Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
MR TONY
ANDERSON AND
MR PETER
HAMPSON
2 JUNE 2008
Q40 Chair: 50p?
Mr Anderson: 50p per person which
is not an awful lot of money in the great scheme of things, but
if you are with a coach of people who are paying a flying visit
to this country who, for example, have arrived in Dover or Southampton
and come here and who have been told that they can pay everywhere
in this country with credit cards, 50p is an issue. The change,
the money is the issue.
Mr Hampson: Toilets are an absolute
fundamental issue for tourists. You use the word "tourist",
I prefer to use the word "visitor" because in this context
I think it is equally important. For example, if I am visiting
my local town of Southport if I am going shopping I would regard
that I would be a visitor. If I do not do it often, I will be
in the same position as somebody visiting from a long way away.
The issue is about familiarity, you need to know where these things
are and you can use the facilities in a store or the local toilets
and you will know which are the best toilets if you are familiar
with the place, if it is somewhere you go often. If you are a
visitor and there on a temporary basis, provision of toilets becomes
absolutely a fundamental. As I said in my evidence, most journeys
start and finish with people going to the loo. That is what we
as human beings tend to do and I think we need to acknowledge
that fact. That is why—in previous evidence somebody mentioned
about car parks—it is an eminently sensible place for public
toilets to be, just as they should be at places like stations.
Chair: We are going to explore the community
toilet scheme in a second but, Anne, did you have an issue to
raise on this?
Q41 Anne Main: On Mr Hampson's very
pertinent observation, that most of us who go to our local town
centres know exactly which cafés, restaurants or shops
where we can pop into the loos. Is there something to be said
for displaying a sign that says, "We welcome visitors and
people can use our toilets"? It is a cheap option.
Mr Hampson: It
is a cheap option and most places will do it. As part of my preparation
for coming to see you today I thought I better have a quick look
around my local town and, yes, there are signs. You can put up
a sign that says, "The such-and-such an attraction",
"Westminster this way", but if you were to sign toilets,
where are you going to sign them for somebody who is not sure
what they are looking for and suddenly, "Oh, I want a toilet"?
You have to have signposts on literally every corner. Most towns
you will find do have signing maps. Sefton Metropolitan Borough
Council, Southport, where I happen to be based, has an excellent
map that shows the public provision and the private sector provision
where those private sector providers have it agreed to have their
facilities shown. Some of the big train stations, for example,
are on that map. It is about information. If I could reinforce
that, I went to the TIC, the Tourist Information Centre, this
morning and said, "Do you get many complaints about the toilets?"—brand
new ones which are opposite.
Q42 Chair: Where is this?
Mr Hampson: Southport and he said,
"No, the new toilets we have are really, really popular.
The question we get is `Where are they?'" They are literally
10 yards across the street and people just do not realise they
are there.
Q43 Emily Thornberry: I think that
we were also looking at the idea of community toilet schemes,
local authorities working in partnership with local businesses,
and how that would work. I suppose what your evidence seems to
be is that if you know a local town centre well you will know
the places to use and not use and it is much more difficult for
tourists. Would a community scheme work, do you think, for tourists
and, if so, how?
Mr Hampson: I have mixed views.
To start with I think it would not work in the case where you
are dealing with very large numbers. For example, why would a
restaurant put up with 50 people getting off a coach and ploughing
into their café with no return on business? I think the
community scheme is a wonderful idea and it allows local authorities
to put provision, ie not have to have the capital cost of putting
small provision, and that is where a lot of them suffer, it is
rural areas, small towns. You are using somebody else's facilities,
but you have to accept that those facilities will only be open
to their requirement, so the pub is not going to stay open or
the restaurant is not going to open the facilities early. I think
it will work very well up to and including the point where you
get some abuse. If there is an unpleasant incident or something
happens, then the pub landlord is going to think twice about whether
or not to continue with the arrangement they have got. It is great
in its context. I do not see it working, for example, in Westminster.
I do not see it working in a Blackpool or a Bournemouth but, yes,
in a small rural town, perhaps where they have not got a toilet
near a popular start for a walking route, for example, the local
pub, and it makes sense for both the business, the community and
the local authority, they can get some money for providing the
service and the local authority gets the service provided at low
capital cost.
