Cornwall Council's ragwort balderdash.

During a conversation on twitter some ill-informed person held up Cornwall Council as a useful source of information on ragwort.

Nothing could be further from the truth as evidence by this piece of ignorant balderdash in their Highway Maintenance Manual

C.8 Specialist inspection of noxious and invasive Weeds

The control of injurious and noxious weeds is a statutory responsibility for

authorities under the Weeds Act 1959 and the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

The primary objective of the specialist inspection is therefore to identify

areas of prescribed weeds that may be hazardous to users of the highway.

The prescribed weeds are:

Ragwort

Broad leaved dock

Curled dock

Creeping thistle

Spear thistle

First of all neither piece of legislation creates ANY statutory responsibility on local authorities. Then we get the nonsense that there has to be inspection to removed weed that may be hazardous to users of the highway. You can imagine it dock leaves causing car crashes by their mere presence on a verge! What utter nonsense! I suspect it is because they don't understand that Injurious weeds means harmful to the agriculture we had in 1920 when they were first written into the legislation governing Great Britain. They seem to  think that the term, "injurious weeds"  means that edible dock leaves are a danger to people and cause injury which is not the correct use of the word  injurious in this context.

Then there is the fact that none of these native plants is mentioned in the Wildlife and Countryside Act at all! The list there is of problematic foreign plants which are a problem and while there is a brief mention of Japanese Knotweed later on they don't cover these!

Some years ago Cornwall council was spending £100,000 a year on this kind of environmentally damaging control, which is a matter for concern and no doubt writing this sort of rubbish in documents helps the highway's department justify this.

The main message here is that local council officers very rarely know what they are talking about with regards to weeds so don't rely on them to inform yourselves!

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