Provisional planning is underway for a reuse festival to be held in east Bristol on Saturday, 29th October.
The festival will take place around the St Marks Road area of Easton. The organisers are hoping space can be made available either at St Mark’s Baptist Church, the mosque in St Mark’s Road and Mivart Street Studios.
The provisional programme of activities is as follows:
The latest Easton & Lawrence Hill Forum held on Wednesday evening at Easton’s Pickle Factory attracted some 40 lively, vocal residents who’d come along to the event whose theme was waste management and its attendant problems such as litter and fly-tipping.
After the initial announcements, your ‘umble scribe was first out at the front of the hall to administer death by PowerPoint, giving a brief history of Tidy BS5, its activities and successes over the past two and a half years and calling for residents to act as the eyes and ears of Bristol City Council to combat fly-tipping, report litter and urging them to report other environmental crimes that blight the inner city such as fly-posting, dog fouling and graffiti. The Tidy BS5 slot finished with a showing of the “Green Capital Tale of Two Cities” video produced for viewing at full council last year.
I was followed on the microphone by Tracy Morgan, CEO of Bristol, the wholly-owned council waste company responsible for keeping the bins emptied and the streets tidy.
This was the main talk of the evening and Tracy gave some background of Bristol Waste’s work, which stretches from carrying out some 17 mn. waste collections around the city to clearing its streets of dead animals. Those collections yield an annual total of 140,000 tonnes of waste and recycling, of which 53,000 tonnes is sent for recycling or composting.
Tracy remarked, “We want to create a cleaner, greener Bristol… but waste is a shared responsibility,” before going on to the main point of her presentation – the 12 weeks-long trial to remove communal bins (otherwise known as skipbins or 1280l Eurobins. Ed.) from the Stapleton Road corridor.
The communal bins were introduced some years ago with a typical botched BCC consultation to attempt to tackle the problem of fly-tipping in the area. The communal bins consultation carried out last year (posts passim) clearly revealed that the introduction of the communal bins had failed in this respect.
Instead of the thrice-weekly communal bin collections, those streets where residents have sufficient storage space will be issued with 180l wheelie bins to be emptied fortnightly. Where this is not possible, residents will be given rubbish bags (hopefully gull-proof. Ed.) for collection on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, to be put out at a certain time.
After Tracy’s presentation came questions and comments from the audience to a panel comprising, Tracy, Tom Ward from enforcement and myself.
There was lots of intelligence offered to Tom, particularly as regards fly-tipping along the Lawrence Hill/Church Road corridor, although the main concern was the Stapleton Road trial and the communal bins.
One resident spoke passionately for retaining on Claremont Street and Seymour Road (which are regularly abused, like all the other communal bins within the proposed trial area. Ed.). However, I feel she’s on a hiding to nothing with her desires and she was the only person in the room defending the communal bins that other residents described as the bane of their lives and a health hazard since they attracted rats.
Other residents wanted to see more litter bins, particularly in parks and along the Bristol & Bath Railway Path, whilst the operation of the St Philips Recycling Centre (e.g. no pedestrian access) and the surly, unhelpful attitude of the Centre’s staff were also mentioned to Tracy for attention, as were the habit of recycling crews leaving “offerings” in the streets for the local gods and the reaction of certain street sweepers to local residents trying to help them.
No doubt this will be a matter to which forthcoming Neighbourhood Forums will return.
The photos used in the post are by kind permission of Up Our Street.
At the weekend, Cllr. Marg Hickman, the cabinet councillor for neighbourhoods and a great supporter of the Tidy BS campaign, shot the video below at the junction of Perry Street and Stapleton Road – a notorious fly-tipping hotspot which your correspondent has been reporting to Bristol City Council for the best part of two and a half years.
The Post’s report states that Marg also sent the footage and photos to the city council in the hope Bristol Waste, which manages street cleansing and waste collections, will finally begin to get to grips with the problem.
According to the Post a council spokesperson said:
The refuse team emptied the bins this morning, and Bristol Waste Company have two men on Stapleton Road every week day, so they will clear up following attendance from the refuse crew.
