A DECISION to allow controlled culls of badgers in hotspot TB areas has been welcomed by politicians and farmers in Mid Devon.

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman last week announced the launch of a nine week consultation on plans to licence groups of farmers and landowners to carry out controlled culls of badgers in specific areas.

Neil Parish, MP for Tiverton and Honiton said the increase in incidents of the disease in the past decade and a half had been alarming.

"In 1997, there were 3,500 cattle in the UK lost because of bovine TB, by 2009, that had risen to 35,000, a ten-fold increase."

Mr Parish said Devon alone will lose nearly 2,000 cattle this year, with young stock particularly affected.

Mr Parish said: "I don't welcome having to cull badgers, but I feel doing nothing to take out the reservoir of disease is no longer an option. We need to make sure however that any culling that takes place is effective and humane."

Fellow Conservative MP Mel Stride, who represents the Central Devon constituency, said he also backed the minister's decision.

He said farmers in his constituency would be "eternally grateful" for the decision to take tough action to tackle the spread of the disease.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Mr Stride said there was "not a country in the world that has tackled bovine TB successfully without getting on top of the reservoir of that disease in the wildlife population."

Mrs Spelman told the House she was "strongly minded" to allow culling, though the details were still to be subject to consultation.

Culling looks set to be piloted next spring in two trial areas, one of which is likely to be within Devon. If this is found to be effective, the policy would be rolled out more widely in 2013.

Badger control licences would be issued by Natural England under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992 to enable groups of farmers and landowners to reduce badger populations at their own expense.

The cull proposals form only part of a package of measures to tackle the disease including reducing compensation where TB tests are overdue and removing some exemptions to test animals before they move out of herds under annual and two-year routine testing as well as a £20 million investment over the next five years to develop effective cattle and oral badger vaccine.

The National Farmers' Union hailed the decision as a "massive step forward" and said "painstaking work" had been carried out by DEFRA and the Secretary of State prior to taking what it described as a "very tough decision in the face of not inconsiderable opposition".

Among those opposition voices is the conservation group the Badger Trust which responded to the announcement saying: "For far too long, too much effort and time has been devoted to badgers and far too little to the main causes of TB spread – ineffective testing and cattle movement controls."