FORMER EDITOR AND LOCAL RESIDENT TAKES RICHMOND COUNCIL TO TASK
By Ted Young, former editor of The Metro newspaper and Richmond resident. (This article first appeared in the Sunday Telegraph and online)
I actually thought it was a bad joke when I heard that, earlier this month, a woman had been hounded and fined £150 by not one but three enforcement officers for pouring her coffee down the drain. The woman, Burcu Yesilyurt, had done this because, like a good citizen, she didn’t want to spill the remnants of her drink on the bus she was about to get on.
This was not in some authoritarian state but in leafy liberal Richmond, which is allegedly one of Britain’s best places to live. And, having lived there the best part of 35 years, I have had little to complain about. Until now.
To my utter astonishment Richmond Council initially stood by its decision to fine this poor woman, who had understandably found the encounter with the council enforcement officers who chased her down before she boarded her bus “quite a shock” and “intimidating”.
She’d apparently fallen foul of Section 33 of the Environmental Protection Act, which makes it an offence to dispose of waste in a way that will probably pollute land or water – including pouring liquids into street drains. Coffee’s a problem because, scientists have warned, caffeine can cause fish distress. Possibly it wakes them up, which could please local fishermen. To do any sort of harm, she apparently would have had to pour 100,000 litres of coffee – roughly 300,000 takeaway cups – down the drain.
The Liberal Democrat-run council has since cancelled Yesilyurt’s fine and apologised. But not before plenty of time and money has been wasted on the whole debacle. To make things worse, the council has form when it comes to this kind of pettifoggery: early this year it: turned its sights on a newlywed couple who put their rubbish out four hours earlier than the advised time so that they could make the flight to Athens for their honeymoon. Another £150 fine.
Where is the common sense? And where are these enforcement officers when you really need them?
My street just by Richmond Bridge is piled high with bin bags fly-tipped every day. The street cleaner does his valiant best to tackle the garbage left in the way of pedestrians but has the air of King Canute.
We have bin collection days on Wednesday mornings. Blue bags for paper and cardboard. Green for mixed containers. I can work it out – but not everyone can. And the council won’t take any wrongly filled bags. So they lie in the street to be torn apart by the urban foxes. Litter is distributed across the pavements and is gently blown towards the caffeinated waters of the Thames. The worst moment for me was when I found a dead rat outside my front door. Which is rather more worrying on the environmental front than a cup of Costa, I suspect.
Oh, and don’t get me started on the lack of services tackling mental health and homelessness. Or the graffiti. Or potholes. Or the uneven pavements, which can be an assault course for the elderly and disabled. It’s hard to avoid waking my grandson up as I wheel his baby buggy over the cracked slabs and exposed tree roots. Could an enforcement officer sort that out? I know times are hard and budgets are tight but they’re clearly not tight enough to reduce three coffee cup enforcers to one.
Also, who is checking on the proliferation of barber shops and nail salons? Why do we need so many all next to each other? How can they all afford the rent and business rates?
And let’s talk about Richmond ice rink, which was once one of the most famous in the world – Betty Callaway, best known for coaching the legendary Torvill and Dean, worked there. The prime site it occupied next to the river was sold to developers in the 1990s, who built luxury flats. We council taxpayers – Richmond residents pay significantly more than the national average – were told we’d get a new ice rink in the borough. Er, where is it?
Which reminds me: something else has disappeared from the town centre. The police station. To compound all the issues with the council, the police station was sold in 2017 and is now a pizza parlour, which could explain why Richmond is often a magnet for mindless yobs. It would be nice to have more enforcement officers to tackle actual crime.
In the event, nobody bothers reporting thefts from cars or vandalism any more. It’s just not worth it. And what about the electric scooters and bikes that race through red lights and along our pavements? Who is stopping them?
Full disclosure: I was actually beaten up by yobs a few years ago whom I confronted when they were smashing up donations for the local RSPCA shop.
To give the police their due, they actually caught my assailants and I got a small reward for my troubles. But the officers told me then there just weren’t enough of them to cope with the yobs.
Am I being cynical when I suspect that the reason honeymooners and commuters are being fined is that it’s easier to get a quick result with little effort? It’s much easier than fining somebody speeding through pedestrians on an electric bike.
So, Richmond Council (and the police), wake up and smell the coffee. Start enforcing things that really matter.
Teddington Town has contacted Richmond Council and the Council Leader Cllr. Gareth Roberts to offer the right to reply to this article but has so far not received any response.