Mr Anderson: I can only agree
with that. In many ways around in London, for example, I think
it could be a big disincentive for pub or café owners to
run something like that because if you take the example that I
was giving earlier about visitors arriving in Dover being transported
up here in coaches, you can have on any one day anything between
20 and 40 coaches arriving in London at roughly the same time.
On the way down, we might say, "This café is good",
and "That café is good" and, "That pub is
good", so you would end up with 10 or 15 coaches arriving
at each one. It is a big disincentive on the owner or the management
of that establishment to continue with that scheme because who
is going to want to have that number of people going through their
particular establishment which would put off the people who are
already in there or who are wanting to have a cup of coffee and
a read of the paper, a bite to eat, a sandwich or something like
that? Certainly I would not want to sit in a café when
a coach load turns up and then walks all the way through and then
walks all the way back out again.
Q44 Emily Thornberry: And queued
up.
Mr Anderson: And queued up and
talking.
Q45 Emily Thornberry: And borrowed
50p!
Mr Anderson: Exactly. It is a
real issue. As tourism is changing and we are going more and more
towards these flying visit sort of tours, then this is becoming
more and more of an issue. We have talked about Westminster but
a similar situation is in the City. If you are coming in from
the East or the South East a very popular stop is the Tower of
London. If you want to stop a coach at the Tower of London for
longer than 15 minutes it will cost the coach company £10
and if you have got 20 coaches arriving there, it is going to
take longer than 15 minutes to get all your passengers out and
get them back in again when you are waiting for the first coach
to have finished.
Q46 Chair: Could I ask a question
about London which I had not really thought about. What sort of
provision is there at tube stations, because transport infrastructure
hubs are an obvious place to put loos?
Mr Anderson: It is fairly meagre,
I think.
Mr Hampson: They are often outside
but not inside. They are not provided by London Underground, they
tend to be in parks and gardens close by from my limited knowledge
of that.
Mr Anderson: A lot of them have
now been replaced. The old brick buildings that we used to have
where you would have the gents one side and ladies the other side
and two or three cubicles in each one have very often been replaced,
and I think this is what you meant by the TARDIS toilets, where
you have to pay and go in and you hope to goodness it is not going
to turn around while you are sitting inside there, which are modern,
clean and state of the art in many cases, but you have room for
one person.
Mr Hampson: They do not service
a coach.
Mr Anderson: They do not service
a coach.
Q47 Dr Pugh: Back to payment again.
The tourist industry is slightly divided by the evidence we have
got. BRADA believes that free toilets are ideal but accepts that
there may be scope, given the cost, for some charge, whereas VisitBritain
want them free. There must be surely some sort of price that people
do not mind paying or a price that they are not especially surprised
by? To what extent do you think this sort of issue is price sensitive?
Mr Hampson: If I can answer that.
I have tried to do some research on the actual cost to provide
toilets on a not-for-profit basis. The maths are incredibly difficult,
but since I put my evidence in I got hold of the CIPFA figures
for 2006-07, that is the outturn figures that CIPFA produce for
England. According to those figures, local authorities in England
are spending, including their capital cost nett of any income,
very conveniently £99.something million, ie around about
£100 million in 2006-07. During that same period their income
was around £4.5 million, so 4.5%. Doing that maths, in order
to cover the cost you would have to charge 25 times more and that
is very simple maths and it gets more complicated because obviously
the greater the charge, the more people will not pay, et cetera.
One of the things that we have had highlighted is even at 20p
a lot of money is lost, because little old ladies and little old
gentlemen—I must be careful what I say—lots of people
hold the door open for the next person so you do not get the income.
Q48 Chair: Could I ask, in a sense
you represent business rather than residents, if I can put it
that way. Do you think there would be scope for a levy on local
businesses in a place that was a tourist attraction in order to
provide public loos?
Mr Hampson: They would tell you
that there already is and it is called business tax and the fact
that there is no provision within the funding grant for a statutory
responsibility, that is the issue. There needs to be a statutory
responsibility and there needs to be money made available for
it.
