Events | PPC92 September 2018

BPCA sent Chief Exec, Ian Andrew and Technical Manager, Dee Ward-Thompson off to the Global Summit in Portugal. They both came back exhausted and tan-less. We asked them to report their findings to PPC readers.

Henry Mott welcomed everyone on behalf of CEPA to the conference in Cascais, Portugal. He spoke with real passion about the future of pest management. As a BPCA past-president and now President of CEPA, Henry runs a small pest management company in the UK and spoke with credibility despite his speech being based around cabbages and Status Quo.

Basically, Henry’s message was that we now work in a world where the target audience for pest control companies is becoming increasingly knowledgeable and sophisticated and, as a sector, we need to keep ahead of that curve.

We heard very encouraging noises from the food industry from Metro Group and Nestlé. Metro Group no longer operates in the UK since the sale of the Makro Brand - which is unfortunate - as it is an early adopter of EN16636 in its pest control specification.

Both Metro Group and Nestlé spoke about the need for change so that the balance when procuring pest management providers shifts from price to quality.

Ferenc Varga, Food Safety Manager at Nestlé, encouraged pest control companies to be more flexible, astute, have a broader expertise, be environmentally assertive, consultative, and proactive.
Dennis Jenkins, President-elect of NPMA (our sister association in the US), spoke about the ‘uberisation’ of pest control where customers use services like Uber and Amazon expect a same-day service, where five minutes early is on-time and on-time is actually late, and anything else is unacceptable!

Customers hold so much more power over our business due in part to social media and with being more informed generally. Being eco-friendly is an expectation. All of this with the additional drive for innovation means that the pest controller is having to be more of a businessperson than a bug killer.

There was a lot of coverage of mosquitoes and, while in the UK they’re not seen as a priority pest, diseases like Zika and dengue fever are very close to us geographically in Spain and Italy. This is much closer than it was a few years ago. This begs the question: how ready is the UK for mosquito management?

One of the best sessions was the closing session. Here we went around the world in 80 minutes hearing updates, and trends from associations in Uruguay, South Africa, Australia, North America, China, Portugal and France, and it was significant that the central themes coming across in all of these were:

• Professionalism – we need to be and be seen as professionals and not sell our sector out as being cheap
• Voice – we need to increase the volume of our voice as public guardians, keeping people healthy and safe.

I think it’s fair to say there is a collective voice and that the Global Summit of Pest Management Services for Public Health and Food Safety is very much aligned with our strategy here at BPCA.

WHERE NEXT?

If you have any events that you would like to see us at for 2019, then suggest them! After all, we’re there for you!
events@bpca.org.uk