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19
Jul
Should local councils take on the public loos – and should we 'pay to pee'?
Would you pay to pee? That’s one of the questions engaging the minds of town and parish councillors as they decide whether or not to take on responsibility for running our public loos.
Toilets have long been the remit of local authorities, but – perhaps surprisingly – councils aren’t legally obliged to provide them.
So in straitened times, many authorities – North Yorkshire included – are looking at ways to offload what is ultimately an inconvenient call on the council coffers.
As we reported earlier this month, North Yorkshire Council has asked town and parish councils to consider taking on the public toilets, but just what it’s offering remains unclear.
At the heart of the matter is the question of money. North Yorkshire Council, which operates more toilets than any other local authority in England and Wales, wants to get rid of the financial burden, but the local councils don’t want to take it on.
In our area, there are eight public toilets in Harrogate, five in Knaresborough, five in Nidderdale, four in Ripon, and one each in Masham and Ripley, according to North Yorkshire Council’s website.
The public toilets in Starbeck.
One man who is ideally placed to break down the financial realities of running them is Raymond Martin. He’s managing director of the British Toilet Association and has been campaigning for better provision for over a decade. He told the Stray Ferret:
Toilets cost. The smallest single-user automatic toilet might cost £5,000 a year to maintain, but the biggest toilet blocks that attract thousands of users a year can cost £45,000 to maintain. If they’re staffed as well, costs can go through the roof. You can’t expect town and parish councils to raise that kind of money.
There’s got to be some of kind funding strategy to make toilets cost-neutral or even – God forbid – profitable.
The two most obvious ways of squaring the financial circle are increasing the local council precept – the money residents pay – and charging people to use the facilities, and neither is wildly popular.
Chris Aldred, Liberal Democrat councillor for the High Harrogate and Kingsley division, said:
Whether or not local councils took on the toilets would depend on what the offer was, which toilets were involved, and what the arrangement was. Do we put up the precept, or apply a charge: 10p a pee? It’s all up in the air.
The public toilets on Oatlands playing fields in Harrogate.
This is an argument that is being played out very publicly in Malton, where a deal – the first of its kind since North Yorkshire Council came into being in 2023 – was to see town-centre toilets transferred to local control.
The town council would have received a one-off grant of £57,000 from North Yorkshire Council to pay for a refurbishment of the facilities, but the sticking point came when the town council opted to introduce a charge of 40p per use.
A "free to pee" campaign led by Cllr Keane Duncan, who represents the neighbouring town of Norton, has attracted more than 1,500 supporters.
It appears clear that careful handling will be required in hammering out any deal if the public is to be won over.
Lilla Bathurst, manager of Ripon BID, told the Stray Ferret:
[If the local council were to take on responsibility for public toilets], people would need fair warning, because the council would presumably need to alter the precept, and they’d need to consult with residents if they were to do that.
I believe the toilets in Ripon bus station did at one point have a charging mechanism, but they weren’t used, so they didn’t pay for themselves.
Personally, I feel that public loos should be free. In a tourist environment like Ripon’s, you wouldn’t want to inconvenience visitors and put them off coming back.
Jackie Snape is also against charging. She is chief executive of Disability Action Yorkshire, many of whose clients need easy access to public facilities.
She said:
I don’t think people should be made to pay to use the toilet, particularly not disabled people who already have to purchase a Radar key to access toilets.
Our customers can’t just pop upstairs to the toilets in a shop – but when they need to go, they need to go.
The public toilets at Ripon bus station were refurbished in March.
Others are agnostic. Peter Lacey, chair of Knaresborough and District Chamber, told us:
In principle, town and parish councils should be able to run the public toilets if they wish to. But exactly how they should be run... there are different options.
I don’t have a position... I’d need to see a business case. If there were no other option, I’d probably favour local management, and a charge may be necessary. But I wouldn’t want to pre-empt the town council – that’s for them to decide within the context of their other financial commitments.
But although the BTA’s Mr Martin campaigns for better provision of, and access to, public toilets, he is not against ‘paying to pee’. He said:
You have to pay for everything else, so why not?
As for whether toilets should be transferred to local councils, he said:
I think the answer to that is probably yes – and no. I’m against the idea of town and parish councils taking them over without any money and without the local authority retaining any responsibility.
It would be better if the town or parish council took over responsibility for cleaning and everyday maintenance, and the county council picked up the bill for the bigger stuff: blockages, breakages and the fabric of the building.
The Stray Ponds public toilets on Knaresborough Road, Harrogate.
As for funding, however, he offers an intriguing third option to consider: toilets that pay for themselves.
He said:
I think a mixed-use approach is the way to do it. Often, you go into public toilets and there are lots of facilities, but you’re the only one in there. So it would be better to have just maybe three unisex toilets and use the rest of the space for something else to generate revenue. It could be a taxi stand, or a florist, or a tourist information centre.
In Glasgow, there’s a toilet that has a coffee shop on one side of the building. In order to run a café, you’re legally obliged to provide toilet facilities for customers, but this owner doesn’t have to – and his presence also stops anti-social activity in the toilets. It’s a symbiosis.
You can also have advertising above the urinals, like you see in motorway service stations. In London, they’re looking at external digital advertisement boards, which could bring in tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
According to documents published on its website, North Yorkshire Council is working towards a “series of measures to take forward the public convenience service and an agreed approach for the role of parish and town councils in managing the current network”.
It aims to make a decision on the matter by September 16.
In the meantime, Mr Martin hopes that the decision-makers don’t lose sight of what he sees as the central issue. He said:
Toilets shouldn’t be a barrier to being a part of the community. This is about human rights, human dignity, and for some, human safety.
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