Published 24th April 2023. Originally written and submitted about two years ago.
This proposal to transfer the responsibility for the control of weeds on pavements and back streets in Morecambe is put forward on the grounds that Lancashire County Council (LCC) are only making a minimal effort to provide a weeding service
The majority of Morecambe residents receive no weeding service at all. They do pay Lancashire County Council for this service and they should receive it.
If responsibility for weeding pavements and back streets is transferred to Morecambe Town Council (MTC) the residents will receive a far superior service.
MTC employees are already doing the work. They are cleaning and weeding back streets that have been neglected for years by LCC. They are also weeding the built environment in all areas of the town where the neglect is worst.
If MTC has control of this work, MTC will decide who does and does not receive a weeding service, not LCC. Decisions made locally are much superior.
To put what LCC does into proportion, LCC admit that they only spend around 172 hours weeding in Morecambe in a year. The two MTC operatives do this number of hours in three weeks.
Lancashire County Council were approached under an FOI request to provide information as to the amount of the budget for weeding in Morecambe. They provided the following statement:
Request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000
Further to your request for information, made under the provisions of the above Act, please see below our response.
- It is difficult to break this down into the specific costs as we don’t necessarily quantify or record such specifics of hours and costs in the categories requested. But the below is, not necessarily 100% accurate but not far off;
- Total for carrying out the weed treatment incorporating all costs including vehicles/ equipment/ product and person hours etc.
- Total Cost £10,587.26
Total Person Hours 172hrs
We don’t quantify administration time or cost in such detail relating specifically spent on the many different aspects of highways maintenance activities we undertake.
- Not Applicable
- This information is only in relation to this financial year as would be unable to quantify the previous year accurately after the City Council no longer undertook the function.
Last summer when the elections were taking place intense pressure was brought to bear on LCC to do something about the pavement weeds in the West End. They eventually turned up when it was raining and commenced operations. To use these chemicals in wet weather is very bad for the environment and it is ineffective.
MTC would only do chemical weed control when the sun was shining.
How much would it cost?
There are around 540 streets in Morecambe.
The streets vary in size and we have presumed the average length to be about 150m. The weed growth needing attention will be variable.
If we presume that an operative can spray a street in an average of two hours and that all streets will be sprayed, this comes to a total of 1080 hours.
The spraying will be done selectively so that the streets most in need get attention. Many streets will need little or no attention.
It is essential that the spraying only be done in bright sunshine. The total number of hours of sunshine in April, May, June, July and August (153 days) is around 946 hours.
This is an average of 6.18 hours per day but many of these hours of sunshine will be outside working hours.
It is hard to know correctly, but could we say there might be 40 days when we get a full sunny day and that six of those hours can be worked? If we presume this, then that is 240 working hours. If we have three operatives that is 720 hours.
If we say that half of the streets need to be sprayed, at two hours per street that works out to 540 hours.
If the job needs more hours, we have the operatives on hand anyway so our costs will not change. We will be employing the operatives whether or not they are spraying weeds.
An advantage of taking this work on is that LCC should, hopefully, pay MTC £10,587.26p annually and it will cost us around £2000 in the first year for weed killer, PPE, tools and training; falling to half of this in following years because the tools will last multiple years. We are employing the operatives anyway so MTC will be around £8000 to the good every year, if LCC continues to fund the work. Spraying will massively reduce the amount of hand tool weeding that is required so we will see a big increase in the productivity of our operatives. Morecambe will change into a much more attractive town. A town that will have more visitors, a town where more people want to live, and a town with a buoyant property market.
There is so much upside to this that it is not a case of being able to afford to do it, but rather how could we afford not to do it?
What might the effects be?
It is hard to find accurate data but suppose one fifth of the streets in Morecambe are of terraced houses with back streets. One fifth of 540 is 108 streets. Suppose every street has an average of fifty houses and a clean back street increases terraced property prices by £4000. If this is correct, then the total price increase of just the terraced houses amounts to £21.6 million. A rising tide lifts all boats, so this increase will ripple out to other classes of property across the town. Some might say this is fantasy, but we do know that a clean back street affects the price of the houses there. The question is, by how much?
A clean town attracts more visitors. More visitors means more successful businesses, which in turn means more employment and higher wages. We can’t know the full economic value of a clean town but we do know it is positive.
Things to consider.
The legal position.
Lancaster City Council are our parent authority and they have refused to use weed killer. When members of MTC complained loudly to Lancashire CC about the weeds last year Lancashire turned up and sprayed weed killer (in the rain) despite Lancaster City Councils resolution not to use it. The basic questions are: Can Lancaster City Council forbid what we intend to do? If we do take on weeding, are we acting as the paid agents of Lancashire CC with a SLA or will we bear the ultimate responsibility for weeding and be the legal weeding authority, accountable only to the voters? If the former, it would seem sensible for Lancashire CC to have a SLA with us, just in case we failed to provide a good service. From a financial perspective it would be advantageous to have commitment from Lancashire CC that guarantees the funding for a large number of years. There would be a lot of money at stake with a multi-year agreement so we would need a lawyer who is not employed by either Lancaster CC or Lancashire CC to write up the agreement.
It might be better to have a SLA with the County for another reason. It might protect us from interference from Lancaster, our parent authority.