Wirral Council has halved its use of the weedkiller Glyphosate, a chemical which some experts have linked to cancer, in a year.

At Thursday night’s meeting of Wirral Council’s environment and transport committee, a passionate debate about whether the borough should be using the chemical at all broke out.

The major fall in the use of Glyphosate is partly due to the pandemic, as weed spraying was paused for six weeks at the start of the coronavirus outbreak.

However, Wirral Council said its policy of not using Glyphosate in parks and the countryside is also part of the picture.

Given the concerns around the chemical, many councillors were pushing for more to be done to dramatically reduce or eradicate the use of it in the borough.

However, Colin Clayton, Wirral Council’s assistant director for parks and the environment, said alternative methods including 20% Acetic Acid and ‘manual weeding’ had been trialled by the authority, but were not sufficiently effective weeding tools.

Mr Clayton said the acid had a very pungent smell and did not prevent weeds from growing back quickly, while manual weeding, which involves using tools such as hoes to pull weeds out of the ground, was difficult to scale-up to cover the whole of Wirral.

The council officer added that while much effort had to be undertaken to train volunteers on how to weed safely, a New Brighton trial of manual weeding was an enjoyable event

Cllr Chris Cooke, who represents the Green Party, was one of the councillors pushing for more to be done.

He said officers were implicitly making the argument to keep using Glyphosate and this was unacceptable.

Cllr Cooke added that weeds should be cleared where they are most dangerous such as on pavements, but in some places such as at the roadside they are not so dangerous and could be left.

The Green councillor also praised the trial of manual weeding, which has seen council workers train groups of volunteers to weed their own areas in order to avoid the need to use the cancer-linked chemical.

He said manual weeding could allow people to regain ownership of their neighbourhood.

Labour councillor Liz Grey, chair of the environment and transport committee, said that while there were teething problems the event in New Brighton was fun and the practicalities of manual weeding would get easier over time.

But Cllr Tony Cox, a Conservative member for Hoylake and Meols, urged members to listen to council officers.

He noted that on the issue of Hoylake beach, Labour and Green councillors tended to quote experts who broadly speaking advocate a more natural beach, so they should also listen to Mr Clayton’s comments on the difficulty of using manual weeding across the borough.

Cllr Cox said it is not “scalable” and that other alternatives to Glyphosate should be sought by Wirral Council.

Labour’s Steve Foulkes made a contribution which drew praise from both sides of the debate.

He said it could be self-defeating to push forward with a solution which does not work.

Cllr Foulkes said that instead the council needs to explain to people that it is on a journey and could strike a deal with communities in favour of manual weeding.

He argued that people often want the council to weed an area first using chemicals to make it clean, then from there locals will look after their local area themselves.

But Cllr Foulkes said he has received huge numbers of complaints from residents about weeds which have not been cut. Therefore, if the authority moved away from Glyphosate too rapidly there could be a backlash from residents.

He asked the committee to unite to come up with a way of eradicating the chemical, but said the council was “not there yet”.