Litter fines
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Posts
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[quote quote=112796]Is the idea to reduce litter, or increase revenue? Where I work currently there is a significant amount of litter and commercial waste which is clearly visible yet the council contractors are only interested in cigarette butts.
If the idea is to reduce litter then the policy is failing as litter is not improving.In addition innocent members of the public are being accused of littering, one of my customers was accused of throwing a cigarette butt on the floor by an enforcer. When he told the litter police that he had put said stub in the bin the enforcer stated that he had not seen the lid lifted. This worries me because these enforcers are assuming litter has been dropped rather than seeing the offence. Fortunately for my customer there were numerous witnesses and enforcer went away.
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It’s to increase revenue – funds have been cut so every avenue needs to be explored.
This is effectively a local tax on chavs – much like the National Lotttery.
[quote quote=112796]Is the idea to reduce litter, or increase revenue? Where I work currently there is a significant amount of litter and commercial waste which is clearly visible yet the council contractors are only interested in cigarette butts.
If the idea is to reduce litter then the policy is failing as litter is not improving.In addition innocent members of the public are being accused of littering, one of my customers was accused of throwing a cigarette butt on the floor by an enforcer. When he told the litter police that he had put said stub in the bin the enforcer stated that he had not seen the lid lifted. This worries me because these enforcers are assuming litter has been dropped rather than seeing the offence. Fortunately for my customer there were numerous witnesses and enforcer went away.
[/quote]This is obviously yet another attempt to extract money from the general public by a local ‘authority’, in a worrying trend of public organisations who now believe they have the right to fine you for any and all misdemeanours (all stick, no carrot). WCBC have instructed Kingdom Enforcement Services to have a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to issue fines because they know the fines are ‘Disproportionate & Immoral’, and want to absolve themselves of criticism by using a private company as a shield when the public complain. Quite frankly, they didn’t have the balls to tackle the problem themselves, and wanted another cash cow.
We now have overzealous parking attendants, the new ‘litter police’, and North Wales Police who are itching to fine you the moment you inadvertently drift over the speed limit (which if we are all honest, everyone has done at some point)!
In this instance though, the power does not sit with WCBC, or Kingdom Enforcement Services, but with the consumer! The very canny management of Eagles Meadow have seen the problem here, if you fine a customer it gives them a negative experience, and they will NOT come back – irrespective if they are at fault!
And before some of you start bleating on saying things like “if they didn’t drop the litter there wouldn’t be a problem”, I say to you:
1) Don’t moan when all the shops are shut in the town as enough customers get pissed off and spend their hard earned money elsewhere.
2) As Chris has already stated, Kingdom Enforcement Services have already been too keen to try and issue fines!
3) We already pay for our streets to be kept clean by the HUGE council tax we pay!Once that money goes to WCBC and Kingdom Enforcement Services, it enters into a black hole (outside of the local economy), and there is no ‘velocity’ on the money to stimulate the local economy.
This is yet another example of making Wrexham an unattractive place to shop – on top of the crap gridlocked roads, constant road works, high car parking charges, and overzealous parking attendants.
And just to get this out there, I haven’t been fined for a littering offence :) I always keep my litter until I find a bin, but I also have young children, and know that they sometimes drop things that blow away.
I will, however, admit that I was fined £75 for parking in the loading bay by the peoples market, 3 days before Christmas (while buying some wrapping paper) about 5 years ago. WCBC said that their policy was designed to ‘change peoples behaviour’ – and they were right, it worked, I changed my behaviour! I haven’t spent a penny in Wrexham Town Centre on any Christmas shopping since! And I barely go into town more than once or twice a year – it’s Broughton, Cheshire Oakes, and Chester for me now!
Who really loses out? The local independents, and if enough people do the same as me, WCBC through lost rates when businesses fold, or chose not to open in Wrexham!
Rant over….for now!
I’m certainly for fixed penalties and cannot agree that any illegal activity is acceptable, including parking where’s not allowed or even ‘minor’ speeding. The roads will be safer for children, walkers and cyclists and cleaner too if FWarp stays away.
[quote quote=112841]I’m certainly for fixed penalties and cannot agree that any illegal activity is acceptable, including parking where’s not allowed or even ‘minor’ speeding. The roads will be safer for children, walkers and cyclists and cleaner too if FWarp stays away.
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Totally agree with you. If it deters wrong doers, then we should all support the Council with this innovation!If you do the crime, pay the Crime!
Councilor X
PS Don’t forget that the polling stations close at 10pm tonight!
There are two sides to this. I picked up 5 items of litter from my front garden this morning, none of it mine. Will the litter patrol be outside the pubs & clubs when take-away litter is discarded. Unlike some, I don’t claim to be perfect. I would NEVER intentionally deposit litter anywhere other than a bin. It does appear to me though that they are looking for easy targets.
I am in favour of fining people for dropping litter or not picking up after their dogs (I have two dogs and we always pickup and take it home or to a litter bin). I just wish the Kingdom men would follow the bin wagon and stop the bin men dropping and leaving so much rubbish including sharp bits of metal on the pavement and roads.
[quote quote=112841]I’m certainly for fixed penalties and cannot agree that any illegal activity is acceptable, including parking where’s not allowed or even ‘minor’ speeding. The roads will be safer for children, walkers and cyclists and cleaner too if FWarp stays away.
