Issue - meetings

Environmental Services and Sustainability Portfolio

To consider report HCS/10 of the Head of Community Services, which was referred to the meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Commission held on 19 November 2018.

The Leader presented report HCS/10 of the Head of Community Services which set out an option available to the Council to tackle the issues associated with abandoned trolleys across the Borough. The proposal was to implement the adoption of the relevant powers under Section 99 and Schedule 4 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. The powers would allow the Council to collect any abandoned trolleys (both shopping and luggage) across the Borough and then charge the ‘owners’ (normally supermarkets) the cost of the collection and returning the trollies back to them.

Councillor Cheshire presented the Overview and Scrutiny Commission’s comments on the report to the Cabinet following their consideration of the matter at its meeting on 19 November 2018. The Commission was in support of the proposal, but had some concerns that this would cause undue impact on those Neighbourhood Patch Teams (NPT) who had responsibility for the Town Centre where many of the larger supermarkets were. The NPTs would be responsible for the collection of abandoned trolleys, as part of the proposal.

Councillors Jones, Mullins and B. Smith all spoke as part of the discussion on the report.

RESOLVED

That the Cabinet:

1.            approves the adoption of the statutory powers under Section 99 and Schedule 4 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, for use across the Borough from the 22 February 2019.

2.            delegates authority for this function to the Head of Community Services, including the consequential steps required to implement the powers, the fixing of charges and review of how the powers are implemented. (Generic Delegations 3 and 4 will be used to enact this recommendation).

Reasons for the Recommendations

There are reports of abandoned trolleys across the whole of the Borough.  While the Council addresses this matter it bears the full costs associated with the work. 

Adoption of the powers in the Environmental Protection Act 1990 provides the Council with a simple means to deal with abandoned shopping trolleys and abandoned luggage trolleys.  Furthermore, it allows the Council to recover the costs in so doing whether or not the owner seeks to have them returned or not.

The proposal aims to incentivise trolley owners to take action rather than punish them for failing to do so.

Experience from other authorities is that this is an effective solution as it resulted in a significant reduction in the number of abandoned trolleys.