One of the street cleansing supervisors has been sent to check the area to make sure everything is clean and tidy.
The council may have sent out a street cleansing supervisor yesterday to check, but one needs to be at that location 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, since your correspondent reported another load of fly-tipping had mysteriously appeared in the same spot overnight.
Although progress on the ground may be slow, the Tidy BS5 campaign seems to be making better headway in the corridors of power since Marg’s intervention prompted Marvin Rees, Bristol’s elected mayor and past resident of Easton, to tweet on the filthy state of Stapleton Road, voicing his commitment to get our streets tidy.
However, Marvin and Marg have a big problem on their hands, as dumping litter and rubbish seem to be endemic throughout the city, not just in deprived BS5. Bristol’s annual Harbour Festival ended on Sunday evening and the Post noted in a separate report that the clean-up from the event is still continuing today, Tuesday.
Apologies for the short notice, but there’s a community litter pick taking place tomorrow, 15th June, at Owen Square Park in Easton (map) from 3.00 pm to 4.30 pm.
See the poster below.
Owen Square Park is having its grand re-opening on 18th June, so Tidy BS5 supporters Up Our Street were asked to get involved and support a litter pick just prior to the weekend event.
I’m indebted to Twitter user @StapletonRd for the following photograph of communal bins in the prosperous Clifton area of Bristol.
Communal bins screened by Bristol City Council to protect the delicate eyes of Clifton residents.
As you can see, no effort – or expense – has been spared to make communal bins acceptable to the area’s rich residents, who have sharp elbows and loud voices, not to mention the ear of the council.
Now let’s contrast this with Milsom Street in Easton, where communal bins were imposed on residents in 2012 after a botched council consultation (with the emphasis on the first syllable of consultation. Ed.).
Somewhere under that pile of furniture is a communal bin.
Somewhere under that pile of fly-tipped furniture (reported to Bristol City Council this morning. Ed.).
In Easton the communal bins were introduced by the council as a remedy to tackle an endemic local fly-tipping problem. One can see how well it’s worked.
One can also see that no effort has been made to make the communal bins more attractive to Easton residents: no off-street siting of bins; no wooden fencing to screen them from delicate eyes and so on.
Many years ago, east Bristol residents campaigning to retain public access to Packer’s Field, 7 acres of much-used green space for informal public recreation, were told by council officers that they “were not the kind of people the council listened to“.
By the unequal treatment of Clifton and Easton residents in respect of communal bins, that attitude is still alive, well and kicking very, very hard indeed down at the Counts Louse (or City Hall as some now call it. Ed.).
One can only hope that after the mayoral and council elections on Thursday, those newly elected will finally start to break down the discrimination and unequal treatment of different areas that has blighted Bristol City Council’s administration of the city for generations.
Since your correspondent starting campaigning seriously on litter and fly-tipping some 2 years ago, he’s become quite well known to the crews of the dustcarts and the local street sweepers.
Both these bodies of men (and they are all men. Ed.) quite often stop me in the street to exchange a few words and from them I’ve gleaned much valuable information, such as e.g. how there’s only one 5 tonne truck assigned to patrolling the streets of Bristol and collecting the fly-tipping that’s reported – a textbook example of woeful under-resourcing.
From these gentlemen I’ve received more reliable and concise information in a few minutes about the state of play in Bristol’s waste management arrangements than I’ve received in interminable hours of meetings with the council officers set over them who fly desks to earn their crust.
A short while ago while I was heading down the Stapleton Road, the dustcart pulled up beside me and the driver told me that he and his colleagues had received fresh instructions. They were not to pick up fly-tipping such as black plastic refuse sacks that had been dumped alongside the area’s notorious communal bins (posts passim), but this was to be left in situ for collection and examination for enforcement purposes. However, this might be a fruitless exercise, as the city council has admitted in meetings that only 3% of the fly-tipping collected off the streets comprises any evidence that might point to the criminal who dumped it.
