Government badger control costs 2024
Updated 11 December 2025
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Background
On 16 October 2024, Defra published updates as part of its measured approach to tackling bovine TB and achieving disease control benefits. Natural England authorised licence holders to resume operations in 19 existing intensive badger control areas and issued one new Intensive Cull Licence in the Low Risk Area of England in 2024.
Badger control costs
Information on costs to government in 2014 to 2024 is provided in this table.
| Badger control costs | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Licensing and compliance monitoring | £1,036,000 | £1,003,000 | £1,284,000 | £1,289,000 | £1,312,000 | £1,459,000 | £1,541,000 | £1,542,000 | £1,520,000 | £1,200,000 | £1,050,000 |
| GPS and humaneness monitoring, including postmortems | £1,515,000 | £154,000 | £392,000 | £506,000 | £352,000 | £388,000 | £282,000 | £254,000 | £643,000 | £296,000 | £692,000 |
| Efficacy monitoring | £17,000 | £0 | £0 | £0 | £0 | £0 | £0 | £0 | £0 | £0 | £0 |
| Advice and assessments | £294,000 | £460,000 | £646,000 | £728,000 | £410,000 | £314,000 | £313,000 | £88,000 | £143,000 | £59,000 | £24,000 |
| Other costs, including equipment | £205,000 | £162,000 | £53,000 | £49,000 | £1,000 | £20,000 | £16,000 | £3,000 | £1,000 | £1,000 | £1,000 |
| Total cost | £3,067,000 | £1,779,000 | £2,375,000 | £2,572,000 | £2,075,000 | £2,181,000 | £2,152,000 | £1,887,000 | £2,307,000 | £1,556,000 | £1,767,000 |
Badger control policing costs funded by Defra
The total cost for policing in 2024 across all participating forces was £1,977,000.
Policing costs are also published by individual forces.