Today there’s a full meeting of the elected members of Bristol City Council at 6 pm.
Each council meeting has a slot of 30 minutes allotted to statements from members of the public to raise concerns.
This evening’s meeting will be treated to 2 statements by Tidy BS5 campaigners, namely Hannah Crudgington and your ‘umble scribe.
In addition, Hannah will be screening a video of one minute duration to the assembled councillors and officers.
Hannah will also be making a statement to councillors after her video. This statement reads as follows:
I have made my home and set up my business in Easton of the last 12 years or so.
It is extremely sad to report that after an initial improvement and vibrancy, the last five years have seen a huge deterioration and this is largely due to ill thought decisions by people without practical experience of the area at grass roots level.
Bristol City Council has been made well aware of the issues of waste in BS5 and yet the problems are getting worse. In the last year, it has gone from fly tipping and litter to fly-tipping, litter and a horrendous stench. So it is no longer an annoyance or inconvenience but more a health hazard.
So what is Bristol City Council doing to resolve this, what are your time scales and finally would you put up with this?
My statement will be:
It is with a sense of profound despair and regret that I’ve watched the problem of litter and fly-tipping in the Easton area over the past few decades.
Given that Bristol is European Green Capital for 2015, it’s an absolute disgrace that scenes such as those in Hannah Crudgington’s video are a daily occurrence in the inner city.
However, fly-tipping and litter are not just an eyesore; they are a health and safety risk, attract vermin such as rats and gulls, make people feel insecure on the streets and attract anti-social behaviour; residents have observed people urinating on piles of fly-tipped rubbish and using the communal bins installed by the council as a screen for defecating in the streets.
Would you tolerate this in the area where you live? We refuse to.
Concerned residents have been raising these matters with local councillors and council officers for well over one year. Given the glacial pace at which Bristol City Council moves, it has taken that long for streetscene enforcement officers to turn their attentions to Easton and Lawrence Hill. Whilst I appreciate the enforcement officers’ efforts I feel that their presence may be a matter of too little, too late.
Furthermore, the total number of these enforcement officers is very small: there are only 6 of them to cover the whole city, far too few for the size of the city’s problems with litter and fly-tipping, which it must be remembered is not exclusive to the 2 wards in which I and other Tidy BS5 campaigners are working. I regularly receive reports – as I’m sure ward councillors do – of problems with litter and fly-tipping in Ashley, Bedminster, Fishponds, St George, Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston, to name a few more areas of our city blighted by environmental crime.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the city council employs 43 press and PR officers – more than seven times the number of streetscene enforcement officers. This suggests to me that the city council has a warped sense of priorities: it has a real citywide problem with litter, fly-tipping and other environmental crimes; it does not have a problem with weasel words.
The one real disappointment is that Bristol’s elected mayor George Ferguson will not be in attendance at the council meeting. Our George has junketed off to Rome, where he has deigned to give the Pope an audience.