The blog of Leicester Friends of the Earth, a grassroots environmental action group. We campaign on issues such as climate change, fracking, air pollution and plastic.
Today we had a stall at the Eco Church 10th Anniversary Celebration. We spoke to church members from across Leicestershire who are working to care for the natural world by greening their buildings and their land, engaging with their local community and discussing how they can make a difference in their lifestyles. It was a lovely event and we had some useful conversations about moving away from using pesticides in the management of churchyards.
We have been celebrating after Leicester City Council agreed to stop spraying herbicide in and around children’s play areas!
As you'll know if you read this blog regularly, we have been campaigning for the city’s parks to go pesticide-free for five years. In that time, the Council have reduced the amount of spraying and they have been looking at alternatives, but they haven't stopped using glyphosate. Towards the end of 2025, we contacted Councillors Geoff Whittle and Vi Dempster to express our concerns about the continued use of glyphosate near to where children are playing. The Global Glyphosate Study, which involves scientists from Europe and the US, found that levels of the chemical previously considered to be 'safe' caused multiple types of cancer in test animals. One of the researchers stated: "The findings from this carefully conducted study...[are] a powerful reminder of human infants’ great vulnerability to toxic chemicals". Children are more vulnerable to pesticide poisoning because their skin is more permeable.
We also shared research showing that glyphosate harms bees’ digestive systems and damages their ability to keep their colonies cool, which can be devastating in our increasingly hot summers.
We met with Councillor Whittle and a council officer in December to explain our concerns about glyphosate endangering Leicester’s children. The journal article that had previously been used to claim that glyphosate was safe was retracted by the publisher last year, because they discovered that the company that makes glyphosate had been involved in the research. As with tobacco and fossil fuels, the companies who make this product have been trying to hide the harm that it is doing.
The City Council took some time to consider our suggestion and then they got in touch in January to let us know they have agreed and will stop spraying in and around the play areas this year. We are delighted that they listened and made this decision - we celebrated with cookies at our last meeting! We hope that they will take this opportunity to leave more wild edges in the city’s green spaces.
We are also encouraging gardeners across Leicestershire to stop spraying, to protect everybody’s health and to help wildlife. You can pledge to go pesticide-free in your garden here. We are planning to create a map of pesticide-free gardens using the postcodes of those who have taken the pledge.
The day we have been planning for a while is here - we have launched our pledge for gardeners to go pesticide-free! Pledge to go pesticide-free
When we talk about pesticides we tend to focus on the harm to flora and fauna (especially pollinators) followed by the impact on human health. But there’s another group that are impacted that we tend to forget: our dogs and cats.
Just as our children are in contact with pesticides as they
make contact with sprayed areas, so are our dogs and cats. Children playing on
the ground can easily make contact with sprayed areas but our pets have no
choice: by walking on the ground they are bound to make contact. Symptoms of acute pesticide poisoning (single
incident exposure) in cats and dogs can include vomiting, diarrhoea, drooling,
irritation to the skin or eyes, chemical burns, breathing problems, lethargy,
disorientation, seizures and even death. While instances of acute pet poisoning
are sometimes studied and recorded, there is almost no research on the
long-term, chronic effects on pets’ health of regular, ongoing direct exposure
to pesticides that have been linked to diseases in humans such as cancer.
Spraying in our parks and green spaces is exactly where we
walk our dogs. We recently heard a case where somebody had tied their dog to
the railings around a play area, while they took their child inside where dogs
aren’t allowed, then ran up a vet’s bill of over £1,000 when the dog fell
ill. The area along the railings had
been sprayed. There has even been a case
of a dog dying after lying on a sprayed area and ingesting the poison through its
skin.
Making the connection between pets falling ill and pesticide
use is in its infancy. The Veterinary Poisons Information Service (VPIS) has
recorded a 55% increase in pesticide related poisoning enquiries between 2019
and 2021, but this is only through voluntary contact with the VPIS, so the
issue is likely to be much greater.
The lessons to be learnt from this are:
Please join Leicester Friends of the Earth in pressing your
council not to spray in public parks and green spaces.
The sun shone and the afternoon buzzed with the sound of bees…. wait a minute…that was the sound of human bees! Well humans dressed as bees!
It was Friends of the Earths annual summer picnic and get
together to celebrate our year of work and what better way to celebrate than to
celebrate the life of bees and how we need to protect them. So, we decided to
have a picnic in Humberstone Park – dressing-up as bees was optional.
We have spent the last year working again on our pesticide
project – trying to get Leicester City Council to stop spraying parks and green
spaces with glyphosate.
