Businesses & residents of our Town Centre have been contacting us and reporting the increasing sightings of rats.
Town Centres are a breeding ground for rats with food readily available and if not tackled swiftly this problem can, and will, turn into an infestation.
Over the past few years your Labour Council has given Planning permission to, and licensed, a huge number of Restaurants, Take-aways & late-night convenience stores, all of which produce waste on a daily basis, and wait for the Council to clear this waste.
Labour boast of the increase in our night-time economy but absolutely no changes have been made to their waste collection & street cleansing routines.
At the Council meeting last week we put forward several suggestions to combat this but all were ignored.
All cleaning & collection finishes at 7pm, some areas in the Town Centre get no service after 5pm. Rubbish overflows in bins and some smaller establishments have to use thin, green bin bags left out overnight waiting for the morning collection.
Conservative Councillors suggested a change of times for the collection – Labour ignored us.
Conservative Councillors suggested using Sea-gull proof bin bags (used by other Councils) to stop the food waste being made available to the rats – Labour Councillors laughed, and did nothing.
The Labour spokesman for the Environment Cllr Smart suggested it was down to the Businesses to tackle the problem and offered NO hope of action to our hard-pressed business owners – despite them paying huge amounts in business rates.
Rats are a health hazard and a terrible advert for our Town. Conservative Councillors will keep pushing the Labour Council to take the action they should have done when this problem started.
