How to make wardens’ work more efficient

Earlier this year I took on the responsibility as opposition lead for infrastructure for the Independent Group and within a few months also secured the role as vice chair of the infrastructure overview and scrutiny panel. I take these roles seriously.

One of the first projects I had as councillor was to finalise plans for The

Limes to become a resident-only parking area. Happy residents.

Within months RBWM had decided that residents had to start paying for parking permits. A resident changed vehicle and had to start paying even though they’d not used the full permit period. Unhappy resident…

I resolved the problem but why are the rule changes not being thought through and a clear plan of execution adopted?

Residents complain of people parking on double yellow lines… where are those enforcement officers to prevent this from happening?

Currently we have three sets of wardens: parking, environmental and community all run differently!

We pay the parking wardens contractor circa £80k a month for 24 people and they generate circa £50k a month.

That doesn’t stack up – they need to be issuing more tickets for parking to keep my residents happy!

Another contractor which is keeping all the fines is working harder, generating similar money with circa six people in play!

The District Environmental Crime Officer trial contract is for 12 months and you don’t have to be a businessman to understand if you owned that contract you’d be milking it.

“Oh, you there, parked on that double yellow line, yes you, did you just drop your cigarette down the drain?

“That’ll be £100 quid for the fag son, not bothered about the double yellow.”

Our community wardens don’t generate income. They spend their time looking after the public in a variety of ways.

A great deal of time has been spent helping the vulnerable during COVID and this has had a huge impact on officers both mentally and physically.

They cost, with tweaked budgets, around £600k a year.

There is a huge disconnect across these services, which creates an opportunity.

We need to move away from silo working and start talking more to work out solutions for the long term benefit of our community.

If this team generated £2.4m a year from parking, fly tipping, fag butts, low level disobedience and 20 per cent was used for education purposes within schools and 5 per cent for the marketing team to generate and distribute relevant messages then that would leave 75 per cent or £1.8m or 45 people plus support team (If the average cost of a head count is circa £40k a year).

That’s two officers per ward who could get to know the community well and know who to warn, who to fine and who to give a cuddle (COVID permitting).

There are bound to be issues but if we had two officers on the beat, one good cop, one bad cop, then folk would soon start pulling their socks up and taking note.