Both the dustcart crews and I could see the result of these new orders: any fly-tipping not cleared as per the previous arrangement by dustcart crews would be left on the street for longer, making the place look grottier, as well as constituting a health risk, e.g. if it had sharp edges or was a hazardous substance; and if the fly-tipping contained food waste this would also be a health risk, as well as attracting vermin such as gulls and rats.
The result of this new policy can be seen in the photograph below, which was taken on Lawrence Hill on Tuesday after the communal bin had been emptied by the chaps from Bristol Waste.
Bristol City Council endorses institutional squalor for east Bristol. Note the added grot factor provided by the tagging and fly-posting on the communal bin.
There are times when I wonder if I’m wasting my time fighting litter and fly-tipping in east Bristol, particularly when it seems I and my fellow campaigners are also having to fight the idiocies emanating city council and Bristol Waste, its arms-length, wholly-owned waste management company as well.
While the Bristol Post’s report concentrated on the 4% increase in council tax and Bristol’s donation of £500,000 for a Concorde museum in neighbouring South Gloucestershire, its political editor, Ian Onions, somehow managed to omit some important news for those fighting environmental crime in the city.
This news was that the city council will be employing two more so-called “streetscene” enforcement officers next year, bringing the total number of these officers employed by the city council to 8. These officers are responsible for bringing fly-tippers and litter louts to book.
Lawrence Hill ward councillor Marg Hickman conveyed this news to Tidy BS5 campaigners yesterday evening, stating that the Labour group’s amendment calling for the 2 additional officers was the only amendment to the Mayor’s budget to receive 100% support in the council chamber.
Marg was one of 2 councillors to speak to the amendment (another colleague spoke on dog fouling, another of the blights of urban life, in support of the amendment. Ed.). Her speech is transcribed below and conveys many of the sentiments that Tidy BS5 campaigners have been voicing to the council for the past 2 years, with the local authority’s lack of action to date neatly summarised by the phrase “glacial speed of change“, although your correspondent reckons that glaciers actually move faster than Bristol City Council and a more accurate comparison would be with tectonic plates.
Institutional neglect has been the impact of Green Capital on parts of the city. What is certain is that, when it comes to the cleanliness of most areas of the city, this much-praised initiative has had minimal effect.
In 2013/14 Bristol had the unenviable status of the dirtiest place in the South West. According to government statistics, Bristol residents reported 10,472 incidents of fly-tipping – can you imagine how many more unreported incidents there must have been? It was with this statistic as a backdrop that the number of street scene enforcement officers was cut in 2013 from 10 officers, plus support staff and 3 dog wardens, to approximately 6 today. In comparison I can reveal that during our Green Capital year we had an army of PR experts – 45 in total – all employed to make the council look good. Well, I know, and I am sure many of you would agree, that our residents would prefer it if we employed more people to keep our communities looking good rather than ourselves.
There seems to me to be complacency in the council regarding the unacceptable levels of fly-tipping and litter in areas from Lawrence Hill and Eastville to Lawrence Weston, and it is compounded in the south of the city by the Mayor’s refusal to sign off the waste recycling centre in Hartcliffe.
In BS5, one of the city’s fly-tipping hotspots, which stretches from across the road from Cabot Circus to Eastville, there have been 32 enforcement actions taken against people. This low level of enforcement is because of the cuts and the lack of ongoing training and development of the enforcement staff. We need to augment our street enforcement officers and provide proper support and training, and learn from best practice from around the country to deal with the issue of waste at a time of shrinking budgets.
We have to support communities across Bristol blighted by this environmental eyesore and come up with solutions that work. We need to consult affected communities, speed up the glacial speed of change, and increase the number of properly trained and supported enforcement officers.
We have before us an amendment that will get the ball rolling and help kick-start the change we need to clean up our streets. Surely money would be better spent on this rather promoting more and more PR people.
We would all benefit from this amendment. The communities you serve would benefit and Bristol as a whole would be a cleaner and happier city. Please support this amendment today so that Bristol can be the cleanest city in the South West and not the dirtiest.
On Wednesday evening Bristolians had an opportunity to question the city’s elected mayor, George Ferguson, at the City Academy on Russell Town Avenue.
