A three year project to control the gull menace in Gloucester has come to an end leaving future action up in the air.

The city council has spent £26,000 a year trying to tackle the feathered pests who blight businesses in the city centre, creating a terrible mess.

Some 2,000 eggs have been removed and 880 nests destroyed annually as part of the control measures.

But city council member for the environment, Cllr Richard Cook, said on BBC Radio Gloucestershire today that the three year programme has ended. The closure of Hempsted tip next year means that half of the funding for the control measures would no longer be available from the landfill operator.

Cllr Cook said on Steve Kitchen's breakfast programme: "We have got to continue to do something otherwise the city centre and surrounding areas will get quite intolerable.

"We have got to do an analysis of how successful we have been over the last three years."

One suggestion was that the shortfall in the funding for dealing with the gulls could be made up by Gloucester's new Business Improvement District or BID.

We at Punchline believe this is a very bad idea. The BID has been established to provide extra support and promotion for the city's businesses above and beyond what is already being done.

It would be self-defeating if it was asked to channel its precious resources into a task which quite rightly needs to be performed and funded by the city council.

What do you think? Email mark@moosemarketingandpr.co.uk

Readers' comments:

Norman Mitchell: Having watched gulls stealing food off plates and out of hands at Wetherspoons in the Docks and I see the flocks of gulls circling over the tip at Hempsted from our flat in Gloucester Docks we should be encouraging the establishment of the waste incinerator asap then they would have a shortage of food and perhaps go elsewhere.

Having canal cruised through Wolverhampton, Stoke on Trent and Tysley Bham and seen their incinerators working near the centre of town without any problems to my knowledge, bring on the Gloucester one!

Mike Lawrence: Whilst the City plays with the idea of getting on top of the gulls problem might I suggest that you start an in-house competition of "ways to imaginatively and creatively exterminate seagulls"

I think we could let almost anything go except perhaps shooting, so unimaginative, or nuclear weapons, the typical mushroom cloud gives the game away.

To make this competition actually work we will deliver your very own seagull later today.