Another victory as top law firm removed ragwort blog entry

 Incorrect information on ragwort is very prevalent on this occasion I complained to a law firm that  they had a blog entry, written by publicity staff not a lawyer it seemed. I checked with the register of solicitor.

That was in effect giving false legal advice on the law This  was a Legal 500 company with an a agricultural department and I don't propose to name them. Legal 500 is one of the two most prestigious independent legal directories in the UK and internationally, alongside Chambers and Partners. They research and rank law firms and individual lawyers across different practice areas based on client feedback and peer review. So this is not some fly-by-night website  but a proper legal firm 

I will point out the errors with a few short quotes

"A landowner is legally required to prevent ragwort spreading to adjoining land"  this is falseFalse. The Weeds Act 1959 Act places no general duty on landowners. It  clearly only empowers the Secretary of State to act.

"The Environment Agency can issue a clearance notice" This is false. The Environment Agency has no powers whatsoever under the Weeds Act 1959.

"You may serve them with a formal notice under section 1" False. Private individuals have no power to serve notices. Section 1 gives that legal power solely to the Secretary of State.

"Requiring them to eradicate the ragwort" False. The Act requires prevention of spread, not eradication and this is a significant legal distinction.

"You can then involve your local authority, which has the power to serve its own notice and carry out the work itself"  False. Local authorities have no powers under the Weeds Act 1959 whatsoever and it does not even mention them.

"Notifiable weed"  False. Ragwort is listed as an injurious weed. Notifiable weed is a different legal category entirely it would mean that you'd have to report the presence of the plant to some kind of authority. No such law exists in the UK.

"The Ragwort Act" Confused but essentially false. No such Act exists.

Every substantive legal claim in that article was wrong. I complained and just 1 hour and 17 minutes later I got a reply from the law company's Senior Compliance Officer. They had just deleted it , no ifs no buts it was gone. I would imagine that they were rather embarrassed by the nonsense.

How does this happen. How does stuff like this appear on even good legal firms websites.  Well this kind of thing is typical of members of the British Horse Society or, and it is an overlapping group,  readers of horsey magazines. We know that both these are sources of misinformation. The British Horse Society STILL has incorrect information on the law on their website of similar kind to  the kind of misinformation that this article contained.

 The issue here is always the problem with this hysteria. It is that emotion about animals overrides reasoning and science.

In the ragwort case this is particularly significant because the emotional stakes are  really quite  genuine people love their horses and are understandably alarmed by anything that might harm them. That entirely understandable concern creates exactly the precise and bad  conditions in which misinformation flourishes. I have written before of a horsey world bubble in which nonsense circulates. and here  because nobody stops to ask whether the law actually says what everyone says it says we get an article full of nonsensical claims about the law. The Act is four sections long. It would take nobody longer than ten minutes to read. But  emotion here about horses and welfare  means perhaps that for the writter of this awful article, checking never felt necessary.

It is always very clear that love of animals is really giving people licence to make all sorts of false claims without checking them

Victory over Welsh government over ragwort misinformation

 A few months ago I wrote about how I had persuaded DEFRA the English government department to change false information about ragwort on -line, Well now it has happened with the Welsh government on a different piece of actually quite badly thought out advice. I should explain for foreign readers that the United Kingdom is divided into separate nations of which England is only one and Wales is another and environmental matters are devolved, decentralised away from London.

Anyway, this has occurred  because they misunderstood the meaning of a legal word in the Weeds Act, or more precisely a legal phrase "injurious weeds" They represented  it as weeds that could cause injury, which is incorrect. I wrote to them via a local member of the Senedd ( our parliament in Wales) and complained in a consultation and it is gone. You see, the term injurious is a form of legal art ,it is a word that has a precise meaning in law and it does not mean causing injury it  essentially means causing harm to the interests of something. 

I never had a chance to use what I discovered was a devastating attack on the bad use of the word, but the way I compiled my data has given me the opportunity to put it all up publicly on my website. This is is useful because this term is still be in misused by other sources that ought to know better,  along with another bad one, "harmful weeds."

What I did was to get over 200 years of parliamentary debate records and write a computer program to extract all the sentences where someone had used the word "injurious" or "injuriously". To do the analysis I needed to gather up the over 2000 examples and isolate them and put them on the screen . Now the easiest way to do this is to make them into webpages. This makes it easy because the web browser does all the work displaying the data and all you need to do is add a few formatting codes to the text and it all comes out clearly on the screen. This avoids writing your own software to display things which is very time consuming.

