You'll have seen me moaning about Defra's lack of ability before, they have described ragwort as being on a list of dangerous foreign plants in the past, when it is one of our most ecologically important native plants
I think however that the latest stuff sounds like deliberately misleading people.
On the page that lists their guidance on ragwort control, they give the following misleading legal advice. There is no question that this misleads, as I will explain. They make this statement:-
"If you do not follow this code it may be used as evidence in any legal action. But if you can show you have adopted measures in the code of practice, this will help you avoid any fines."
This clearly gives the impression that you must control ragwort and follow this advice, because someone can turn up and spot it and you will get fined, but that is not true.
The law actually says,
"Where the minister of Agriculture fish and food (in this act referred to as ' the Minister') is satisfied that there are injurious weeds to which this act applies growing upon any land he may serve upon the occupier of the land a notice, to take such action as may be necessary to prevent the weeds from spreading."
There is no obligation on them to issue an order and there is no obligation on anyone to do anything without an order. You can only be fined if one of these rare orders is issued and you do not comply. So contrary to the impression given you can't just be fined for not following this advice.
Now let us see if it can be used in court. I'd love to be able to defend someone on this, because of the quality of the guidance. It is hard to find words strong enough to describe just how bad it is. The estimation of risk is totally incompetent. It is in fact positively bananas!
It uses figures from someone known to say really crazily daft things. Freedom of information requests to the institution where he worked says they are likely to be wrong anyway as they almost never record any poisoning cases, It then takes these crazy figures and extrapolates them in a mathematically incorrect fashion to say there are lots of cases of ragwort poisoning. It even talks of confirmed cases when we know from the research that you can't confirm cases because the toxic effects are even at a microscopic level indistinguishable from other causes. In short it is a pile of horse manure. It is utterly, shamefully wrong!
However, there is a legal reason, why this guidance cannot be used. It was withdrawn several years ago. We know this because the on-line copy was stamped withdrawn and quite amazingly the man who withdrew it announced it on twitter! It was marked as having been replaced with updated new guidance. The law says that to be valid It can't just be put back, has to go before parliament. It hasn't!
This is what the law says This is the Ragwort Control Act ( It doesn't make control compulsory either.)
(1) The Minister may make a code of practice for the purpose of providing guidance on how to prevent the spread of ragwort (senecio jacobaea L.).
(2) Before making the code the Minister must consult such persons as he considers appropriate.
(3) The Minister must lay a copy of the code before Parliament.
(4) The Minister may revise the code; and subsections (2) and (3) apply to the revised code.
(5) The code is to be admissible in evidence.
So replacing it and revising it with new guidance has to go before parliament, but they didn't do this with any of the revisions and reinstatements.
We live in a parlimentary democracy. Parliament decides the laws not the civil servants. This would be a very powerful argument for lawyer to make. It is very clearly not valid unless it goes in front of parliament.
This is copy of a blank page in the withdrawn document notice that, despite the fact that ragwort is unquestionably a native plant, it says that the updated guidance is on non-native plants. More shameful ignorance!
