A joint legal challenge by wildlife groups Wild Justice and The Badger Trust against the granting of Badger culling licences in England has been given permission to be heard in the High Court for a full judicial review.

Our case challenges the legality of Natural England’s decision to issue 26 supplementary Badger cull licences in 2024, against the advice of its own Director of Science, who could find “no justification” for authorising further supplementary Badger culls because vaccination was a viable alternative.

However, Natural England went ahead and authorised the cull licences after Defra officials expressed concern that its relationship with the farming industry could suffer if cull licences weren’t granted.

We lodged an application for judicial review in August 2024 but in November 2024, The Hon. Mr Justice Sweeting refused our application. We lodged an appeal against that decision on 8 November 2024 and a hearing took place at the High Court yesterday (15 May 2025).

After listening to the arguments, The Hon. Mr Justice Fordham gave permission for our legal challenge to proceed on all three grounds, which are:

1. Natural England unlawfully exercised the statutory power to issue licences to kill Badgers for the improper purpose of maintaining farmers' confidence in the Secretary of State's policy, rather than for the narrower (and proper) purpose of "preventing the spread of disease" (Bovine Tuberculosis).

2. Natural England had considered arguments that were legally irrelevant to its decision on whether to issue the licences. These included the consequences of the decision for its relationships with Defra and the "farming community", and for its own budget and wellbeing of its staff.

3. Natural England failed to provide adequate and rational reasons as to why the licences should be issued after its Director of Science had advised that there was no scientific justification for issuing the licences.

The full judicial review hearing is expected later this year and there will be an interim hearing to deal with costs prior to that, following Natural England’s attempt to increase our costs should we lose the case, in what we perceive as an attempt to intimidate us from bringing the challenge (see here).

Although our case focuses on Badger cull licences that were issued in 2024, this legal challenge remains significant because (a) Government agencies need to be held to account for their actions and (b) we anticipate that Natural England will be making a decision imminently about 2025 supplementary Badger cull licences and it will have to think very carefully indeed now the legality of last year’s licences is in doubt.

This is a costly challenge - we have already spent a lot of time and money to get the case to this stage. However, we refuse to be intimidated because the needless slaughter of thousands more healthy Badgers, just to maintain Defra's relationship with farmers, is outrageous. We need to raise £52,486 to pay our lawyers, court costs, costs of research, Crowdjustice fees and Natural England's costs if we fail to win the legal argument. 

Please help with a donation to enable us take this challenge all the way on behalf of Badgers, those charismatic and ecologically essential members of our fauna. 

Thank you for any help you can give.

Thank you to all those who have already donated via our newsletter. We will shortly be transferring those donations to this crowdfunder.

If, for any unexpected reason, we raise more money than we need to fund this challenge then unspent funds will be retained by Crowdjustice and will be available for Wild Justice to use for other similar legal cases on behalf of UK wildlife.

Thank you, from Wild Justice and The Badger Trust.

(Badger photo by Chris Packham).