Shropshire public conveniences ‘cannot be guaranteed’
Friday 26th November 2010, 1:21PM GMT.
The future of public toilets in Shropshire cannot be guaranteed unless they are offloaded to town and parish councils, a meeting heard.
Shropshire Council has written to Wem Town Council to warn the closure of all public toilets is being “actively considered” as part of belt-tightening measures.
Shirehall wants to transfer ownership of toilets and devolve their running to grassroots authorities in the face of massive spending cuts following the Government’s comprehensive spending review.
Members of the town council last night claimed they were already burdened with the running of too many key services.
Councillors gave Wem Town Hall and Wem Swimming Pool as examples of services which have only survived local authority spending cuts because the town council saved them.
In his letter to the council, Steve Brown, Shropshire Council head of environmental services, said: “If towns and parish councils do not wish to negotiate the development of public conveniences, I cannot guarantee that public conveniences will remain open.”
Councillor Mandy Meakin, Mayor of Wem, said: “This means that if we don’t take over the running of the toilets we are being threatened with the closure of them.”
The meeting heard the running costs of the town’s only operational public toilets on the main car park would be about £10,000.
Councillor Chris Mellings warned that by adopting the toilets, the town council might have to add about £5 a year to each Wem household’s precept for its share of the council tax.
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I suppose with budgets being slashed news of this was bound to leak and I can see visitors to Wem being rather peed off about this.
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I agree – it could be very inconvenient!
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Well plenty of gutters and drains about to pee in
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its hardly a major fronline service is it – who cares just go into mcdonalds if you’re caught short in town
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Surely something must be done in lieu.
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its hardly an essential service now is it, see this is all victorian legislation which set this up when they had to for public health but in this day and age we dont have open sewers and cholera, most other countries i go to have those 1 euro port a flush loos which are cleaner and better anyway and dont cost the public taxpayers a penny
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that will really pee people off
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This council has gone down the pan lately
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LOOk here, there seems ALOOt of bother about frankly nothing here, LOOts of places in LOOts of countries privatise LOOs and LOOsley speaking it seems to work without ALOOt of problems
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surely the Big Society is the solution, instead of nanny state council doing everything for us, some volunteers could step in to clean the toilets – any volunteers ???
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You must be joking right? Volunteer to clean toilets, get lost! they should get criminals to do it instead
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i think you have quiet cleverly exposed the fallacy of the big society there Asif. People will happily volunteer to be beach lifeguards in sunny devon, or work with animals in a zoo or what ever –
but who will volunteer to do the rubbish jobs?
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How about those who have to do community service? They would have to do it as part of their payback and what a just reward for bad behaviour….
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Its driving me round the u bend
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i actually think this isa good thing, you know if the council dont provide toilets people will be more inclined to go into the pubs and cafes, it may actually not only SAVE money on taxes but simultaneously CREATE wealth and business opportunities, so please if any council big wigs are reading this, go ahead and close all the toilets in shropshire, as far as im concerned if people want to use things they should pay for them individually not put them on my communal tax bill, you wouldnt accept a communal phone bill for shropshire would you? So why a communal toilet bill?
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who wants a bog standard job cleaning loos, i agree close some of them down
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E=mc2 [i think you have quiet cleverly exposed the fallacy of the big society there Asif. People will happily volunteer to be beach lifeguards in sunny devon, or work with animals in a zoo or what ever –
but who will volunteer to do the rubbish jobs?]
Interesting comment considering being a councillor used to be regarded as a voluntary role with out of pocket expenses provided.
Now town councillors are reimbursed with a generous allowance and county councillors get the equivilent of a wage!
Town councillors are not now being asked to really earn their allowance by actually cleaning the public toilets! That would be a proper job for someone on a very minimal wage.
All they are being asked to do is find the money in their budget and administrate the provision of this essential service to the town.
Now I’d have thought the obvious solution was to perhaps, in these difficult times, return to the role of councillor being of a more voluntary and service to the community nature?
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