The Global Glyphosate Study that concluded this year was a
multi-national study on the effects of glyphosate and the results were even
worse than feared: there is no safe level of exposure to glyphosate when it
comes to human health, with the risk of multiple types of cancer and DNA
damage. Also, the GM crops that have
been developed to resist glyphosate have also been shown to have an impact on
human health. Our latest approach is to
highlight the impact on pet health while we wait for the public consultation on
the renewing of the glyphosate licence in December 2026.
The family friendly picnic was well supported. Families
brought food to share, children and adults dressed in bee costumes and made
paper flowers to take home with them. We also had a huge Rainforest picture for
people to colour in to think about the current national campaign, “Planet over
Profit”, where we are asking the government to bring in a law to make companies
avoid harm to people and planet in their supply chains.
It was a lovely day – a celebration of everyone’s hard work, then everyone can have a well-earned rest ready for the next round of work persuading Leicester City Council to stop spraying the same as Lewes, Cowes, Trafford, Cambridge and many others and keep its environmental status as an environmental city that cares about nature and wants to help save our pollinators.
Time to listen Leicester City Council?
We held our ‘Bee-Picnic’ a week later than originally planned due to a rain storm on Bank Holiday Monday – well it was a Bank Holiday after all, what else would you expect? - causing us to postpone.
The Saturday after was a beautiful sunny day and everyone had a lovely time sitting out on the grass next to a flowerbed of pansies eating their bee friendly picnics. The event was organized to promote our ongoing campaign to persuade the City Council to stop using herbicides, which are a threat to biodiversity and a danger to human health, particularly that of children; and to raise awareness of the damage done by pesticide use more generally, to try to encourage schools, businesses and private individuals to stop using them.
A recent study found that populations of flying insects in the UK had fallen by 60% between 2004 and 2021, (1) and by a further 18% by 2023 (2). This is a decline that has been ongoing since the 1970s. This has major implications for food security as many of our crops rely on insects to pollinate them; and major implications for biodiversity, with many insect species threatened with extinction and knock on effects further up the food chain amongst other species, such as many birds. Insects are suffering from both direct poisoning and loss of habitat.
Interestingly, in the park, opposite to where we were sitting Leicester City Council had a notice board about the value of bees to biodiversity with ideas as to how we can help to protect bees. They didn’t mention on the board that they themselves are spraying in their parks to keep them ‘tidy’ and helping to cause the decline of bees!!
The impact of herbicide use on human health is also a major concern, since there is evidence of exposure to many common herbicides having long-term health implications. Many have been identified as potential carcinogens, and there is also evidence of them causing liver damage, and of them increasing the likelihood of someone developing diabetes and cardiovascular disease (3), with young children at particular risk of exposure in urban areas, due to the way that herbicides are used by councils in areas such as parks particularly when children’s play areas are sprayed.
As some councils have already gone pesticide free (4), and are allowing hard to mow areas to remain wild and adopting alternatives where some control of wild plants is needed, for instance on pavements (5), to protect both biodiversity and their citizens, we wonder why Leicester City Council cannot follow their examples and stop spraying our parks and green spaces in particular.
The picnic was a great success with people wearing Bee costumes and at the end taking part in a ‘bee die-in’ as a photo opportunity to forward to the Council to further our request for no more spraying and keeping our children and bees safe.
We are planning another event later in the year so look out for that if you would like to take part!
*Updated 13th May 2025
Our press release on this event was covered in the Leicester Gazette and the Northern Eco. The reporter from the Northern Eco, Sarah Hartley, had contacted Hannah Wakley from Leics. FoE before the picnic to learn more about the campaign as she is bringing together people campaigning against pesticide use across the UK and has set up a WhatsApp group. Hannah noticed that Leicester City Council had claimed, in their response to the press release, that glyphosate is certified by the Soil Association. She pointed out to Sarah that this is completely untrue and in fact the Soil Association have been campaigning for glyphosate to be banned for years! Sarah went back to the City Council, they admitted that it is only the adjuvant that is certified and she has now published a correction.
Careful Leicester City Council we are watching you!!
Leicester City Council are currently consulting on their new Climate Emergency Action Plan, which will cover the next five years until 2028. The consultation is open until Sunday 28th January 2024 and you can read the consultation documents here. We are writing a detailed response from Leicester Friends of the Earth but it will have more impact if as many people and organisations as possible respond to the consultation. You can complete a survey at the link above or simply send an email to sustainability@leicester.gov.uk with your thoughts.
Here are our suggestions for the key points to include:
------------------------------------------------------------
Although there are many good actions included in the new
plan, there are also too many points without any defined targets, so that there
is no way of measuring whether the Council is making progress towards reaching
net zero by 2030. There are also too many ‘actions’ listed which are in fact
only plans to make plans. These are not actions and should not be listed as
such.
