Government badger control costs 2025
Updated 30 July 2026
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On 11 December 2025, 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 12 existing intensive badger control areas, including one Intensive Cull Licence in the Low Risk Area of England in 2025. Â
Badger control costsÂ
Information on costs to government in 2014 to 2025 is provided in Table 1 below.Â
| Cost category | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | £750,000 |
| 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 | £425,000 |
| Efficacy monitoring | £17,000 | £0 | £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 | £12,000 |
| 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 | £3,000 |
| 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 | £1,190,000 |
Badger control policing costs funded by DefraÂ
The total cost for policing in 2025 across all participating forces was £1,333,000Â
Policing costs are also published by individual forces.