Bromley Council’s highway weed treatment programme for the 2024-25 year

Full details of the regime and methodology, which remains unchanged from previous years, can be found on the Council’s website at: https://www.bromley.gov.uk/street-care-cleaning/weed-control. This contains more general information which should provide answers to any questions that there may be and is where any interested parties can be directed.

The salient points I would like to draw to your attention at this stage are:

Bromley Council manages over 850 miles of both footway and carriageway assets, as well as 50 miles of interlinking footpaths, meaning the scale of the operation comes with a multitude of challenges. The Council does its best to navigate this in partnership with its provider, Veolia, but any queries initially should be raised either via Fix My Street in the usual way or through the local Neighbourhood Officer in the first instance. Neighbourhood Officers also undertake randomised monitoring inspections to check for signs of weed ‘die-back’ after 14 days or so of the application, as well as monitor that this ‘die-back’ is being removed through ordinary sweeping operations.

The Neighbourhood Officer for Hayes & Coney Hall Ward is David Hall (E-mail: david.hall@bromley.gov.uk), Tel: 0300 303 8658).

It is also important to note that the Council uses a contact herbicide – to be effective this requires a degree of weed growth followed by a period for die-back before removal, meaning the Council cannot maintain a completely weed-free environment at all times. Manual removal is an option in certain situations, but not preferred as typically only surface-level growth is removed meaning the weed will simply re-grow within a short period of time.

Indicative dates for this season’s weed treatment applications:

1^st Application  – W/C 29^th April 2024

2^nd Application – W/C 1^st July 2024

3^rd Application – W/C 26^th August 2024

Each application will last between 4-6 weeks. Die-back will thus become visible depending on when in the application cycle the work is completed, and from that point will then take up to 14 days to show signs of the application taking hold.

Naturally, weather conditions play a large role in both the weed growth cycles and application duration (we cannot spray during wet or windy conditions for example).