Talking about Cleaning Up the Borough seems to be More Important than Cleaning Up the Borough. Let’s Bring In the Private Sector!
It seems that Mehmood Mirza has not let up on his campaign to get Newham Council to clean up the borough. Mayor Fiaz has been vociferous in her promises to improve the state of the streets in Newham. The evidence of this improvement is yet to be seen.
Former Labour Party exec member in West Ham, former supporter of Rokhsana Fiaz in her attempt to become mayor and former rival of hers in the 2022 mayoral race, Mr Mirza has consistently sought to hold Mayor Fiaz to account and to get her to address the issue of dumped rubbish. It’s just as well that someone does, because it seems that our elected representatives seem a little shy in doing so.
Below is the text from his open letter to the mayor.
An open letter to the Mayor of Newham
After your re-election last May (with substantially reduced majority), we saw a flurry of photo shoots, with various council services, picking up litter, posing next to fly tipping and so on, with implied promise to get to grips with the problems neglected during your first term. One of them being rampant fly tipping right across the borough.
Alas photo shoots turned out to be just that – photo shoots, there has been no progress as far as fly tipping goes at the usual hot spots. I am afraid you have hugely disappointed the residents of Newham again. Residents have the right to ask you in this regard;
1. How many enforcement officers have you recruited dedicated to catching offenders.
2. How many new cctv’s have you installed at the usual hot spots.
3. How many offenders have been prosecuted or are awaiting prosecution for fly tipping.
Residents expect an honest answers (sic) from you, their Mayor, whose main pledge if re-elected was to tackle fly tipping.
Some readers may think that these are reasonable questions, and questions which deserve an answer.
They might also ponder as to why it is that no Newham councillors are asking this. Most of them still live in the borough, so they must see the mess. If they haven’t seen it or they’re happily living in Redbridge or Havering now, Mr Mirza helpfully supplies some photos, (see at the end of this post). And there are many, many more on his Facebook page.
Here is the latest contribution from the mayor, in her email Update.
Tackling litter on our streets
Newham Council is tackling street litter by promising to fine anyone who drops litter. A new Enforcement contract started in July adding capacity to our existing enforcement team to tackle litter problems.
£150 fixed penalty notices will be issued for dropping any litter.
Cigarette butts, chewing gum and spitting will all be targeted in the crackdown.
The Council has appointed a contractor – Kingdom Local Authority Support - to tackle the problem of litter on Newham’s streets.
The contractor will add capacity to the Council’s internal team, providing further visible enforcement presence on the streets.
Read more about Newham’s enhanced Enforcement Team >
You can report dumped waste (and those who dump it) at love.newham.gov.uk >
You will see that dropping cigarette butts and chewing gum WILL NOT BE TOLLERATED! Good. Glad to see that this is being taken seriously.
It appears that the great supporter of publicly owned services, or at least she was in her hustings speeches, has now engaged the private sector to help to keep the streets clean. One of the main selling points of Kingdom is their “tactful, professional enforcement teams” which raised some £6m in fines last year for local authorities.
It would seem, and we are happy to be corrected, that the new enforcement officers are coming from the private sector and they will be raising funds by issuing £150 fines on kids spitting out gum. They will be targeting ‘hot spots’ according to their website. Helpfully they come at no cost to the borough. They take the money from the fines that they issue to cover their costs.
This is a business model that is not without merit, but it is a model which is open to serious abuse, think private parking enforcement.
In the USA, one of the problems underlying much of the civil/racial unrest was the way in which local police and sheriffs’ department raised funds by the use of multiple fines for minor infractions. The best place to get these was in areas where there were the greatest numbers of infractions. These ‘hot spots’ tended to be in Black neighbourhoods with high levels of poverty.
We hope they we are wrong, but this model of enforcement raises many concerns about the way in which it will be used. And whilst cigarette butts and chewing gum are problems, so are the fridges and used mattresses.
We know nothing of what the mayor proposes to do about the endemic fly tipping of used beds, fridges and furniture. Nothing it seems, but at least she is talking big on the subject. And she’ll be able to point to a whole lot of fixed penalty notices which have been issued.
