POLICY

The pest management toolkit

Pest professionals rely on a broad toolkit of physical and chemical control methods to keep homes and businesses pest-free.

Each tool has its pros and cons. Some can only be used inside. Others risk the secondary poisoning of non-target species like pets and wildlife. Others are prohibitively expensive or require too much supervision in certain locations.

Through training and experience, pest professionals select the right mix of tools for a job.
As products get restricted, banned or removed from the market, pest professionals find gaps in their toolkit and, ultimately, their clients suffer.

New surveillance has found genes for resistance to anticoagulant rodenticides in 78% of rats and 95% of house mice.

The Campaign for Responsible Rodenticide Use UK / 12 December 2022

A niche market

Unlike agricultural pesticides, public health pesticides are niche products with a limited UK market. There are around 1,500 pest management companies in the UK and they each use much fewer chemicals than a farm spraying crops.

Chemical regulation post-Brexit means products must go through GB BPR, which applies to biocides manufactured in or imported into England, Scotland and Wales.

The GB BPR pricing model is comparable to the equivalent EU scheme (EU REACH) while having access to a much smaller market.

This disproportionately affects niche markets such as professional-use public health pest management products.

For our members to continue to protect public health effectively, they need access to a broad, affordable range of products to combat pesticide resistance and manage sites with specialist requirements.

A high price for the authorisation process will cause manufacturers to make difficult decisions about which products they bring to the UK, thereby stifling innovation. If the reauthorisation process is too expensive for niche markets, products will disappear from shelves, and our member’s ability to protect public health will be further limited.

A tiny percentage of the population uses professional pest control products, however they go a long way to protect public health. Every supermarket, hospital, care home, food factory and significant British infrastructure relies on pest professionals and their toolkits. Please do not stifle our sector’s effectiveness with a prohibitively expensive authorisation process.

Physical toolkit

65% of pest controllers say rodent control will become difficult without glue boards

Westminster, Holyrood, and the Senedd have all restricted physical control measures with legislation. Rodent glue boards have been banned or restricted across England, Scotland and Wales.

There are early signs that snap traps will come under pressure next, meaning that non-chemical tools may become trickier to deploy.

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