Letter: SCC Directs Weedkilling Policy

Published on: 27 May, 2025
Updated on: 27 May, 2025

From George Potter

Lib Dem borough and county councillor

In response to: If GBC Wishes To Be Nature-friendly, Stop Spraying Weedkiller

Given that Mrs Redpath has emailed me about pavement weedkilling before, she is well aware that the spraying she is complaining about is undertaken for Surrey County Council as part of their verge maintenance programme.

While Guildford Borough Council does have the contract to do some of the verge maintenance for SCC, the terms of that contract oblige us to do weed-spraying in some places.

Where it is possible, within the terms of the SCC contract, to exercise discretion to avoid spraying, GBC does so. Where spraying is mandated, GBC only uses targeted spraying of individual weeds rather than dowsing the entire verge with pesticides.

However, our hands are tied on this issue since it was SCC who, a couple of years ago, decided to take control of verge maintenance away from the districts and boroughs.

If GBC still had direct control over verge maintenance, rather than simply being a contractor, we would be taking a different approach, as we had been before control over verges was taken away from us.

Mrs Redpath is fully aware of this, as I explained all this when she contacted me previously. I also referred her to her local county councillor, who happens to similarly be from the R4GV party, and suggested that since this was an SCC decision it might be an issue which said county councillor might wish to lobby the county council about.

For my part, as a county councillor I voted , along with the rest of the Lib Dem group, against SCC’s decision to centralise verge maintenance and to apply an ecologically-harmful set of one-size-fits-all policies to verge maintenance across the county. What was notable in that debate was the lack of support for this position from R4GV councillors.

The question I would put to Mrs Redpath is why, knowing all this, she chooses to focus her ire on GBC, and seeks to blame GBC for something which she knows full well is the responsibility of the county council.

This is far from the first time that Mrs Redpath has chosen not to let facts get in the way of a good political attack (such as when R4GV boasted that all their county candidates lived in the areas they were standing to represent despite the fact that this was not true in Mrs Redpath’s case), so I leave it to the reader to judge what motives might lay behind her comments and whether she is likely to be being deliberately misleading or not.