Labour has vowed to get to grips with the weeds infesting the streets of Brighton and Hove over safety concerns, numerous complaints and overwhelming feedback on the doorstep during the local elections.
The problem started four years ago when Brighton and Hove City Council stopped spraying glyphosate weed killer, known commercially as Roundup. Councillors from all parties had signed up to a pledge to ban the chemical.
Last night (Thursday 20 July) at a meeting of the full council at Hove Town Hall, three councillors asked about the weed problem which has blighted the area since the ban.
Council workers have manually removed weeds but, despite recruitment campaigns, there were never enough of them to clear hundreds of miles of local streets.
Green councillor Ellen McLeay asked whether Labour intended to bring back glyphosate.
Independent councillor Peter Atkinson asked if there could be one spray a year, in line with other councils, to keep the weed down – if necessary, with a glyphosate-free alternative.
Conservative councillor Ivan Lyons said that his inbox was full of complaints from residents.
Labour councillor Tim Rowkins, who chairs the council’s City Environment, South Downs and the Sea Committee, said that weeds had been a key issue when speaking to people on the doorstep during the election campaign.
Councilor Rowkins said: “It’s pretty clear that there has not been a sufficient strategy in place to stay on top of the weed problem.
“We have already begun trialling some new equipment and we are in the process of assembling a policy working group to flesh out a new weeds management policy to bring to committee later in the year.
“We are working very hard on it as it is a priority for the administration. You’re not the only one who has an inbox littered with complaints about the issue.”
The equipment had been ordered before the elections in May, councillors were told.
Councillor Rowkins said that there was “no desire” to return to glyphosate which has been linked with some cancers.
He said: “I am in the process of assembling a policy working group that includes representatives from the streets team, disability groups, the Pesticide Action Network, our biodiversity officer, residents and others, with a view to developing a long-overdue detailed strategy which we will bring to committee in the winter, ahead of the next growing season.”
Glyphosate is still legal to buy and use in the UK, the EU and the USA and the EU has recently extended it’s license again.
As long as usage instructions are followed Glyphosate is perfectly safe for humans, animals, and insects, kills weeds to the roots in one application, and breaks down in the soil.
If the council is really worried about carcinogenic agents, perhaps they should start on this known causes from this list that includes alcohol, tobacco, and sunlight
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/understanding-cancer-risk/known-and-probable-human-carcinogens.html
Glyphosate is on still on the “probable” list but this also includes eating fried, hot food, and night shift work.
Will the council now start banning anything that might cause cancer in their operatives?
We’ve had this conversation a few times now Peter, unfortunately the evidence base does show issue with it beyond the immediate, and there are many safer alternatives to explore, which have not been done so yet.
Exhaust the alternatives first and have a strategy in place, then I’d be happy to concede Glyco is reasonable.
People like Peter Challis don’t care about the safety of the workers as long as weeds are removed.He’s always banging on about it.You can’t reason with people like him.
What has the council been doing since they stopped spraying without having found a practical alternative in 2019 after believing scaremongering misinformation from Brighton’s very own Pesticide Action Network UK ?
What have other other authorities done?
Not exploring alternatives, mainly due due to a pandemic. You will find very little has been done to explore alternatives currently. So, until that work has been fully explored, and the results have been documented, we should place reintroducing a dangerous product pretty far down on the list.
Incorrect – the council have been trying alternatives such as hot foam and flame guns but they were limited in where they can be used, especially next to parked vehicles and fences. So far all they have come up with is using hoes and now what look like a scarifier for gutters.
If the council had worked out a practical alternative before introducing a total ban then great, but then lead of the ETS committee Anne Pissaridou, as part of the secret Labour-Green coalition agreement (AKA Memorandum of Understanding) stopped all sprayings without consulting the committee members or any affected ward councillors.
And remember that the council still use Glyphosate for killing tree stump and giant hogweed.
And you keep repeating that Glyphosate is dangerous, even though you have no evidence to support the claim, other than a statement that it is probably carcinogenic like many agents, and what do we do about all the agents that are definitely cancer causing and council operatives are exposed to every day?
Ah, and I believe I’ve given you quite a comprehensive selection of international peer-reviewed academia before to very much answer the claim of bias?
The weight of the evidence supports the notion of not using glyco, in both large and smaller scale, as I know this was a reasonable point made by yourself, so I was careful to check and correct my thinking.
So are you employed by PAN UK and posting here in an official capacity? If so please use your full name.
Do you work alongside former Green Councillor Amy Heley who is now employed by the Pesticide Action Network UK as a Public Affairs and Media Officer?
Yes – I was supplied with many, cherry-picked, reports supporting their claims, but strangely they omitted ones from other groups stating that glyphosate was safe. When I made the effort to investigate the various claims and counter-claims it became obvious that PAN UK were just spreading scaremongering misinformation.
If the USA, EU, and UK authorities have looked at all the evidence from activists, manufacturers, and their own scientific experts, and decided it is safe, I’m happy to accept their decision, rather than just accept the claims from a local activist group which is paranoid about the use of all pesticides, and obviously doesn’t understand how the safety of chemicals is determined by authorities.
Let’s hope PAN UK are NOT involved in any review of what we do and instead we make pragmatic decisions based upon ALL the available information.
The PAN allegation is getting old, Peter. I didn’t know who they were until you mentioned it last week. Actually, you’ll find much academia doesn’t use terms such as “safe and unsafe” – they tend to focus on actual toxicity levels. Meta-analysis generally says more research is needed to tell firmly either way, which is why this debate is so heated.
Current evidence suggests that glyphosate usage trends are not only a concern to environmental and organismal health but also to human health in domestic habitats as well. However, many of these articles rely on non-environmental glyphosate concentrations, which you had mentioned before, and I agree that limits the conclusions that can be made. Although scientific interest in glyphosate is increasing, gaps in publicly available global data and challenges in understanding glyphosate when formulations are varied and private.
