We presented our petition asking the City Council to stop using pesticides in parks and green spaces last night (Thursday 7th July), to the full council meeting. Between the paper and online petitions, we had a total of 1057 signatures, of which 690 were verified as having city postcodes. Unfortunately, this left us short of our target of 750 verified signatures, which would have required a senior officer to respond to a public meeting. However, the Council still have to respond and we will be able to continue the conversation with them.
We had been told before the meeting that we would be able to speak for 5 minutes in lieu of reading the petition text, so we had prepared some key points to explain our campaign. We were then told at the meeting that we could only read the petition text. However, as we had already prepared our speech, we have emailed it to all the councillors instead. You can read our summary below.
We'll update you here and on our social media when we get a response!
On behalf of Leicester Friends of the Earth, I wish to present our petition as printed on the script, asking the City Council to stop using pesticides in parks and green spaces. The City Council say that you are minimising the use of the herbicide glyphosate but we still see unnecessary spraying around trees, fences and even rocks in the city’s parks.
There have been a number of studies linking glyphosate to cancers in people, particularly non-Hodgkin lymphoma. This research was collated in a meta-analysis published in the academic journal Mutation Research in 2019 and I can provide the link to that for anyone who would like to read it. Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of pesticides, because their skin absorbs chemicals more easily and because they are more likely to be playing on the ground. And yet when we visited Humberstone Park recently, glyphosate had been used principally around the children’s play area.
The evidence for the ill-effects of glyphosate on bees and other wildlife has also been mounting over the last few years. It is now known that glyphosate harms bees’ digestive systems, for example, affecting their ability to absorb food. Councillors may also have read the recent article in the Guardian about glyphosate damaging the ability of wild bees to regulate the temperature of their colonies. We were therefore particularly disappointed to see that the seeded section of the 'Bee Road' meadow strip on Goodwood Road has recently been sprayed with glyphosate. The RSPB’s Pesticides and Wildlife Report explains that the combination of chemicals that all living creatures are exposed to, known as the cocktail effect, can cause more harm than any single chemical. The cocktail effect is not tested as part of the approval process for pesticides but research is now starting to reveal the extremely harmful effects of combinations of these chemicals.
We have been out on the streets collecting signatures for this petition over the past few months. The vast majority of people we have spoken to are opposed to the use of pesticides in the city and many have expressed surprise and dismay that they are still being used. Leicester has always rightly been proud of its status as the UK’s First Environment City, but on this issue, we are not leading. Forty-three local authorities in the UK have already banned all pesticides or committed to phasing them out in the near future. Cambridge, for example, banned the use of herbicides in the parks and green spaces in 2019 and are aiming to stop all herbicide spraying in the city by the end of this year.
The City Council’s Biodiversity Action Plan states that the Council aim to 'make sure that local biodiversity thrives'. We applaud that aim – with the catastrophic decline in insect and wild plant species in the UK, it is absolutely necessary to make space for nature in cities. However, biodiversity cannot thrive in places that have been sprayed with poison.
We ask the City Council to reconsider their policy. Thank you.
Glyphosate weedkiller damages wild bee colonies, study reveals | Bees | The Guardian
Information for local authorities - Pesticide Action Network UK (pan-uk.org)
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