There were a few small and trivial issues with the data but every single example of the use of the words was entirely in accordance with the legal meaning I've described. This of course is a devastating set of facts to counter anyone who misstates the meaning of the words. I had over 2000 sentences covering over 200 years of parliamentary statements.

I had also done research on the origin of the word injurious and the Latin words that it derived from and what I have done is used this to greatly expand the page on my website explaining this.

To my immense glee I found a perfect quote from the Roman writer and legal expert Cicero, all the way from 44BC! You see I have a critic online. They're not the brightest of souls which I might forgive,  but venomously nasty with it. I have on a number of occasions been falsely accused of using out of date information. Just because I quote something from the 60's or 70's doesn't mean it is wrong. It remains valid in science unless shown to be wrong. Often the research on something was done some time ago and is accepted as correct. Well now I've found a reference from before the birth of Christ, which perfectly illustrates the point of things not being out of date just because they are old.

And here is that page on Injurious Weeds

The frustrating things is the time it takes to get things corrected and the effort it requires. It is a matter of literacy really, not knowing what a word means. If they'd have asked a lawyer, and perhaps they eventually did, then the problem would never have occurred.

Experience has long told me that you can't trust officials to get things right, like the time DEFRA announced that our very much native and ecologically valuable (Common) Ragwort  was on a list of dangerous foreign invaders!

While I'm here there are some other new or updated pages that may interest those who follow my writing here.  Ragwort Law Harmful weeds. And this is the usages of the word Injurious in parliament link.

Oh and while I was thinking about the generally poor literacy which causes a lot of these problems I came across a beautiful example of this. I encountered a person on social media who was insisted that I couldn't possibly have put the first copy of the Weeds Act on line, which I did in 2002 some years ago. He pompously claimed that it had been up for decades. I got a copy out of the library, photocopied it, took the copy home, and typed it into my developing website. If it was already online I wouldn't have had to do this! This arrogant bighead seemed to have forgotten that the internet was in its infancy around then. I'd got online a few years before. I was an early adopter of the online world and I had to say to people, "Have you heard of the internet." Really!

The really amusing thing about this man was he had commented on-line that he wasn't going to listen to Professor Crawley's podcast. He knew better , better of course than a top ecologist who is a Fellow of the Royal Society! What made it really funny was that this semi-literate, bombastic, know-it-all, nobody described the professor as an, "armature." He couldn't even spell amateur! 

 

Updates British Horse Society exaggerating ragwort toxicity 10,000 times and Dogs info

 You know, there is an awful lot of work that goes into this, It isn't just a matter of writing stuff. There is an awful lot of reading. Just to discover the facts about small doses of ragwort having no effect was extraordinarily difficult. It must have involved at least 1000 and possibly nearing 2000 miles of travel to get the actual documents. Of course I will have used that opportunity for other research but it is a lot of work. I have located some more sources of information recently so there will be more coming out.

A colleague suggested recently that I was probably amongst the most knowledgeable people alive about ragwort. It actually caused me to stop and pause, I'm rather reluctant to accept it, but If I look at it honestly with approaching two and a half decades of work on this , and dedicated reading of the literature I can see why someone might think so.

One of the things I am writing about today is the updated information on the British Horse Society exaggerating the toxicity of ragwort by ten thousand times. Yes, this actually happened and I've got the evidence to prove it. It wasn't just sloppy writing in what they said as they used a term with a precise scientific meaning incorrectly. They called it extremely toxic, but that has a meaning and I've got the  literature sources for the toxicity, sources of what is extremely poisonous in chemicals and the mathematics proves it correct. It is all documented on my updated web page on this issue .Ragwort is not extremely toxic.

The other update is about dogs and ragwort. Yes, ragwort is poisonous to dogs, but it is not dangerous to them, there is no likelihood of exposure.   The idea that dangerous and toxic  not always  being the same is, it would seem, invisible to some people. As I keep saying everything is dangerous in sufficient quantity and I actually know someone who was found unconscious by a concerned relative and who spent several weeks recovering in the local intensive care unit. The cause was medical issues which caused them to drink too much water!

And yes I've done my research, there is no reliable test for ragwort poisoning, There are toxins in moulds which could easily grow on dried dog food quite invisibly and they are in the words of an article in Nature, a top tier scientific journal, "indistinguishable from ragwort poisoning."

It is important to note here, It isn't just my research. A colleague, a CEO of a conservation organisation, went to a meeting and discovered it directly from a veterinary professor. 

