Should you apply for a gull licence?
Birds pose serious health risks to the public, and your business can be under liability if you don’t attempt to manage the population at your property. However, obtaining a gull licence should always be the last point of call for shopowners, businesses and organisation.
At Falconry Services, we work with businesses to help them manage a gull population and, ultimately, not ever need to apply for a gull licence. We use various services such as bird netting, bird spikes, bird wire, and bioacoustic scarers such as bird alert to achieve this.
How do you obtain a gull licence?
We’re aware that sometimes these services can have a limited effect depending on the situation and how bad the gull population is at your business. Therefore, if we’ve attempted to use these services with no success, we can work with you to obtain a gull licence from bird licensing at Natural England.
Working with your company, we can put together a document showing all the evidence needed to have any chance of gaining this licence. We must reiterate, this will only be possible if there is a severe and clear risk to public health and safety due to birds.
We’ve worked alongside Natural England to obtain gull licences in the past, and even with the recent changes related to the control of Lesser back-blacked and herring gulls, we’re confident we can help you gain an A08 licence if all non-lethal control methods have been attempted.
Information taken from gov.uk states that Natural England will only licence if you can show evidence that:
- Damage or a problem is occurring.
- What target species is causing the damage or problem.
- What non-lethal control methods have been attempted or why they would not be suitable to try.
- The action you wish to commence with will prevent damage or the problem from continuing.
- The action you take will not impact the status of the bird.
Falconry Services can help you gather all evidence to make a valid request to Natural England.
The laws behind obtaining a gull licence
Wild birds are protected across the United Kingdom due to The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, although different areas contain different information.
If you’re trying to prevent diseases or severe injury to public health and safety, you first need to contact us to complete an A08 form, which can usually take around 30 working days for Natural England to review. We will be unable to use lethal control methods until the licence has been granted during this time.
Depending on which country you are applying for a licence in, England, Scotland and Wales, you’ll need to follow the relevant information based on that country.
England: Licensing Requirements
Scotland: Licensing Requirements
Wales: Licensing Requirements
