already demanding.
Whatever view a farmer takes on the badger cull itself, the practical consequence is the same: more testing, more frequently, for more herds, and a new mandatory check on animals moving into lower-risk areas. Each of those tests generates a record that needs to sit alongside the animal's other paperwork, its medicine book entries, its movement history, its audit evidence for Red Tractor, covered in the audit checklist guide. A strategy shift like this rarely announces itself as an admin change, but that is exactly what it is for the herds it actually touches.
FarmHQ logs a TB test result against the same animal record as its passport, movements and medicine-book history, so a breakdown herd's extra interferon-gamma tests do not end up as a separate pile of paper nobody can find at audit time.
See how FarmHQ worksPublished by Defra on 10 June 2026, it shifts the focus of bovine TB control from badger culling toward cattle-to-cattle transmission, through wider use of the interferon-gamma blood test on breakdown herds, more frequent testing in the Edge Area, and mandatory post-movement testing for cattle moved into the Low Risk Area from higher-risk areas.
The 2025 culling season was the final year of industry-led culling in England's High Risk and Edge Areas. Government has committed to ending the badger cull entirely by the end of this Parliament.
If your herd is in the Edge Area, the strategy recommends more frequent bTB testing than before. If your herd has had a bTB breakdown, wider use of the interferon-gamma test is recommended alongside the standard skin test.
Yes. Mandatory post-movement testing is recommended for cattle moved into a Low Risk Area herd from a higher-risk area, on top of whatever pre-movement testing already applied to that animal.