Your ‘umble scribe attended, hoping to ask George a question on the city council’s dreadful record on keeping on top of fly-tipping, litter and other environmental crimes within the city as a whole and east Bristol in particular.
The session was chaired by BS5 resident and freelance journalist Pamela Parkes, who did an excellent job.
Your correspondent was successful in putting his question to the mayor, which read as follows:
This year Stoke-on-Trent City Council managed to find £750K of additional funding to tackle environmental crimes such as fly-tipping. What additional budget allocations will the mayor be making this year to emulate the Potteries?
Needless to say, the mayor ducked answering the additional funding bit (from which one can infer that no additional resources will be made available in Mr Ferguson’s forthcoming budget. Ed.) and laid great emphasis on £80m cuts imposed by central govt. on Bristol and how much Bristol City Council was actually spending on waste management in Bristol. I thought most of his answer was emollient waffle, blustering about the establishment of Bristol Waste, early days for them etc. However, facilitator Pamela Parkes pointed out that despite all the campaigning by residents, both informally and formally under the banner of Tidy BS5, the situation locally hasn’t improved at all. To be fair to George Ferguson, he did make a good point about the need to promote the repair and reuse of consumer goods, to reduce the amount going to landfill.
George then handed over to the head of Bristol Waste whose name I cannot remember. She made the point that fly-tipping had remained constant in Bristol over recent years. When challenged about the level of fly-tipping – four times that in neighbouring local authorities, back came the defeatist line that fly-tipping is always higher in cities.
So overall it looks like there will be little change in the council’s competence or motivation in tackling fly-tipping in the city
Besides my question, others tackled the mayor on education, housing and homelessness, the treatment of BME communities (following the cancelling of this year’s St Paul’s Carnival and current management problems at the Malcolm X Centre) and transport.
At the end there was a lively open session, during which there was a lot of hostility to the mayor from the public on various matters – the previously mentioned carnival and Malcolm X woes, growing Islamophobia, declining community cohesion and the total waste of Green Capital (which GF characterised as the most successful Green Capital year yet. Ed.), to mention but a few.
George placed great emphasis on his listening skills, stating he’d listen to anybody. However, he has past form in his post-listening dismissals of members of the public. This was not lost on his audience on Wednesday, one of whom queried along the lines of: “You may be listening George, but are you hearing what they’re saying to you?”
A T-shirt design produced after George’s dismissal of a member of the public in 2013. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In the end the session overran and City Academy staff were heartily thanked for sacrificing their time so generously.
Now landing on Bristol Mayor George Ferguson‘s desk are postcards from residents of BS5 to bring him back down to earth with a thump after being honoured with a prestigious award by Lord Gnome of Private Eye (posts passim).
The cards remind George that BS5 residents are fed up with the fly-tipping they have to endure every day, a problem that was neither tackled nor mitigated by council action during the city’s wasted year as European Green Capital (posts passim).
If you have difficulty getting hold of a postcard, supplies are available from the Up Our Street office in the Beacon Centre in Russell Town Avenue (map).
Your correspondent took a dozen or so with him to the pub the other night and had no difficulty coming home minus his entire stock of postcards. There are evidently lots of fed up BS5ers out there, George, so you’d better exdigitate on getting to grips with fly-tipping in East Bristol and not just send any postcards you receive down to Streetscene Enforcement to clutter up their desks, as Tidy BS5’s spies down the Counts Louse inform us you are doing. 😉
Yesterday, feeling frustrated with Bristol City Council’s ineptitude at tackling fly-tipping and litter in the city’s Easton and Lawrence Hill wards, despite 18 months’ vigorous campaigning by local residents and ward councillors, I decided to take advantage of Twitter’s poll facility.
The results of the poll are shown below.
That’s right! 90% of respondents believe Hell will freeze over before the local authority gets a grip on fly-tipping.
If anyone spots Satan shopping for ice skates in Broadmead, the Galleries, Cabot Circus, Cribb’s Causeway or any other retail centre in the Bristol area, please provide details using the comments form below. 🙂
Lawrence Hill ward councillor 
On Wednesday evening Bristolians had an opportunity to question the city’s elected mayor, 
