Rats! Everywhere! ‘Will anything ever be done about them?’
Rats! Everywhere! ‘Will anything ever be done about them?’
Page Moss’s vermin problem has raged on for years. Have we found the solution?
By Lisa Rand
They’re famous. Celebrities, really. Facebook groups obsess over their every movement, political rows centre on them and they regularly make headlines — locally and nationally. And why wouldn’t they draw attention?
Because the rats of Page Moss are something to see. Whether strolling brazenly through people’s gardens or being captured by the paparazzi (or their version of the same: local residents with smartphones) shimmying up drain pipes in broad daylight, they always give people something to talk about.
That Page Moss has a rat problem isn’t exactly news. Reports date back years detailing horror stories: rats flying out of people’s car exhausts, rodents camping out in newly laid decking, children being bitten in the middle of the night — these ‘rats the size of cats’ have been terrorising residents.
The local authority, Knowsley Council, concedes there’s an issue — speaking to The Post this week they described the “particularly high” volume of calls they get from the area about rats, a statement they’ve issued periodically over the years. They claim that tackling the rats is one of their priorities, and that they’ve tried a range of measures to combat infestations. This differs from the accounts some locals give — namely, that rats are as big a problem as ever. So what’s going wrong?
Enter John Carine. Carine is a local resident and Green campaigner. But he’s best known as the man to go to if you’ve got an issue with rats — it’s becoming something of a calling for him, agitating about the rat problem.
John peers at me over his glasses as I approach him, cosy in his fleece. He has just finished a night shift when we meet on Page Moss Avenue to talk all things rats and walk around the area on bin collection day. As we stroll down the street, he points out wheelie bin after wheelie bin, all lined up neatly in rows, displaying tell-tale holes — “Chewed up by the rats,” he nods.
There’s plenty of other people milling about on this uncharacteristically sunny November morning, and most seem on first-name terms with him. As we stroll along, him relating years-long battles between rodents and residents, me scribbling away in my notepad, each quizzical look from passersby is fielded with the same single-word response from John: rats.
It seems to prompt a resigned, knowing response from most of the locals who walk past. One lady, bag of shopping in hand, calls out as she weaves between the bins, “They’re everywhere! Will anything ever be done about them?”
We turn into an alleyway behind a row of shops on Liverpool Road. The tarmac is cracked and beyond the fences windblown wrappers punctuate the concrete. Here we find metal burgundy bins (no purple in sight up this neck of the woods) emblazoned with the council’s logo. John tells me they were placed behind the shops, which are owned by the council, after they received complaints about rubbish piling up and attracting rats. It doesn’t seem to have stopped the fly-tipping though — what appears to be an entire row of seats from a van or minibus has been plonked next to them, providing a cushioned platform for an assortment of junk which has now congregated on top.
At one house round the corner, a local resident —who didn’t want to be named — shows me her side alleyway. A bait box was laid near the entrance and inside, just under the neighbour’s water pipe, she showed me what appeared to be a trail of chewed up bait and excrement. “I only cleaned this yesterday,” she tells me, “look at the state of it now. They’ve been trying to chew through the wood by my back door as well.”
She says one neighbour moved out because of them, fed up with the battle. Another had a family member’s medication eaten by rodents. And then there are the cars. After we’ve parted ways, John publishes a post for me on the local Facebook group he runs, asking if anyone has had trouble with rats in their cars. Within hours dozens of comments pile up. People describe rats nesting in their engine, wires nibbled out, cars totalled as a result.
One local mum, Amy McFadden who moved to Page Moss four years ago, tells me her car recently cut out on the motorway. It was only when it was getting repaired she realised the horrifying problem. “The rat must have been in there when I started the engine and it had been pushed down into the alternator. When the mechanic opened it up, there were two pieces of rat cut in half.”
She said the threat of the rats is part of daily life, whether putting rubbish in the bins (“I fling open the lid and just chuck it in quickly” — but never at night) or worrying about whether it will be safe for her child to play out in the garden. "It’s just not nice to live around”, she says.
What keeps her in the area is the sense of community: “I’ve never lived somewhere where I knew my neighbours before, there’s a great community spirit round here.” The only problem is the rats, Amy says.
John shows me a council-owned bin with a broken door swung open, leaving its bag exposed. He said it’s been reported multiple times to seemingly no avail. The council told The Post they have a programme in place to replace public bins in the area with ones including integrated bait boxes they are in the process of rolling out.
I stop to photograph some chewed up wheelie bins a little further up just as its owner pops her head out the front door. “You tell her what’s going on John,” she said. “They got replaced at the last day of action, just look at the state of them now.”
