FRESH calls for a controversial gull cull have been made amid claims the city is one of the worst-affected in the country.

Cllr Alan Amos has continued his crusade to tackle Worcester’s ever-growing gull problem and wants a ‘health and safety emergency’ to be declared as part of a plan to bring numbers under control.

Cllr Amos said gull numbers were rising “exponentially” in Worcester and attacked Natural England claiming the government agency was “deliberately” making it difficult for gull control after making changes to the way it hands out licences for dealing with protected birds.

During a full council meeting at the Guildhall on Tuesday (July 14), Cllr Amos said: “Following their suspension of an ‘organisational’ licence to the council, so requiring an individual licence even for the removal of one egg, and only after the submission of an array of restrictive conditions, Natural England have now deliberately made any form of gull control in this city impossible.”

Cllr Amos called on Worcester MP Robin Walker to tell “out-of-touch bureaucrats” Natural England to “stop peddling the lie that the ‘vicious flying rats’ were in any way endangered.”

“They certainly would be if I get my way for a cull,” he added.

The council was told in 2019 that a city cull would be illegal and a licence “impossible.”

Due to a fall in the rural gull population, Natural England has been stricter with its licences and hardly any were awarded last year.

The council has been spending between £30,000 and £40,000 each year to try and bring the city’s gull problem under control and has exhausted a long list of methods in a bid to curb numbers.

These have included disturbing nests, removing eggs, using hawks to deter gulls and buying gull-proof bins.

City council leader Marc Bayliss said the government needed to take the gull issue more seriously than it had done so far and he would be raising it with Robin Walker.

“I think the gull numbers are at a level now that will have a serious impact on the health and safety of the city and I think the government, and government agencies, need to reflect on that,” he added.

Just last month, it was agreed that an extra £30,000 would be spent this year on gull control measures as one of the council’s new Conservative administration’s top priorities.

Cllr Bayliss said the extra money would pay for two months of “intensive” hawking in the city centre for eight hours every weekday, spikes for lampposts, more red roofs in the city centre to deter gulls and more nest removals.

Cllr Bayliss said that 137 nests have been destroyed, 23 eggs have been removed and 27 chicks have been captured so far this year.