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Making things happen - litter and ASB and lost dogs in Melksham

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-07-25 18:54:09 - Graham Ellis

A meeting last night - organised by Wiltshire Council / our local area board, under the title "Everyone wants to get on - how can we make this happen?". The evening's theme was very much along the lines of "your local council's having to watch expenditure and cut back even more, so how can we make better use of the resources we have, and how can we get the community to help us?"

Some interesting outcomes / discussions.

Did you know that there are some parts of Melksham that are litter-picked every day, but then the next "grade" is monthly and then three-monthly? By all means stick with daily at the heart, but there are some areas which are daily at the moment that could, I'm sure, be weekly - indeed they're probably no more litter prone than many of the monthly areas.

Every fortnight dustcarts collect rubbish ... driving past public litter bins, which are collected by a separate team. It was explained that some of the public litter bins are away from the road and it would be expensive to tie up a dustcart while someone walks across the park (or whatever) to them ... Surely it shouldn't be beyond the realms of logic for the streetside ones to be picked up by the big truck, leaving the others for the local team with small vans who are around doing other things anyway?

Much of the evening seemed to be about getting the community to police itself (report and challenge more) and to have more authority for more fines in various hands. Whilst I applaud the desire to discourage antisocial behaviour (be it dog fouling, noise, litter), I'm much more in favour of positive approaches rather than putting extra penalties in place, or widening enforcement powers. We do have some excellent individuals in our neighbourhood policing team, but I also continue to observe occasional behaviours where some of them (at least) appear to do things they oughtn't. I used to think my view was the exception, but learned to my suprised a couple of weeks ago that some pillars of our society have similar concerns.

So ... the result of the meeting? Some good ideas, but "Can't do that because of Contracts" and "You wouldn't be allowed to do that these days because of health and safety" seem to be roadblocks.

We learned during the evening that one of the major time "eaters" for dog wardens is lost dogs ... and the suggestion came from our table that a "dogs reunited" website would help. Numbers are not huge, but time per incident can be. On doing a search today, I've found the dog lost website ... and it seems that they're already re-uniting over a dozen dogs every day in the UK. There should, then, be no need for us to re-invent the wheel - just a little help with ensuring that people are aware of the niche facility. "Have you reported this on Dogs Lost?" to finders and users. www.doglost.co.uk ...