The days of action are something John and I are both familiar with. I went to the first just yards away in 2022. It involved officers removing litter, dog fouling and sewer baiting and testing.
That event, which John points out with a wry smile occurred, “just before purdah” was one of several that have now taken place in Page Moss. “There’s also the posts they put up telling us what to do.” One refers to not putting bird boxes out. He says it particularly riles him because the council were also recently running workshops inviting residents to make bird boxes. “Most people can’t even go in their gardens, the place is so overrun. Sometimes it feels like they’re blaming us but look around, most people are keeping their homes clean.”
He’s not wrong. Looking around, many of the homes appear well kept — some venture beyond tidy presentation to being actively festive, already boasting Christmas lights and tinsel. It’s the streets that are littered, wrappers everywhere. “It gets worse after the bins have been emptied,” John tells me.
I chat with Yvonne Caffrey, who lives not far from Page Moss Avenue and has been in the area for 13 years. “It’s terrible what we have to live with”, she tells me, recounting a dozen horrifying incidents, including one where her kids’ friend looked out of the window while they were playing to see an entire family of rats chasing each other around the garden in broad daylight.
On another occasion, shortly after a birthday party, she was in her garden which had been “all done up lovely”. Taking a moment to relax as the dusk set in, she said it didn’t take long before she could hear them “rustling through the bushes”.
She tells me that she is “frightened” to go out of a night because of how many there are roaming about. “I bang my feet down as I’m walking if I have to go out when it’s dark, I don’t care if it looks a sight, because you hear them. They’re always there and they’re not a bit bothered by you”.
Does it make people want to leave? Yvonne says that for many residents, who are often attached to the area, it’s not like there’s anywhere better to go: “Everywhere in Page Moss is like this, it’s disgusting”.
When I ask John what the problem is, he reels off a litany of issues — among them, problems with the bins, fly-tipping and house construction in the area disturbing rat populations. Plus the move in 2011 to fortnightly bin collections (brought in to encourage more recycling) hasn’t helped, he says, nor have unpopular charges for pest control and a failure by the council to carry out sewer baiting until recently. When we approached the council for comment, they denied fortnightly bin collections or charging for pest control have had a negative impact, arguing that “very many local authorities across the country have the same policies in place without seeing the same pattern.”
Does this add up to a strategic failure by Knowsley Council? “Probably,” he said, although he appears wary of getting too political. “For me this is a local issue”. He tells me his involvement is as someone living in Page Moss rather than as the local Green candidate: “Me and so many others are completely fed up with it.”
Green Party councillor and local opposition leader Kai Taylor doesn’t mince his words, however. He tells me: “Despite frequent efforts by opposition councillors to secure action on the issue, [Knowsley Council] still lacks any coherent strategy on how to tackle its growing pest problem.”
He says Green councillors had tried to get the budget for tackling the scourge increased at local council meetings “only to be voted down by Labour”. One such recent unsuccessful proposal involved removing a £24 charge for pest control to help hard-hit residents tackle infestations.
Knowsley’s Liberal Democrat leader Ian Smith also thinks the council could have done more, at the least to head off issues it should have seen coming. Smith tells me he doesn’t want to be “too critical” as tackling the scourge is clearly a challenge. He cited a number of issues feeding into the problem, which he said is also prevalent in his ward up in Prescot. He mentions similar concerns to John — fortnightly bin collections, fly-tipping and house building.
He says: “It is a combination of circumstances but at the end of the day it’s a situation [Knowsley Council] has created in many ways. They’ve disturbed these colonies of rats, it’s bound to be expected, and if on top of that the bin service is every two weeks, rubbish builds up and there’s a tremendous amount of fly-tipping in places.”
It’s difficult to argue the council didn’t see this problem coming. A 2015 council report described how complaints about rats and mice had increasingly dominated call-outs for pest control services. That same report noted how, among nearby local authorities responding to questions put to them by Knowsley Council, it had the lowest number of pest control technicians. This is something they have addressed in recent years, they tell us when we reached out for comment on this story, after hiring an additional staff member with three dedicated technicians now in place bringing Knowsley more in line with the rest of the city region.
It was also noted in the 2015 report Knowsley Council was the only one out of six local authorities surveyed (Liverpool didn’t respond) which were not carrying out sewer baiting, stating that discussions with United Utilities were “ongoing”. At that time, other city region councils were spending between £4,500 and £22k on carrying out sewer baiting. It would be five more years before those discussions led to a resolution, with a programme finally being announced in 2020. Since then, the council told me they have been spending £15k a year baiting or investigating around 50 manholes a year in Page Moss, sharing costs with United Utilities.
United Utilities told us that while the rat problem is ultimately Knowsley Council’s responsibility and likely to be related to the availability of food sources, they continue to work “closely” with the council “to support their programme of sewer baiting.”