There is also a critical fact there is actually a standard veterinary textbook on things toxic to cats and dogs and it has no mention of anything connected to ragwort. Here is the link to the updated page https://www.ragwortfacts.com/ragwort-dogs.html

Well that just rounds things off for today. There is more to come. I've recently discovered a cache of old magazines with a mixture of nonsense and rebuttals from scientists and experts. I'm sure that will provide a few new web pages and some postings here. Only 800 miles of travelling for this lot, what a bargain!

DEFRA Corrects Ragwort Guidance on Fines Under the Weeds Act

Following a formal complaint I submitted earlier this year, DEFRA has now corrected wording on its ragwort guidance page concerning fines under the Weeds Act 1959.

The original wording implied that compliance with the Ragwort Code of Practice could “help you avoid fines”. In isolation, this created the impression that landowners faced a general risk of fines if ragwort was present on their land and that following the guidance prevented those fines.

This was misleading because the enforcement mechanism under the Weeds Act 1959 operates through a specific legal process.

Under the Act, action begins with the service of a Control Notice. Only if such a notice is served and subsequently breached can enforcement proceedings potentially lead to fines. There is no automatic liability simply because ragwort is present.

DEFRA has now amended the page to reflect this structure. The relevant sentence now reads:

“If you have been served a control notice under the Weeds Act 1959, but you can show you have since adopted control measures which comply with the guidance in the code of practice, this can help you avoid fines.”

This correction restores the correct sequence of enforcement under the law by making clear that fines only arise in the context of a served Control Notice.

The distinction is important because inaccurate descriptions of ragwort law are frequently repeated in social media posts, advertisements for weed-control services, and campaigning material. When government guidance is unclear, it can unintentionally reinforce those misunderstandings.

Clarifying the legal position helps ensure that discussions about ragwort management are based on the actual structure of the law rather than assumptions about general legal duties or automatic penalties.

I am grateful that DEFRA reviewed the issue and updated the wording accordingly.

Accurate public guidance is important, particularly where legal obligations are concerned, and this change helps ensure that the Weeds Act 1959 is described correctly.

 Just to explain the law here. I've put in this section to explain it in more detail.

The enforcement mechanism under the Weeds Act 1959 operates through the service of a Control Notice.

A Control Notice is a formal legal notice issued by the Secretary of State (in practice through officials acting on behalf of the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs). It can be served on the occupier of land where specified injurious weeds are considered to be growing in a way that may cause agricultural harm.

The Act lists five species as “injurious weeds”, including common ragwort (Senecio jacobaea). Injurious here is a legal word that means harmful to the interests of something, Injurious weeds are, or were in 1920 when the term was first written into law, Weeds that are harmful to the interests of agriculture. It has nothing to do with causing an injury, Many of the other can be found in books on foraging for humans as wild foods. They are in fact edible. Ragwort of course isn't

The purpose of a Control Notice is not to impose an immediate penalty. Instead, it is a direction requiring the occupier of the land to take specified steps to prevent the weeds from spreading.

A Control Notice typically:

• identifies the land concerned

• specifies which weeds must be controlled

• sets out the measures required

• gives a time period in which the work must be carried out

Importantly, the Weeds Act does not create an automatic offence simply because these plants are present on land.

Enforcement action only becomes possible after a Control Notice has been served.

If the occupier fails to comply with the notice, two forms of enforcement may follow:

Prosecution for non-compliance

Failure to comply with a Control Notice is an offence that may lead to a fine.

Default action by the authorities

The authorities may carry out the required control work themselves and recover the costs from the occupier of the land.

In other words, the sequence under the Act is:

A Control Notice is served

The occupier is given an opportunity to carry out the required control measures

Enforcement action is only possible if the notice is ignored or breached

This means that the presence of ragwort on land does not by itself create legal liability. Enforcement under the Weeds Act arises only through the formal process of issuing and enforcing a Control Notice.

Key points: Ragwort enforcement under the Weeds Act

• The Weeds Act 1959 does not make it an offence simply for ragwort to grow on land.

• Action under the Act begins with the service of a Control Notice requiring the occupier to take specified control measures.

• The occupier is given time to comply with the notice and carry out the required work.

• Fines can only arise if a Control Notice is served and the occupier fails to comply with it.

• If a notice is ignored, the authorities may either prosecute for non-compliance or carry out the work themselves and recover the costs from the occupier.

In short: no Control Notice then no enforcement under the Weeds Act.