POLICY

Pest management work is largely unregulated

While many of the products pest professionals use are heavily regulated in the UK, technicians themselves aren’t.

Despite having access to dangerous and highly regulated biocides, the UK has no licensed pest technicians or mandatory professional bodies for companies like many other countries do – including Ireland, the USA, Norway, Germany, Netherlands, France, Hungary and Cyprus.

Instead, we have many voluntary ‘self-regulating’ initiatives to help technicians conform to legislation, such as the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the legally binding label conditions of biocides.

Qualifications like the RSPH/BPCA Level 2 Award in Pest Management, various Codes of Best Practice and guidance documents are in place to ensure pest controllers understand how to control pests safely while remaining compliant.

Public health pesticides can be dangerous

Rodent poisons, or rodenticides, can potentially harm non-target wildlife. These poisons present a significant risk to other wildlife, either by direct ingestion or indirectly by consuming prey that has eaten bait.

In 2023, the Campaign for Responsible Rodenticide Use (CRRU UK) warned that “two-thirds of the latest sample of barn owls had residues from products containing brodifacoum, an active ingredient in many brands, though in none was it confirmed as the cause of death.”

Professional-use insect poisons, or insecticides, can be fatal to fish, plants and aquatic insects.

Pets, particularly dogs, can die from rodenticide poisoning if treatments aren’t carried out professionally.

Many pesticides can be harmful to humans, particularly children. In 2022, the untrained use of pest control products was linked to the death of an 11-year-old girl at a block of flats in Shadwell, Tower Hamlets.

Welfare concerns

Pest control products are humane by design. However, when adopted by an untrained user they can be inappropriately applied and cause unnecessary suffering.

Under the Animal Welfare Act 2006, it is an offence to cause unnecessary suffering (physical or mental) to an animal under your control.

Live capture traps, snap traps, and glue boards can all cause huge amounts of suffering for a target species if they are used without training.

These products are only as humane as the training a pest professional has received.

Access to professional-use products

Professional-use rodenticides can be purchased by anyone with a CRRU-approved training certificate. This can be done online in less than an hour and training is often assessed with a multiple-choice quiz.

Professional-use insecticides have no specific requirement beyond the user being “trained and competent”. Reputable suppliers will ask for training certificates before selling these products, however, these chemicals are available elsewhere.

All professional-use biocides appear regularly online, and we get many reports of these products ending up in untrained hands.

The Control of Pesticides Regulations (COPR) states that users must be “trained and competent” to use professional products – however, this raises more questions than answers. What does competent mean? Who does the training and to what level? How are professional users being benchmarked?

Product and treatment-specific training and licences

Some products have specific training or licence requirements. They include:

92% of professional pest controllers think the sector needs licensing

Self-regulations

Around 80% of all pest management work carried out in the UK is carried out by a BPCA member company.

BPCA members self-regulate by submitting themselves to regular assessments and agreeing to follow Codes of Conduct and Best Practices.  

However, anyone can call themselves a “pest controller” without any qualifications or assessments. They can choose to ignore best practices or might be completely unaware they exist.

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