Cabinet Member Says Weed Killer Is Needed As Weeding Trial Begins

Friday, 28 February 2025 17:06

By Sarah Booker-Lewis LDR

As summer comes, so do the weeds and now Brighton and Hove City Council is trying to find a way to keep weedkiller off the pavements.

Last year Brighton and Hove City Council reintroduced glyphosate – sold commercially as Roundup – after five years without the herbicide resulted in overgrown pavements.

This year the council is carrying out a small-scale trial to compare a three-times-a-year chemical treatment and a three-times-a-year manual weeding.

The reason behind the trial in an unidentified city suburb is to work out a way to potentially phase out glyphosate as councillors from all parties promised in 2019.

Cabinet member for net zero and environmental services, Labour councillor Tim Rowkins said:

“There’s lots of people who are continuing to campaign for us to not use glyphosate, which I’m totally on board with.

“But what we absolutely cannot do is just stop using glyphosate and not have a plan again, because two or three years down the line, we’ll be back to where we started.

“I’m really keen to find what if there is if there is a way to manage weeds on a wider area or across the city without using glyphosate.

“We need to be we need to really demonstrate that it works, that it’s good enough and that it’s going to stay on top of the problems so we don’t to go back.”

Councillor Rowkins believes returning to glyphosate turned the tide on what had become a hot topic in councillors’ in boxes and even the national press.

He said:

“There were obviously places last year that were borderline impassable.

“If we rewind back to 2023, depending on which ward you represent it was one of the most talked about subjects in our in boxes.

“It varies, obviously greatly from depending on where you are in the city, but in some in some parts of the city was really the hottest item on the agenda and it’s that’s been completely reversed in in 2022.”

Last year the glyphosate was delivered through an oil-based medium directly onto the plants rather than sprayed across the wider pavement from the back of quadbikes.

A week or so after the treatment, council workers were able to clear the weeds more quickly than the manual removal which had been used in the previous five years.

Councillor Rowkins said:

“In 2023, we had no viable weed management plan at all.

“In the second half of last year, we pretty much managed to double the amount we were doing, but we still only got round a third of the city streets once.

“You can infer from that that there were spots in the city that didn’t have any weeding done for possibly two years or more. There’s no surprise that it was in such a such a dire situation.

“We just couldn’t couldn’t allow that situation to continue. I assume maybe it is just a bit easier because the weeds were dead so the teams could clear them in no time."