SHOCKING new video shows Southend Council spraying carcinogenic herbicides on Seafront.
The Green Party is today releasing this footage taken on 23.11.22, which shows a council worker blanket-spraying the carcinogenic herbicide Glyphosate across the promenade. This area of the seafront by the attractions is very popular with families and dog walkers, and frequently sees young children and pets playing on the sea wall and beach. Just minutes after this worker was seen spraying close to the children’s play equipment further along, one of our members had to warn families with young children to avoid the area for safety concerns.
The local Green Party has been challenging the council over its continued and widespread use of these dangerous chemicals for years. Many residents are rightly concerned for the devastating ecological impact these substances have on our wildlife and pets, and further the documented cancer-causing health risk it poses to humans. Here we see the video evidence that the council isn’t listening.
Our coordinator James Vessey-Miller grilled the council in a recent meeting about their continued use of these substances, and shockingly Leigh’s Cllr Mulroney responded by wrongly claiming that these carcinogenic herbicides were “completely safe”. Southend Council has claimed for years that it is pursuing a “phased reduction” of these dangerous chemicals. It insists that it only uses these chemicals when necessary, and does all it can to avoid their use when alternatives are possible.
The Green Party refutes this claim, as we’ve seen them spraying this stuff across whole areas year-round, with no evidence of alternative weed control even being trialled at scale. We’re yet to even see any meaningful reduction on 2018 levels. We have a whole folder of evidence of the council using ride-on tractors like this to coat entire swathes of our city in these dangerous chemicals, and in our opinion, it’s often completely unnecessary. Far too often our members have witnessed council employees spraying these herbicides as a corner-cutting way of avoiding more labour-intensive manual weed control around streetlights, benches, and children’s play equipment. Shockingly, we’ve even seen the council spraying in this manner against the fences of primary schools.
We’re publishing this video today to evidence that despite what they say in their press releases, the council’s widespread usage of these harmful chemicals is ongoing, and that they simply don’t care that they’re doing it in areas that subject our children and pets to unjustifiable risk.
The Green Party continues to hold the council to account, and today we’re again calling on them to impose an immediate ban on the use of these dangerous Herbicides.
We call on Southend Council to do the right thing and stop the use of these chemicals.
Do you have any evidence or stories of the council using these herbicides?
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