How to choose a private street warden firm and be heroes not villains

Swindon Borough Council taking on 'paid per fine' street wardens is a golden opportunity to win hearts and minds...or do the exact opposite

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The Barrie Hudson Column

Barrie Hudson is a known quantity when it comes to writing words. Sometimes he even spells them correctly. In fact he has been writing words in the Swindon area for more than two decades. First of all for the Swindon Advertiser and then for Swindon Link and now for The Ink. Here are some of his words…

Let’s make sure we target actual litterers and not somebody’s grandad who inadvertently drops a Werther’s Original

It's not often that a local council has the chance to make itself look 100 percent heroic, to make the people it serves say: "Here's an organisation which truly cares about us and wants to protect us, not to mention the places where we live, work, shop, play and raise our families, from harm."

This is not least because, as a casual glance at the social media feeds of just about any council in any town and city in the country reveals, the default setting for too many people as far as their local authority goes is to think the worst, no matter the issue.

It is also why stories about littering and dog fouling, and councils' alleged failure to do anything meaningful about these issues, have been favourite stories among local newspaper editors (I was going to say 'meat and drink' to them, but that wouldn't have sounded quite right) since the days when other popular stories in local newspapers included witch trials and the activities of highwaymen.

Indeed, I once worked for a local newspaper which sent a reporter and photographer to photograph litter and dog fouling on a large field in a park, and had them emphasise the scale of the problem by walking the entire acreage and sticking small fluorescent paper flags in each item so they would show up properly in the pictures.

Swindon, like many other towns and cities, has a problem with litter. Or rather, it has a problem with people who are either so self-centred or simply thick as mince that they don't understand or don't care that dropping it all over the place is wrong.

Anybody who denies this has clearly never, for example, found themselves in the town centre and watched some specimen casually chucking a fast food wrapper onto the pavement, or some fast food they've eaten half of and don't want anymore, or a crisp packet, a fag end, a tissue they've just copiously evacuated their entire upper respiratory tract into - or not even bother with the tissue.

But anyway, back to opportunities for councils to make themselves look heroic - or at least secure some credit - in the eyes of those they serve. As far as the town centre goes, Swindon Borough Council and the police have made some highly commendable gains already.

Even the most cynical among us must acknowledge, for example, that if we visit the town centre we are somewhat less likely these days to encounter some ranting poison-mouthed self-proclaimed evangelist bellowing swine-ignorant racist, homophobic garbage at earsplitting volume through a sound system, thereby driving the public away and jeopardising the livelihoods of shops and cafes already facing more challenges than one could shake a till roll at.

We are also somewhat less likely - although still rather too likely as far as I'm concerned - to be accosted by grinning little living oil slicks trying to entice us into swapping one parasitic energy company for another, or by paid fundraisers trying to guilt-trip us into handing over extortionate regular payments to enormous national charities which never seem to achieve what they're supposed to achieve - yet somehow manage to have a luxury HQ in one of the more upmarket parts of London and hand their top executives wedges of cash big enough to gag a triceratops.

We are even somewhat less likely to be mown down by some masked fool weaving through pedestrians on a bike or an electric scooter at lethal speed.

Litter remains a significant problem, though, whether in the town centre or elsewhere in Swindon, which is why so many of us will have been delighted to hear that an extra squad of wardens are to be taken on, who will have the power to issue fines for littering and certain other antisocial acts.

Many of us were less delighted, however, when we learned that the council, still labouring like many others under the burden of years of Central Government underfunding, decided that those wardens, to be engaged following a tendering process, would fund themselves via the fines they issued.