The Council
The Council recognises that the most impactful actions they
could take to reduce the carbon emissions of their own buildings are to retrofit
insulation, install heat pumps and connect more buildings to the district
heating networks. However, insulation and connections to district heating are
not mentioned in the actions listed in this section. There is only a plan to
make a plan! Why not start trying to fund those projects immediately, while
creating the roadmap? When we are facing a climate emergency, we haven’t got
two years to waste in only writing the plan.
Housing
The ongoing programme of insulating council homes is good
but nowhere near ambitious enough. There needs to be a target to retrofit all
council owned and managed homes, as well as a target to get all homes in the
private rented sector up to standard. We would also like to understand what
more will be done to encourage privately owned homes to retrofit, as they make
up a significant proportion of the city’s housing stock.
Business, public services and community
The tree planting and Tiny Forests projects happening on
school grounds are excellent but they could be more ambitious; aiming to plant five
more Tiny Forests by 2028 is only one per year! Could the Council aim to plant
a Tiny Forest at every school that has sufficient green space within the next 5
years? That would be a significant number of trees and ensure that most
children in Leicester had access to a Tiny Forest.
Transport
To make active travel more attractive we need to find ways
of reducing traffic levels, so that it is safer to walk and cycle. One of the
key factors driving increases in road traffic is light goods vehicles, driven
by online shopping. This is recognised
in government statistics but not addressed in this plan (apart from with a plan
to make a plan!). More urgent action is needed. For example, the Council could
work with online retailers to install more parcel lockers around the city so
that deliveries could be dropped at one point for people to collect.
Land and infrastructure
The glyphosate reduction trials in city parks are welcome
but we would like to see this expanded. It is possible to manage parks and
green spaces without using any chemical pesticides (herbicides, insecticides
etc). Other local authorities are also managing their streets without using
chemical pesticides and we would like to see the Council follow this best
practice and phase out the use of all pesticides in the next five years.
Consumption and waste
The Council state that food waste is being separated from
other household waste. How is this done? And is it as effective as a separate
food waste collection would be? We are concerned that this is not the most
effective way to manage household waste.
It is good to see that the Council intends to increase the
choice of meals in schools, to address the climate impact of food. This should
apply to all institutional settings, including hospitals, care homes and
prisons, not only schools. Vegan options of similar nutritional value to other
meal options should be made available for every meal.
To give an award to the most nature-friendly park, we need to assess their current state and survey people who use the park. This is our schedule for visiting each of the parks:
|
|
Fridays (evening visits looking at habitats) |
Saturdays (stalls with questionnaire) |
|
Hamilton |
5th
May |
6th
May |
|
Evington |
12th
May |
13th
May |
|
Spinney Hills |
19th
May |
20th
May |
|
Willowbrook |
26th
May |
27th
May |
|
Humberstone |
9th
June |
10th
June |
|
Stokes Wood |
16th
June |
17th
June |
|
Appleton |
30th
June |
1st
July |
|
Reserve |
7th
July |
8th
July |
We were recently very excited to hear that the City Council have decided to stop using glyphosate in parks and green spaces from January 2023!
As you know if you've been following us, we have been campaigning for the
city’s parks to go pesticide-free since 2021. We contacted the City Council
to express our concerns about the use of this poison and pointed out that exposure
to pesticides has been linked to many health issues, including cancers, Alzheimer’s
and infertility. We also shared research showing that glyphosate harms bees’
digestive systems and damages their ability to keep their colonies cool, which can
be devastating in our increasingly hot summers.
We spent several months on the streets
explaining our concerns to the public and gathering support. In July, we presented a petition of 1057 signatures asking the City Council to stop using
pesticides in parks and green spaces. We then attended the Neighbourhoods
Services Scrutiny Commission meeting in August and asked the councillors and
officers to reconsider their spraying policy.
The City Council have now responded to the petition,
confirming that they will stop using glyphosate in parks and green spaces from
January 2023, on a trial basis. They are working with Pesticide Action Network
to develop a pesticide action plan.
We would like to thank Adam Clarke and the council officers
in the parks department for listening to our concerns. The vast majority of
people we spoke to during our campaign were opposed to the use of pesticides in
the city. Many parents in particular will be relieved that they don’t have to avoid
sprayed areas when taking their children to the park.
Leicester has always rightly been proud of its status as the
UK’s First Environment City and the Biodiversity Action Plan states that the
Council aim to 'make sure that local biodiversity thrives'. We congratulate the
Council on taking an important step towards that aim. We hope that they will
take this opportunity to leave more wild edges in the city’s green spaces.