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Hi Waveyd, I apologise if you have misunderstood my point here – it must have been when the text got too small to read whilst you scrambled for the moral high ground :)My point here is 3 fold:
1) A society wide problem, where there is a worrying trend of public organisation imposing fines as a FIRST and ONLY resort, when there are other avenues open to them in order to encourage people to change behaviour (which is allegedly their aim). I am not against fines per say, however it is always how the laws is implemented. What grates me is the move to make so much ‘illegal’ and attach a fixed penalty against it (such as being fined for taking your children on holiday during term time).As previously stated, the issue, mostly, is how the law is applied. A quick google will show you how quick ‘enforcement officers’ are to hand out fines, some examples below:
*£50 fine for feeding pigeons in Bolton – so it depends upon what your definition of rubbish is.
*£75 fine for feeding the ducks.
*Fine for putting up missing cat poster
The list goes on and on, further investigations will reveal that most of these are rescinded upon appeal, just showing that the ‘enforcement officers’ are in the wrong – but only if you appeal! With the specific example of feeding the ducks/pigeons, it all depends upon what you, as an individual, defines as litter against what the ‘authority’ deems as litter.2) My second point was about who actually holds the power in this situation, in the long run anyway. Sure, the individual may be fined but there are two unintended consequences:
* The amount of money fined is no longer available for the individual to procure local goods and services. This stops the ‘velocity’ of money through the local economy, take for example the old lady who was fined £75, half her weekly state pension, for stubbing her cigarette out on the floor in Eagles Meadow (private land that the council don’t even clean against the wishes of the owners!!!) – that money could have been used to go to the hair dressers to get a blue rinse :), which then paid for the hair dresser to get a takeaway and taxi home, both the taxi driver and the takeaway owner then decide to go to the local pub and buy a pint of Wrexham larger etc. Instead, the fine goes to a company based outside the county , sure some wages will go to local people, but after the company take their profit and government take their slice of the wages in tax.
* The consumer may change their habits to avoid being penalised in the future – as it is ultimately their choice where they go to spend their money.
The irony in your comment, if FWarp stays away, is exactly what happened! I was in the wrong, I admit that, but a simple note on the car windscreen saying “Please do not park here, you could get a £75 fine if caught again” would have had the same affect (probably better) – it was my first, and only, car parking offence to date in over 10 years of driving. What really pissed me off about the situation, was that I was only 5 minutes getting the wrapping paper, and the ticket was issued 2 minutes after I left the car. I believe the ‘enforcement officer’ even seen me get out of the car, again, he could have just said “no parking there mate, and I would have moved. At that time my wife and I were not flush with cash but made every effort to shop local, using the butchers and fish mongers in the market, got all our Christmas presents from the town, and that was £75 I couldn’t afford to give away.
Fast forward 5 years and my wage has tripled, my wife’s doubled, now flush with cash – but no shop keeper in Wrexham gets it! That is my point, I, the consumer, have the power, and the actions of Wrexham Council have contributed to me changing my habit – just not in the way they hoped!3) I believe, that this is another contributing factor to making Wrexham a more unattractive place to shop, in the same way that the clampers in Wrexham a couple of years ago did. On top of the crap, overcrowded roads, high car parking charges, police speed cameras etc. Now before you get on your high horse about speeding I ask you to think about North Wales police for a moment, where they position the speed cameras and how they enforce a zero tolerance approach when your speedometer can quite easily have a +/- tolerance of 10%! We have all seen them on Cefn Road, on the hill, where it is quite easy to drift over 30 miles an hour, add that to them previously putting a speed camera in a horse box and things don’t seem on the level! We all know that they are doing it to plug funding shortfalls – but that is a different argument entirely! And then contrast that zero tolerance against how they treat more serious crime, like the setting alight of cars in the area, or when your car is broken in to (a friend had his car broken into, and it took the police 14 hours to turn up, then another 3 days for them to come and dust for prints – and they said “can’t dust for prints now, has been too long).
[quote quote=112841]I’m certainly for fixed penalties and cannot agree that any illegal activity is acceptable, including parking where’s not allowed or even ‘minor’ speeding. The roads will be safer for children, walkers and cyclists and cleaner too if FWarp stays away.
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Now I’ve got my serious point out of the way, time for a ‘tongue in cheek’ reply – giving you fair warning not to get offended! Again, ‘tongue in cheek’ warning for all you SJW out there!
The roads will be safer for :
*Children – if you let your teenagers play on the bypass when I accidently drift over 70 miles an hour, whilst keeping up with the flow of traffic, I consider it a public service if a mow them down and remove your offspring from the gene pool for being so stupid to be playing on a main road!
*Cyclists – they DESERVE to be mowed down, my only gripe is that I don’t have a larger 4×4 to get more in one hit! I can’t be the only one who gets pissed off by seeing a cyclist on the road….NEXT to the cycle path!!! Only to get more pissed off when they start cycling side by side!!!!!
*Walkers – if you walk on the road you deserve what you get….with the exception of Rhos, no-one knows what a pavement is up there!:)
I do wish that the ‘like’ facility still worked. I liked the item about the throwing of confetti at a wedding. How many £75 fines would you get for that? I personally would have no problem with someone throwing an apple core into a hedgerow. But would that now constitute as litter?
I can’t believe that people on here are condoning dropping litter, I certainly don’t believe in a nanny state but why do people feel they have the right to chuck rubbish anywhere, even cigarette butts should not be just flicked on the floor as a lot do in my opinion.
I was driving back home the other day and the car in front of me opened his/her sunroof and threw three or four packet of crisps out of it ! Is that alright to do !!!!!!!!!!! ??
A long overdue initiative if you ask me to try and curb this disease I will call it ! :)
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