The lack of transparency of glyphosate formulations causes challenges in understanding the health implications of its use, and when considered in tandem with gaps in global data, this makes the study of this chemical on wildlife and human populations inconsistent.
Sorry – giving up trying to have a sensible discussion with too. You won’t confirm or deny anything, and refuse to answer points I make.
You make spurious claims about meta analysis, secret formulations, and need for further analysis even though Glyphosate has been used as a pesticide for almost 50 years.
If you look at ingredients in Glyphosate sprays, (which is usually just water, the herbicide, and a surfactant to wet leaves) there are no secrets.
I can only assume that you are indeed a Pesticide Action Network UK activist pretending to be otherwise and I can continue to safely ignore your comments as being scaremongering misinformation.
Please give my regards to Amy 😊
But there is a totally different risk profile between someone who uses it on a very infrequent basis such as the home gardener and someone like a council worker who will likely be using for extended periods on a regular basis.
As an employer the council needs to take those considerations into account.
Definitely, and making sure relevant safety precautions are followed by operatives. How come WSCC, ESCC and many other local authorities have restarted usage? Don’t they care about employee safety?
Perfectly willing to have a debate, involving relevant experts including manufacturers and government scientists, rather than just accepting anti-pesticide propaganda from single-subject activists.
If you can’t understand that these subjects need open discussion and just repeat the same claims then perhaps you are the one lacking reason and more driven by ideology and dogma?
A guy called Mark from the council does all the weeds round here, he’s fantastc
Hard worker!
Community Gardeners are a good shout, the local area puts a little bit in together to fund someone to do pull the weeds in the troublesome areas.
I like the green bits on and around pavements, don’t want them to be removed, unless they’re too big and in the middle of the walkway or otherwise causing real trouble. But most “weeds” around us are tiny. Managed to save some Erigeron this morning, by putting the garden waste bin in front, before the council worker got to it.
If the cut-through pathways and ginnels are as bad as the picture shows, then all it takes is one person with a strimmer for half an hour or so. This is what I do at our allotment paths. You can compost the cuttings.
Unfortunately the weeds then grow back, and within a month or six weeks, because you haven’t dealt with the roots.
So this is why we have an ideological battle over the use of weedkiller. The alternatives, are very labour-intensive.
I personally would never use Round-Up or other versions of Glyphosate, but that’s because I grow vegetables in open land. Similarly in any garden, my preference is always to weed manually.
But I’m not sure I’d mind that much if some chap on a council buggy sprayed our gutters and pavements at the start of summer – like they used to. The damage these untreated weeds are doing to our pavements is obvious, and so the longer term cost of this could be worse.
We also need to get away from the wishy washy and ‘fake green’ idea that weeds ‘look nice’. It’s the same as at home, when a sink full of washing up doesn’t look nice.
A well reasoned and articulated discussion, Billy.
I would like to suggest council does explore using safer options first, but if those are proven ineffective, then I wouldn’t be completely against the idea of using glyco.
I would respectfully disagree with you in all weeds don’t look good. Various wildflowers and long grasses are quite pretty to look at, but I will admit, a little trim around the edges do give them some structure, much like a trim on a messy head of hair.
Long grasses in particular provide a diverse ecosystem compared to a barren lawn, and most relevant recently, are much more resilient to scorched earth.
Give people who live near and along twittens a small reduction in council tax and many would do it voluntarily. Spark it off in April with an afternoon of xlearing. We don’t like seeing the weeds taking over and would do something about it regularly from April onwards as we walk down them every day. Try it as it’s a cheaper and more community minded approach without the need to poison the land. It also instils more pride in your area. I would do it anyway but don’t as I think it’s “someone else’s job” and don’t want to interfere in case its health and safety or some rule means i cant. Fed up with all these pictures of people standing around with weeds about when they could just get on and clear them. Any gardener would be itching to do it.
We have done something along those lines in our area. Part of our allotment group’s time is on green development, focusing on looking at our green features in the area, watering our baby orchard and new trees, pulling out weeds from stairwells and common walkways, and working on further developments.
Cannot believe we are still having this dribble years down the line. Just spray weedkiller once a year. I couldn’t care less about some made up argument that spraying some weed killer on some weeds in the gutter are going to suddenly kill all wild life. That is obviously nonsense. It’s the same nonsense, zero data argument that all main roads should be 20mph. Busybody politics has no place here now the greens are gone. Let’s speed up the reversal of the dumb laws please
Unfortunately Dave, peer-reviewed academia conducted by multiple organisations can’t be considered “dribble”.
Seems you’ve not read much into it with your conclusions. I’d recommend picking a recent meta-analysis, they are good for a round up, pardon the pun.
Trouble with “peer-reviewed” results is that you have to see whether the results apply in the real world and check who the “peers” are. If it turns out that they don’t apply except in extreme conditions or that the “peers” are just an echo-chamber of like minded activists, then they can be ignored.
I have been sent links to peer-reviewed reports from the Stop5g members saying that we should stop mobile phone mast expansion as it causes cancers and suicides.
That’s why we need government agencies who are charged with authoritlsing, or refusing, use of chemicals to make the decisions.
So, to summarise then, just ignore any evidence-based paper whose conclusions you don’t like?
And then make a load of fake allegations about someone who’s worsted you in argument.
About time someone like you
Spoke up and talked COMMON
Sense!
They must have closed a mental asylum near here recently and put the inmates into that big building in hove and called them ” Brighton Council”.
No other city in UK has this subject top of the agenda..does anyone question why that only this”City” can’t get their finger out?