In the ten years since we launched the Pesticide-Free Towns campaign, we have done our best to keep on top of all the changes that have been made by UK councils. However, as the campaign has made more and more progress, increasing numbers of councils have taken action to reduce or end their pesticide use. Conversely, a handful of councils have reverted back to using pesticides after previously being pesticide-free.
Keeping up to date with the moves made by every council across the country has proven to be an impossible task, particularly for a small organisation with limited capacity. The UK government’s own monitoring of pesticide use by councils is both long out of date and hugely incomplete.
While monitoring the activities of every council in the country does not seem like a good use of our very limited time, as the main experts on urban pesticide use in the UK we do want to provide local residents and others with some way of discovering whether councils are using pesticides. We, therefore, decided to send Freedom of Information Requests to almost 400 UK councils, using the responses to provide a ‘snapshot’ of the current situation on pesticide use by local authorities in public spaces. This has allowed us to see just how far we have come in ten years and how much further there is still to go.