TopBadger wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2023 10:55 am
Sciolus wrote: ↑Tue Nov 07, 2023 10:29 pm
And we need more publicly-available toilets.
This - that the main concern seems to be over potential denied usage to others means there simply aren't enough. I expect the blame can be laid at local council cuts, and in turn, government for not funding local councils sufficiently.
Funding really is the key issue. Plus the fact there's no legal requirement to provide public toilets,
...while the Public Health Act 1936 gives local authorities a power to provide public toilets, it imposes no duty to do so, and this lack of compulsion, together with a perception of nuisance associated with them, has arguably resulted in a steady decline in the provision of public toilets in recent years...
That quote is from a government report [
PDF] from 2008 looking at public toilet provision. It states,
Some [local authorities] have opted for a scheme where the local authority works in partnership with local businesses (such as pubs, cafes and shops) that make their own toilets available to non-customers.
Other local authorities are less committed to the maintenance or provision of public toilets, which has led to great disparities between different towns and regions. It has been argued that some local authorities have used the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 as an excuse to close public toilets, rather than bring them up to the standards required by the Act. [p3]
It goes on to note that the government doesn't even know the scale of the losses,
There is a lack of reliable data about the numbers of public toilets still in operation. According to Government figures there is a consistent downward trend: “over many years a significant number of public toilets have closed or been allowed to deteriorate”.2 No precise figures exist; the Audit Commission published an annual review of the level of public toilet provision until 2000, but no longer does so.
A researcher and
blogger collated publicly available data between 2000 and 2016 and found a 28% reduction in public toilets in England and Wales.
The government report goes through the costs for various types of public toilet provisioning, and they are substantial.
According to Healthmatic—a company that designs, supplies and maintains public toilets in the United Kingdom and Ireland—automatic toilets (known as APCs or APTs) “cost typically £70k plus connections to the services and then a maintenance cost of up to £15k per annum”. The cost for a stand-alone semi-automatic toilet, where access is automatically controlled within set times, is around £45,000 plus connection to services. The cheapest option is the traditional public toilet block: a standard block with four women’s cubicles, one man’s cubicle plus urinals and a cubicle compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act would cost around £140,000 plus connections to services. The costs of bringing services to the toilets can cost as much as £30,000, depending on their proximity to the sewerage system and to water and electricity supplies. [page 11]
...
The ongoing costs of maintaining public toilets vary, depending on the type of public toilet, whether it is attended and level of use. Healthmatic states: “Average cleaning is around £8-10k per loo, £1000 on consumables, £1,000 on NDR [non-domestic rates] and capital charges, building repairs, and other costs will vary.” Older facilities need to be updated, to comply with health and safety, and disability legislation. The BTA quotes the figure of £25,000 to £40,000 per year for the cost of maintaining an attended facility. To provide attendants for a public toilet open ten hours a day, seven days a week would require three staff at a salary cost of around £29,000, according to Healthmatics. [p11-12]
The report discusses the impact of charging for access. Benefits to charging are that they may dis-incentivise antisocial behaviour and provide a revenue stream to off-set the costs of running the facilities. Drawbacks are that people may not have the change required to access the facilities (an increasing problem in our evermore cashless society) and thus limit the use of the facilities and the income generated.
The Campaign for Public Infrastructure
reports that local authorities have halved their expenditure on public toilets since 2010.
One partial solution that is being used by local authorities is the Community Toilet Scheme, where private businesses allow their toilets to be accessed by anyone, not just customers, and either get money from the local authority or are allowed to charge for use.
There are obvious benefits with this scheme for the local authorities - they are no longer responsible for the provisioning of these facilities or the majority of the costs. But there are many downsides - access is only available during business hours, they aren't suitable when large numbers of people want access at the same time, access is at the discretion of the business owner - they can refuse to let you use the facilities if they wish, and the person requiring the facilities needs to feel comfortable entering the establishment and asking where the toilets are if not clear and not everyone is, particularly when the facilities are in clubs, pubs and bars. Plus when only some businesses are signed up it can be confusing to people to know whether or not facilities are available to them.
The Royal Society for Public Heath published a report [
PDF] in 2019 that found that people wanted more public toilets but didn't want to pay for them,
Despite the consensus about need, few want to pay for them from their own pockets. For example, 85% agreed that councils (LAs) should have “a legal responsibility to provide public toilets which are free to use for the public”, but only 34% agreed that this should be via raising council tax. Such a proposal would also be unworkable without significant changes to the funding environment, following years of central government cuts to local authority budgets. Between 2010 and 2020, councils will have lost almost 60p out of every £1 the Government had provided for services [LGA, 2019]. Unsurprisingly, the least popular option for funding public toilets was by entry fees (30%), but none of the offered options proved universally popular, with the exception of advertising in toilets (78%).
Business or charity sponsorship (62%), a generous benefactor (60%) and state funding in tourist areas (67%) were favoured. While benefactors do occasionally come forward, for instance for the toilets in Bridport, Dorset, funded by a local business woman, this is not a sustainable funding model at scale. Nevertheless, given the shortage of national or LA funds for these ‘necessaries’, it may be possible to offer tax breaks or gift aiding schemes to encourage both companies and individuals to sponsor local public toilets schemes.
The idea of taking a penny from the price of a bus, train or tube ticket was favoured by 45% of the public, while a tax on cafés and bars had the support of just over half (51%). State funding of toilets in tourist areas is not a new idea and local funding of this type is used in other countries, such as the USA. [p12]
The government in 2007/08 didn't want to change the law as far as public toilet provisioning was concerned.
However, the Government does not want to impose any duty to provide public toilets, nor even any duty on local authorities to provide a strategy about the provision of public toilets. As the Minister told us: “what we have done over the past ten years is increasingly to leave local authorities to determine the way they do things and run things, and that has been the direction of travel.”161 Instead, the Government hopes that each local authority will see for itself the benefits and “recognises the value of public toilets, stimulates local debate and responds to community concerns, galvanises other service providers to take action, and builds links with local businesses and communities.”
But many local authorities have not seen the benefits of public toilets, as can be seen by the decline in the numbers and standards of public toilets, which is why many organisations that submitted evidence sought a statutory duty on local authorities to provide public toilets... [p36] [
source]
This devolution to local authorities has only increased in the years since this report's publication, and provisioning of public toilets has only got worse. The Campaign for Public Infrastructure have a
campaign to improve access to public toilets. As part of the campaign they have recommendations on how local authorities can access funding to improve provisioning.
As the 2008 government report shows, loss of access to public toilets has been a longstanding concern. I mentioned it in a different context a
couple of years ago. The problem is we have had successive governments who have failed to see that public infrastructure benefits the economy. They see the cost of providing public toilets but not the income generated from them, because the costs are centralised and the income is diffuse. Shopping centres don't provide toilets because they are doing so out of the kindness of their hearts - they do so because they know it means that people will stay longer and spend more money. Providing facilities so that people can leave their homes has innumerable benefits that lead to savings for local authorities but until budgets are able to reflect that I don't see the situation improving unfortunately.