In a lengthy statement (much of which they subsequently posted on the council’s Knowsley News website), Knowsley Council described a long list of socio-environmental causes to us: overgrown land, poor waste disposal, fly tipping, housing developments, issues with housing stock and even “fat mountains” in drains near shops due to illegal dumping of cooking oil.
A spokesperson disputed the idea that the council lacked a strategic approach, also providing The Post with a catalogue of actions being taken by the local authority to tackle the issue; measures ranging from dealing with fly-tipping and overgrown vegetation to days of action, as well as work with landlords and housing providers and the information campaigns.
The council said they aren’t looking to blame the residents of Page Moss for the issues — information campaigns are intended to help everyone work together to tackle the problem.
However, they do point to issues with some residents. “We know there are a great many people in Page Moss and across the borough who are already doing everything they can, keeping their gardens tidy and disposing of waste carefully. Unfortunately rats breed quickly and prolifically, so it can be the actions of just a handful of less responsible landowners who create significant issues for neighbouring properties,” the spokesperson tells me, adding that 13 legal notices have been issued in the area in the past six months to try to tackle such problems.
As we follow the streets around Page Moss Avenue, John tells me about how angry residents are and details the various ways in which people have tried to take matters into their own hands. John has ended up with four ferrets in a bid to deter the rats, “There’s quite a few other people round here have bought ferrets too for the same reason”, he says. Why ferrets? The cats run scared, he explains.
There’s also the Facebook group and a steady stream of messages to John, whose phone is often pinging away with entreaties from neighbours tearing their hair out over the creatures.
Despite all the actions of residents trying to stem the problem and activity Knowsley Council says it carries out, the rats appear to be steadfastly winning the battle for Page Moss. So what — if anything — is the council’s strategy lacking?
If British Pest Control Association technical support officer John Horsley doesn’t know, it is possible that nobody does. He’s an expert in the industry with 14 years of experience. He says that while an integrated management approach is always recommended — in layman’s terms, asking local residents to remove sources of food, like bird feeders and even drain and sewer baiting which can help as part of this — if you’re not addressing how rats get into an area in the first place, “you’re just kind of managing the symptoms.” He points out that if you don’t address the root cause, “even if you reduce the rat population somewhat, you’re not going to stop the problem coming back.”
He said the situation in Page Moss sounded like it was “particularly bad”, not least because bin chewing at such a large scale is not common. He told me however, that once this sets in it can be self-reinforcing: rodents tend to learn behaviours. “It’s not common for rats to chew through bins but you will see it from time to time if they’ve learnt that behaviour in an area, that here’s where the food is — then that behaviour will pass on.”
He said it was also “very uncommon” to find areas with bad infestations for years. “Often these things come in waves”, he said — and there is always a cause.
According to Horsley, it’s unlikely to be issues like fortnightly bin collections that’s causing the problem with rats (although it can lead to more flies in summer due to the breeding cycle). He said bird feeders are often a factor in individual home infestations and it’s one of the first things he would check when visiting a house.
Horsley said rat populations tend to remain consistent, so when neighbourhoods do have problem infestations, it’s usually to do with them getting into the area from somewhere. That somewhere? Usually the drain system.
He explains sometimes it’s how they’re made, sometimes the age of the system. “Old Victorian drains sometimes collapse or get broken — a pipe could be added and it knocks some bricks out and they’ll have a gap,” he says. “New to old pipework is also difficult, it creates differences in connections. It’s maybe who surveyed it as well, people might only look for a blocked drain, not how they’re getting out.” When Horsley talks about drains, he's referring to the external part of the sewer system. A problem with the drains frees the rats from their underworld existence and out into our environment.
All this adds up to drain baiting not necessarily resolving the issue, since you could bait the drains but that wouldn’t be getting to the root cause of the problem. “You need to find out why they're accessing from that point.”
The council said drains do get smoked out in Page Moss to look for problems and United Utilities told us that parts of the sewer system were relined in 2021, with work ongoing to monitor for defects across the network.
Yet despite their best efforts, the rat problem seems to be as strong as ever. “I think it’s too late now to get rid of them,” says Amy. “If it had been sorted years ago, there might have been hope, now it just feels like, will they ever go away?”
Want to read more from Lisa? Check out her recent piece on divisions in Liverpool’s Labour Party here, or her analysis of Merseyrail’s new fleet of trains here.
Need to stop the rats flytipping
Oh Lisa well done, my skin is crawling. You’re braver than me to investigate this issue. How absolutely horrendous for residents and an absolute disgrace by the council. I’m sure if the actual councillors lived in the affected areas something would be done.