There has been a catastrophic decline in insect and wild plant species in the
UK, so we need to make space for nature in cities. We also hope that they will
reconsider the use of glyphosate in other places, like school grounds and
pavements.
This story was covered by the BBC and the Leicester Mercury. We celebrated the campaign win at our September meeting with tea and cookies!
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)
If you follow us on Facebook or Twitter, you’re probably aware that we are planning to present our petition asking the City Council to stop spraying pesticides in the parks to the full council meeting on Thursday 7th July. We’re trying to collect as many signatures as possible in the last few weeks. If we reach 750 signatures of people who live, work or study in Leicester, a senior council officer will be called to a public meeting to respond.
Thank you to everyone who has signed and shared it recently –
the petition has grown significantly in the last fortnight so it’s working! If
you haven’t signed and shared yet, there is still time. We’ll also be having
one last street stall to collect paper signatures on Saturday 25th
June, on the edge of Victoria Park.
As part of our research for this campaign, we submitted a
Freedom of Information request to the City Council to find out more about their
use of pesticides on pavements over the last three years. We were particularly
interested in this time period, as we saw more wild plants in the streets in
2020 and early 2021.
We asked the frequency with which the pavements were sprayed
with pesticides in 2019, 2020 and 2021 and the chemicals that were used. They
responded:
Number of treatments - 3
Commenced – 08.04.19, 08.07.19, 14.09.19
Chemical – Glyphosate (this is a herbicide, designed to kill
plants but known to have other effects as well – see below).
Number of treatments - 1
Period - April - Oct
Chemical – Glyphosate, No mix
Number of treatments - 3
Commenced – 17.05.21, 26.07.21, 03.10.21
Chemical – Glyphosate, Rosate adjuvant
We also asked if they could tell us the number of reported
trips and falls due to ‘weeds’ in the pavements in the same years. They
responded:
2019 – 13
2020 – 56
2021 – 17
2019 – 4
2020 – 2
2021 – 0
We found these numbers interesting, because it seems to show
that having more wild plants in the pavements (as there were in 2020 and early
2021) doesn’t lead to more trips and falls. On the other hand, the increase in wild
plant diversity and abundance was very apparent. Two local botanists came to
our May meeting and told us that in 2020, they recorded 361 species of wild
plant on 20 streets in Leicester. They found a similar number when they
surveyed a comparable area of unimproved natural habitat. Cities don’t have to
be botanical deserts. In fact, left alone, nature can thrive in a city. We just
need to give it the chance.
The City Council seem to be more concerned about the
complaints they receive about ‘weedy’ pavements. And yet, many of us are
worried about the use of glyphosate in the city, especially when we see the evidence
that it is linked to cancer in humans and harms wild bee colonies. Therefore,
if you’ve signed our petition and you are wondering what to do next, we
encourage you to write to your councillors and complain about the use of
herbicides in Leicester. You can use the Write To Them website to easily find
your councillors and send them an email. You don’t have to be an expert – just explain
why you are worried. But if you would like more information to quote in your email,
Pesticide Action Network have some useful information here. And if your
councillors respond, we’d love to know! Forward us any responses you receive to
help us plan the next steps of the campaign: leicesterfoe@gmail.com
At our May meeting, we welcomed Russell Parry and Lindsay-Anne, who had come to share their enthusiasm for wild plants (N.B. not ‘weeds’!) in urban areas. You can see their slides here and below is a brief summary of their presentation.
-------------------
Data from NatureSpot, a species recording website,
shows that the highest levels of biodiversity in Leicestershire are found in
the city and towns and the lowest in farmland. The pesticides and fertilisers used
in agriculture are turning fields into green deserts, with very low diversity. Seeing
plants and green places is essential to human health and happiness; many psychology
studies have now demonstrated this.
There has been an alarming decline in insects over
the past few decades. This is made very clear by the ‘windscreen phenomenon’ –
car windscreens are no longer covered in squashed insects after long journeys.
A German study found that there has been a 50% decline in insects in 20 years.
Insects rely on wild plants for food and a place to lay their eggs. More wild
plants = provide more habitat for insects.
Russell has conducted a bird survey along the same
route in Birstall for the past 25 years. He finds that there is less species
diversity and abundance on the golf course and more along the roads with
gardens. More plants = more insects = more birds.
The City Council routinely sprays the pavements in
Leicester with herbicide to kill all wild plants. In 2020, with the lockdowns,
they only sprayed once. In that year and the following spring, there was an
astonishing abundance of urban wild plants. But then they resumed spraying
three times a year and the pavement wild plants have disappeared again. Lindsay-Anne
saw a similar situation in Enderby. A recent article in the RSPB magazine
concluded that the best way to deal with ‘weeds’ is to allow them to flourish.
