After causing an outcry by shooting troublesome pigeons in Kingston's Memorial Gardens, Kingston Town Centre Management (KTCM) now has its sights set on the town's growing rat population.

Its operations director Lucinda Raggett, said a clamp down on rats had been prompted by Kingston residents and shoppers themselves. She said: "We have had phone calls from members of the public reporting seeing rats in the town centre, and even one woman who said she had seen one in the hedge in Ashdown Road in broad daylight. Our rangers have also reported seeing numbers of rats in the town centre."

A private pest control company from Cobham, which KTCM has refused to name, is meeting this week to discuss laying down a number of metal hopper traps laced with poison to kill the rats. The same firm was responsible for bringing in specialist marksmen to cull the pigeons.

The cost of culling the rat population in Kingston is as yet unknown but will also come out of town centre management's overall £14,000 budget for pest control.

In November last year, a three-year programme was set up to reduce the pigeon population in Kingston, including shooting them and limiting their food supply. After the initial culls by marksmen in the early hours of the morning after the clubs in the town centre had closed, numbers have been sharply reduced.

Miss Raggett, however, is not ruling out the possibility of further culling.

She said: "We will continue to monitor the situation of the pigeon numbers, but it's not a case of eradicating every pigeon in Kingston. The contractor is happy that we have achieved control for now, but obviously if people keep feeding the pigeons then we might have to take more action in the future."

Most rats in the wild have a life span of six to nine months, so one single pair of breeding rats can produce 1,000 young in a year. They can carry over 30 different diseases dangerous to humans, including Weil's disease, typhus, salmonella and bubonic plague.