PLEA FOR A CLEAN ENVIRONMENT

Clean air, clean water and a clean environment were key objectives of the Victorians who ran Birmingham Council over 100 years ago. This was in response to the identified public health hazard that a dirty city environment represented to the health of Birmingham citizens. They were successful in achieving these targets.

I attended my first community meeting in Handsworth in 1990 just after I moved here. There was a consensus amongst those attending that rubbish on the streets was a major concern shared by all sections of the community.

Over twenty years I have attended numerous residents, neighbourhood, district and ward meetings, community consultations, and sat as a community representative on many boards and committees. Rubbish has always been one of the top three problems that local people wanted addressing.

Since 1990 hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent in this ward; SRB rounds 1 to 6 and the Urban Pathfinder scheme are just two examples of additional government funding (ie on top of the core council budgets). We have also had District/Constituency management and Neighbourhood management as well as Ward management, and all have had extra funds.

They have been told over and over again that residents want an efficient proper cleaning service – but unlike their Victorian forefathers, Birmingham City Council have totally failed to deliver anything even approaching a good service these past twenty years.

I have cited evidence that shows the links between a dirty environment and poor educational and health outcomes, organised resident reporting campaigns, brokered meetings between residents and council officers, supported the environmental warden scheme (the latter was never properly organised monitored or managed in Handsworth), all to no avail. The service is as bad as it ever was. We live in a ‘shithole’, to borrow an expression from some young men I tackled about spraying grafitti a couple of years ago. In the current heat it is a stinking shithole.

Current austerity and budgets cuts are no excuse, this is a problem of institutional failure. Handsworth council tax payers do not get the most basic of services that a council should be providing: clean air, clean water (check out the pollution in the lake in Handsworth Park) and a clean environment.

The Council, with the tacit support of our local Labour councillors, has socially engineered our area, presiding over a doubling of the population of Handsworth in just ten years without undertaking any study of the impact that this has had upon our well-being or quality of life. No impact studies means no extra services or resources to deal with of all these extra people. Not in cleaning and environment, nor in education, health & social care, housing or transport infrastructure. It has been an unstated conscious policy to use our area as a dumping ground to absorb population growth, and our Labour councillors have done nothing to challenge any of this.

Birmingham City Council is a multi billion pound organisation, the single largest local government administration in Europe, and yet it has failed and continues to fail to provide the most basic of core services that councils were set up to deliver – services that the Victorians were able to provide, that of a clean environment for our tax paying citizens. Maybe we should organise a council tax strike until we start getting the service that we are paying for.

Susan Green has over thirty years’ professional experience working in community settings across the UK and has delivered training in both Europe and the USA. She was Secretary of her local Grove Residents Association for ten years, and sat as a community representative on Ladywood SRB Board and Handsworth Neighbourhood Board, as well as worked with local Parents for Play on campaigning for better facilities for children in Handsworth Park. She is currently working on a film about incompetence and possible corruption in Birmingham City Council’s North West Housing Regeneration & Planning Teams and the resultant degeneration of her neighbourhood. She has been a Handsworth resident since 1989.