Column from Cllr Rick Everitt, Leader of Thanet council, talking about what the council is doing about litter, public toilets and parking:
Thanet District Council is working on an unprecedented number of major projects right now – aiming to restore and regenerate the Winter Gardens, the Theatre Royal, the Port of Ramsgate and the Clock House in the nearby harbour, to name just a few. We’re creating hundreds of new council homes for local people, on a scale unseen in decades. These are exciting initiatives, with potential benefits for the community right across the isle. But I want to reassure residents that we are still very much focused on the day job too.
You consistently tell us that you want Thanet to be cleaner – and so does the council. Your councillors are local residents who live in the same neighbourhoods as everyone else. A large percentage of our employees live here too. And we share your frustrations about litter and graffiti. We are committed, as one of our key council priorities, to addressing these issues. But we understand that when things do go wrong it’s easy to assume that the council doesn’t care or isn’t doing everything it can to improve things.
We want to do that for residents, first and foremost. But we also know that keeping our beaches and tourist areas clean and tidy is important to the visitor economy.
The fact that litter is something every coastal community struggles with or that we’re a small district with not a lot of money is no excuse. “Oh but it’s not just us” isn’t a defence and “It’s not the council leaving the rubbish on the beach” and “Why don’t people just take it home?”, while pertinent comments, aren’t solutions.
We recognise we have to do better and we are confident that we are – better than last year and the year before that. The trade off is that by setting the bar higher, by clearing the litter day in, day out, before it’s blown all over the streets or out to sea, it’s even more apparent when things go wrong.
We’re a small, quite densely populated coastal and sparser rural district with around 68,000 households and an unusually high number of beaches and bays. We have some pockets of very severe deprivation and not a lot of money. So while it’s not an excuse, it is important to put this situation into some context. We only get to keep around 12p for every pound our residents pay in council tax (about £5 a week for an average property) and with that we’re delivering about 30 different services. The most visible of these are domestic waste and recycling collections, followed by our street cleansing (which includes beaches and promenades) services. These services receive 14% of the entire annual council budget.
In the summer, our towns are buzzing with events and our beaches are some of the busiest and best in the country, we have four Blue Flags and 12 Seaside Awards. On a really busy day you could see us collecting 15 tonnes of waste from the beaches and promenades.
What the financial situation means is that we don’t have a lot of resilience. It’s likely there will be occasional days when circumstances – like the recent heatwave, which coincided with some day-to-day operational challenges – overwhelm us. If that happens we will recover the situation as quickly as possible, as I believe we did.
So the big topic is bins. We have loads of bins, right around the district, all different sizes, colours and more of them than ever before. We’ve got big purple 1100 litre bins all along the promenades, and there are over 100 additional general waste bins out this summer. That’s on top of the hundreds of bins that are there all year round, 731 of them to be precise. We’ve also added 30 extra large bins along the coast for mixed recycling.
We put stickers on them to ask people to take litter home if the bin is full and we put signs up to point people to other bins that are close by. We have tried putting a number of different things in place to make it really easy for members of the public to help us and put various systems in place to make it more efficient for our crews to do their jobs as well. Every year, we review how things have gone and make adjustments so that we can improve things for the following year.
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We are constrained by budget so we do have to be smart about staffing. As well as the cleansing staff picking up the waste, our Coastal Enforcement officers are out educating beach users, providing them with litter sacks and encouraging them to take their waste away.
As well as the new ideas we’ve put in place, we often get asked about the old ones. Such as ‘Why aren’t there bins on the beaches like they used to be, instead of them being up on the promenade?’ We haven’t had bins on the beaches for years. And we know that if we do, and people leave their rubbish next to them the seagulls have a field day and we end up with even more litter on the sand. On a practical note, it’s more efficient to be able to empty bins that are near the side of the road than it is to have staff dragging bins across the sand and up steps – it also has health and safety implications.
We use our social media channels to promote messages asking people to be responsible at the beach and take litter home, throughout the summer period. Our Education Officer works year round with community groups on a range of projects to help tackle antisocial behaviour and littering. You can find out more and about how you can get involved in a community litter pick on our website.
I also hear ‘What’s happened to the dog waste bins?’. So a while ago, we realised that it made more sense for all the general waste to be in one place, it means people with dog waste can put it into any general waste bin and that we just collect it as part of our usual rounds. There are over 600 bins in Thanet where people can place dog waste. Leaving a bag of poo where a bin used to be isn’t going to get a bin reinstated, it just makes the place look untidy.
This year, ahead of the summer season we gave toilets in eight locations a deep clean, replaced tiles, completed an overhaul of the plumbing and installed new energy efficient LED lighting. Where needed we’ve also undertaken roofing and window repairs. We are going to do more in the years ahead. We look after 28 public toilets and in the quieter areas we start closing them from 5pm. The six busiest ones don’t close before 7pm. We have looked at keeping them open later but the high levels of antisocial behaviour has made this challenging and we rely on a small team to lock up.
Finally, parking. Civil enforcement officers (parking wardens) are on duty throughout the day and into the evening to tackle illegal parking, especially at known hotspots. They work shifts and operate seven days a week. It’s not a popular job but it’s important to point out that their role isn’t to generate money for the council, it’s to try and ensure that our roads aren’t clogged up. Income from parking penalty notices can only be used for parking-related spending such as maintaining our car parks. Where the same problems occur year after year, we clearly need to look at what we might do differently there on busy summer days, and that is something we will focus on.
One of the issues our waste crews have is people parking in a way that means the vehicles we have can’t get down the street. If we can’t then neither can a fire engine, so it’s really important. Our CCTV control room links in with our Civil Enforcement team and Kent Police to help to tackle parking issues as they arise but ideally we’d all just park considerately.
Just to reassure you, we’re well aware of the blight of graffiti in our towns and we’re on the case. We’ll say much more about that soon.
There is a lot we’ve done but of course there is more to do. Unlike those big projects I mentioned, there won’t be a single moment when the ribbon is cut and the lights go on. Progress will be less dramatic and harder to assess. We’ll never completely resolve the problems, but you can be assured that we care, that we are constantly looking for solutions and that we are doing things differently and better.
You’ll continue to tell us if we’re not getting it right, and that’s exactly how it should be. But I promise that we are committed to making Thanet as clean and welcoming as we possibly can. That’s how we all want our home to be, after all.
