Seagulls

Debate between Oliver Colvile and Steve Double

Tuesday 7th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) on securing this important debate and it is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock).

I represent St Austell and Newquay in mid-Cornwall, and the issue of seagulls has long been a hot topic in my constituency, particularly in places such as Newquay, Mevagissey and Fowey—coastal towns that rely heavily on tourism. We have seen the growing nuisance of seagulls in recent years. That nuisance is to do with noise and droppings that can damage car paintwork, as well as gutters blocked by nests, which then cause gutters to overflow. There is also the nuisance of rubbish strewn across our streets every time there is a waste collection in the community.

Seagulls are not only a nuisance. Increasingly, there is an issue of danger. We often laugh at tourists in our seaside towns who have their pasty or their ice cream stolen by a sweeping seagull, but too frequently that results in injury. Our local A&E in Cornwall reports that every late spring/early summer our seagulls become more aggressive and several people visit A&E as a result of being injured by a seagull.

In 2015, there was the well-publicised case, which my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport mentioned, of a family dog in Newquay being killed by a seagull. That drew a lot of media attention and was directly responsible for former Prime Minister David Cameron commenting that we needed to have a big conversation about seagulls. Sadly, we never got to have that big conversation. The issue went away, as it does most summers, and we have never really come back to address it in the way that I believe we need to.

[Oliver Colvile]

Does my hon. Friend think that a clever idea would be for us to have a debate of this sort annually, especially at this time of year?

[Steve Double]

I am grateful for that comment from my hon. Friend. However we do it, we need to keep returning to this issue until it is addressed in such a way that seagulls no longer blight our seaside communities. Whether it is an annual debate or whatever the mechanism is, we need to keep focusing on the issue until something is done.

My observation is that we have almost two species of seagulls in this country. The gull we most often refer to is the herring gull, which is a large bird. I understand it can grow to about 55 cm, although now that we are leaving the EU we are allowed to say 22 inches. That bird is the most common cause of nuisance and attacks. As I said, it is now almost two species, as there are the birds that live out on the clifftops as nature intended them to live—by eating from the sea and living in the wild—but increasingly we see the urban seagulls that come into our towns becoming a very different species from those that live in the wild.

We do the seagulls no favour by drawing them into our towns. One of the facts that I discovered when I looked into this matter was that the average life expectancy for a gull that lives in the wild on the clifftops is more than 30 years, but for a gull that has come into the town and lives by scavenging off human waste it is 12 to 15 years. Gulls live more than twice as long when they live in their natural habitat than they do in our towns. By removing them from our towns, we would do the gulls a favour and help them to live the long and pleasurable lives that nature intended.

Increasingly in our seaside towns in Cornwall the gulls are seen as nothing more than flying rats. They scavenge from our rubbish bins and seek to steal food from us whenever they can.

Pharmacies and Integrated Healthcare: England

Debate between Oliver Colvile and Steve Double

Wednesday 11th January 2017 Westminster Hall

[Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) on securing this debate on what I believe is a very important issue.

There is no doubt that our health service is currently under great pressure, as we have heard already. People are living longer and we are able to treat far more conditions than we could in the past, which adds to the demand on our health services. Although more money is always welcome, I am sure that many of us would agree that simply throwing more money at the health service is not the solution. We need to find better, smarter, more efficient and more effective ways of working to provide the healthcare that our growing population so desperately needs.

I have no doubt that pharmacies, particularly community pharmacies, can play an important role in finding better and smarter ways of providing healthcare to the people of this country. Community pharmacies continue to be an undervalued and underutilised section of our health service. As a country, we really need to embrace the role that community pharmacies can play in delivering health services. They have much more to offer than they are currently seen be to offering.

The Government have started to recognise that, with the current pilot scheme, started in 2015, to increase the presence of clinical pharmacists in general practice. That is clearly a step in the right direction, but I propose that we should also look the other way. We should not only look at integrating pharmacies into GPs’ surgeries; we should be looking to integrate GP services into our community pharmacies. It is quite clear that many of the routine services that people typically go to their local GP for could be provided by their local pharmacists in a much more cost-effective way.

[Oliver Colvile]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Oliver Colvile]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. He makes a very powerful point. I have thought for some while that we should be trying to put GP surgeries into pharmacies, so that when someone goes to their GP and says, “I have got this ailment and I need some help,” he can say, “Don’t come and talk to me; go and talk to the pharmacist, because he or she can manage the thing properly.” To my mind, that seems a very clever way in which we could take some of the pressure off the finances of GPs, as they would not necessarily have their own lease, but could get the likes of Boots or others to provide facilities.

[Steve Double]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and I agree with him. Clearly, part of the answer is getting GPs and pharmacies working much more closely together, and co-locating can often be one way to help with that.