Enforcement Bristol City Council style
Bristol has one of the highest council tax charges in the country.
Furthermore, it also provides tenth-rate services for that money.
Just how ineffective can be examined by looking at one particular so-called ‘service‘: enforcement against fly-tippers and the like.
In the penultimate of a regular series of meetings about cleanliness in Easton and Lawrence Hill wards, BCC’s head of enforcement just happened to mention he’d noticed an ‘issue‘ with fly-tipping in the Chaplin Road area.
Other local residents and your ‘umble scribe have only been reporting a problem in this area for some 10 and a half years, so there’s a clue as to how long it takes our apology for a local authority to notice something is wrong that doesn’t involve chasing non-payment of council tax or the issuing of bus passes (the only 2 council activities that seem to occur on an anything resembling an acceptable timescale. Ed.)
<I seem to recall the head of enforcement suggesting some remedial action needed taking.That remedial action has now been implemented and is illustrated in the following photograph.
That’s right! The remedial measures seem to have consisted of sending a bloke out with an A5 corrugated plastic sign and cable ties and attaching it to a local resident’s railings at the junction of Chaplin Road and Normanby Road. Out of politeness, your correspondent shall refrain from asking whether the council gained the consent of the occupier/owner before affixing its notice.
This is the enforcement equivalent of a chocolate teapot, as can be seen by today’s photo of the same site.
Clean streets campaigners are becoming increasingly fed up with inaction from the city council, particularly as it recently recruited several additional enforcement officers (posts passim).
With those additional enforcement officers and the lashings of cash provided by the public, I and other campaigners want more from the council.
So, come on BCC! Surely you can afford to have those nice, new enforcement officers deployed to stake out ‘grot spots‘ around the city outside office hours to catch offenders red-handed?