Seagulls

Derek Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)]

I would love to mention my wife, Mr Streeter, but she does not have much to do with this.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) for bringing this matter to Westminster Hall. There is no shortage of material from St Ives that I could talk about with reference to seagulls, and their welfare—it is not just about their being pests. St Ives’s fame comes most recently, as many in the House will know, from its neighbourhood plan. Hon. Members can talk to me about it later, if they are interested; it hit the international headlines. St Ives is also famous for Barbara Hepworth, the Tate Gallery, beautiful beaches, and seagulls. In fact last July an 18-year-old girl was airlifted to hospital having fallen off a 15-foot wall because of an incident involving a seagull and an ice cream.

This is a very tricky public debate, as I learnt without even contributing to it. At the same time as David Cameron was making his comments last summer, I was having a surgery in a local pub in Longrock. I came out of the pub with the landlady and she asked me to do something about a seagull that had been injured. It was there by her doorway, causing a problem to people coming in and out of the pub. I bundled it up, put it in my MG, drove it home and gave it some care and attention in our chicken run. After I got into my house having done all that, I opened my email inbox and had a whole host of emails wanting me to be removed from the planet because of our attitude towards seagulls. I am aware how tricky this public debate is, so my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport is a very brave man for raising it—this is an emotive issue.

There is no disputing that seagulls are beginning to behave badly. We have mentioned most of the issues today. There is a safety issue for both humans—as I mentioned—and animals; we know of stories in Cornwall of pets and other wildlife being attacked by seagulls. There is also an issue for tourism. Interestingly, my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) referred to the noise that seagulls make, but when I am in my constituency on the phone to anyone anywhere else in the country, they always refer to the lovely sound of seagulls in the background. Many people come to Cornwall because of the contribution that seagulls make.

The truth is that seagulls are getting a bit out of control; however, this is no new problem. My hon. Friend also referred to the work that he did on Cornwall Council to try to solve the problem of seagulls distributing people’s rubbish wherever that rubbish might be on bin day. I was a member of Penwith District Council—we used to have six district councils in Cornwall before we went to a unitary system—and we were the only council to introduce wheelie bins to solve this problem. We had to do that because of our tourism and our local economy. The risk to health was a real problem. People would put their rubbish out late one night and in the morning it was everywhere but where it was intended to be, so wheelie bins were introduced. It is of great concern in other parts of Cornwall that Cornwall Council refuses to distribute them.

[Steve Double]

To pick up my hon. Friend’s point, and I have some knowledge of this, part of the problem in places such as Cornwall is that in a lot of our very small coastal villages wheelie bins are completely impractical because people do not have the space outside their properties to store them. That is why, when I was a cabinet member, we introduced the sacks, which are a lot easier to store.

[Derek Thomas]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Again, that is exactly the problem in St Ives; I have elderly residents who have had their bins removed for that very reason. We need to understand how to manage the problem of seagulls and other wildlife distributing our rubbish. That is a big debate—perhaps the subject for another Westminster Hall debate.

[Oliver Colvile]

Does my hon. Friend not also feel that the seagull cause has been helped by the opening of “Desert Island Discs”, which has seagulls calling in the background?

[Derek Thomas]

When my hon. Friend has the opportunity to go on that programme, I suggest he try to correct that, but I will not go into it.

There are things that we can do and there is some human responsibility in this. First, we really must stop feeding seagulls. There are people in Mousehole, where we have a particular problem, who have their own pet seagulls—or believe they do—and feed them every single morning. People try to explain the situation to them, but they continue to feed the seagulls. There are some really lovely people who think that they are caring for these beautiful birds, but actually they are not being caring at all. We need to get the message out to these people somehow that feeding the seagulls is not good for all concerned—including the seagulls themselves, I believe. We also need to address how we secure our bins and look after rubbish because, again, that is obviously a key tension.

There is some conversation about how we provide contraceptives for seagulls. Rather than cull them, which I assure hon. Members would be a very difficult and unpalatable thing to argue in my constituency, there must be a way that we can introduce contraceptives to seagulls to reduce their ability to reproduce. I imagine that if we did that for three or four years, it would have a significant, positive impact on the number of seagulls. I would not personally be willing to offer to do a drug trial, but I am sure that I can suggest ways that a contraceptive for seagulls can be trialled in that area. I know that it already exists.

Finally, we could remove eggs. I was in the building trade and when I did my apprenticeship I used to go up on high street roofs—mainly those of banks. A colleague of mine, who was considerably older than me and more responsible, would have a yard broom and would wave away the seagulls that were intent on knocking me off the roof because I was removing their eggs. That was part of my apprenticeship in the building trade. We used to go up on roofs at this time of year and a bit later to remove eggs because that was the only way that we could control the problem back then. I understand that we are still able to do that, but there are obviously some safety implications and we need to support communities to do it. In fact, in my building trade I spent a lot of time and lots of people’s money on creating all sorts of nets, wires and the various things we have discussed. We even looked at creating ways of spraying water on seagulls, because apparently they do not nest on roofs if they are sprayed.

There are lots of people out there who are trying to resolve this issue, but I completely accept that we must avoid having to come here every year to have a discussion about seagulls—although that is important until we resolve this issue. We need leadership from Government, support for councils and local communities and an honest debate about not how we cull and get rid of seagulls, but how we keep communities safe, protect coastal communities and tourism and look after the welfare of these magnificent birds.