The abundance of 2020 inspired Russell and Lindsay-Anne
to start the StreetWild project. They planned to ask people to go 200 yards
from their house and look for common plants. They would provide people with a
guide to recognising five plants currently in flower every month. The Wildlife
Trust and the City Council were interested in promoting this. However, when the
pavement spraying resumed, the project had to be abandoned.
In 2020, Russell and Lindsay-Anne recorded 361 species
of wild plant on 20 streets in Leicester and found a similar number when they
surveyed unimproved natural habitat. Lindsay-Anne found Jersey Cudweed in
Enderby, a schedule 8 plant (meaning it should not be touched) and the first
record of this plant in Leicestershire. She reported it to the District
Council, but when the spraying resumed, it was still sprayed.
The City Council’s Biodiversity Action Plan includes
some excellent intentions, including: ‘We will make sure that local
biodiversity thrives.’ However, they are not acting on these.
-------------------
This gave us some new ideas for how to progress our pesticides campaign!
We have started a petition
asking the City Council to minimise the use of weedkiller which they spray
around the streets of Leicester. Research has linked exposure to pesticides to
a range of health issues, including cancers such as leukaemia and non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma; neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and
disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; respiratory
disorders such as asthma; and diabetes and fertility issues. Glyphosate, the
weedkiller used in Leicester, was recognised as a carcinogen by the World
Health Organisation in 2015. In 2020 the manufacturer of the weedkiller
Roundup, which contains glyphosate, paid out over $10 billion to settle
lawsuits from people who developed cancer as a result of using their product.
Whilst we recognize that it is necessary to remove plants
from pavements to stop people slipping, we are asking the Council “if it is
really necessary to spray parks and green spaces? Does it really matter if wild plants grow
around trees or fence posts?” Surely, we need more space for wildlife in our
city. More plants = more insects, more birds, more life!
We have written to Adam Clarke the Deputy City Mayor for
Leicester Council and he has confirmed that the City Council are still using
Glyphosate. He explained that the Council have been working very hard to try
and reduce their use of pesticides but they cannot stop using these products
altogether. Unfortunately, this does mean that the parks and open spaces in the
city are still being sprayed and as children are particularly vulnerable to
pesticide poisoning (they absorb three times more pesticides than adults)
because their skin is more permeable and they spend more time playing close to
the ground, this does mean that we are putting our city children at risk!
Members have been taking pictures of areas in parks and
around open spaces which they think have been sprayed with pesticide. The photo
album can be viewed here
.
We are also asking the City Council to, as a duty of care,
and as an immediate measure, put up signs to alert park uses which particular
areas are to be avoided as they have been sprayed. This is common practice in
many cities in America. This would help to safeguard our children and pets and
the health of the general public. The WHO estimates that over 350,000 people in
developing countries die each year as a result of acute pesticide poisoning,
with upwards of 750,000 suffering from chronic defects and cancers as a result
of long-term exposure.
As well as being harmful to human health, pesticides are
also damaging the environment. A single application of a pesticide or
insecticide can remain present in the soil for up to three years, so repeated
doses – even one every twelve months – can render the soil toxic for years.
They work systemically affecting all of a plant including its pollen and
nectar, which means they are taken up by pollinators such as bees. Given the
vital role that insects play in our ecosystems, and the importance of nature in
helping to tackle the climate emergency, it seems imperative that the Council
stops spraying its land with substances that are so harmful to insects and
human health.
The petition will be presented to the City Council later
this year asking them to re-think the way they manage our green spaces. Please
help to encourage the Council to keep our children safe and sign it at
Melanie Wakley
At a recent Parish Council meeting in my village the PC voted to carry on spraying round the village tennis court and play area with weedkiller. When I enquired what the weedkiller is that they use I was told it was glyphosate and I was also told that it was ok because it is what the County Council use.
I wrote to Leicester City Council and to Leicestershire County
Council asking them to stop spraying with glyphosate as lots of other Councils
have already stopped spraying.
Leicestershire County Council responded saying they had put the
spraying (of the highways) on hold and it was under review and they would let
me know the result of the review and their decision about spraying.
Leicester City Council were not quite so helpful in
as much as they are carrying on spraying and explained their reasons why they
had to. Basically, they said they had
tried and researched other methods but they were too costly and time consuming
so they needed to keep spraying.
This is an ongoing project and we are formulating our
response to Leicester City Council at the moment. Watch this space….