Q49 Dr Pugh: If there is a statutory
responsibility it is obviously going to impact particularly on
those areas which are tourist attractions that do have coach parties
and things like that and, therefore, there should be some discretionary
element?
Mr Hampson: It is what I would
call a "Super, what a good idea" idea, you have to go
through the process. We have not looked at the nuts and bolts
on it, but we think that if you are going to go down that route
the provision for locals should be provided by that local authority;
provision for visitors, ie people coming from outside and who
are therefore other people's residents, that is the area you should
focus on trying to get a funding grant into. It is based on the
number of day and night visitors that visit an area because it
is fundamentally the visitor element that is pushing up the cost
of the provision of public toilets.
Q50 Chair: Would you include the
issue that was raised by the Residents Association about the night-time
economy where public provision seems to be even more key?
Mr Hampson: The public provision
at night-time is a real issue and I have to say that providing
toilets is not necessarily the answer. A lot of these modern toilets
are open 24 hours a day or as near as they can be, it is the fact
that people do not use them. Again, it is recent experience. I
do not go out very often late at night, I am beyond that in terms
of age, but recently very near the public toilets in Southport
a couple of guys were urinating in a shop and when remonstrated
with by me and my group of friends they were extremely rude about
it, they crossed the road. I think a previous witness mentioned
it, people, particularly guys, do not like paying to use effectively
a urinal, they want a free facility.
Q51 Mr Betts: In terms of local comments,
have you got any surveys that have been done to indicate how important
tourists regard the provision or non-provision or cleanliness
of public toilets? Is there any systematic evidence that you could
let us have?
Mr Anderson: All I have is anecdotal
from my work and the work of my colleagues where it is a fairly
frequent complaint about the state of toilets and their accessibility,
or their availability perhaps rather than accessibility. You may
take a group up to Oxford, for example, and on the way back you
will be talking to them, "Have you had a good day?"
and so on, "Yes, it was a lovely day. It is a beautiful city,
but the toilets were an absolute disgrace". I am using Oxford
as an example of many other places in and outside London as well.
Q52 Chair: Is there a difference
between the feedback you get from men and women?
Mr Anderson: No. In my experience,
if toilets are in a dreadful state it is both sides that complain.
Mr Hampson: I think it is more
of an issue for females though the toilets whether they are in
a dreadful state. My personal experience again is I know that
I will go and use a public toilet that is in a bit of state and
think, "That was pretty unpleasant"; my wife, for example,
will not use a public toilet that is in a state and it is just
one of those things. We can always judge a visitor experience
in our family by the look on my wife's face as she leaves a public
loo.
Q53 Mr Betts: Is there not any evidence?
Mr Hampson: Nobody has done it
because I think it is so self-evident that public toilets when
you are away from your home location are an important factor,
but nobody has gone to the expense. It would be an enormous expense
to do it, but certainly at times it does come up.
Q54 Mr Betts: As I am saying, lots
of resorts and tourist attractions do surveys about, "Did
you enjoy it? What was your feeling? What was good? What was bad?"
on a sample basis and I wondered if that had been incorporated
into anything you were aware of?
Mr Hampson: It is in a lot of
the surveys and questions about visitor experience. There was
certainly some work done by VisitBritain where they were doing
a benchmarking for resorts or destinations and that is certainly
part of the questioning in that. There will be some evidence base
floating around, but I do not think it has been done on a wide
national basis.
Chair: We will contact VisitBritain
then and try and get that.
Q55 Mr Betts: Turning the tourist
issue around, I suppose there are also one or two examples, are
there, of public conveniences which now have developed a historic
attraction which maybe attract visitors too? Are you aware of
that as a different aspect to our inquiry?
Mr Anderson: Yes, there are. In
fact, it is funny you should say that because I was looking at
VisitBritain's written evidence to you to see whether they had
included anything on your previous question, but they referred
to the public toilets in Gravesend which cost £300,000 or
something like that but people stop and go and see them.
Q56 Chair: Are they modern?
Mr Anderson: Yes, they are. The
public toilet block in Gravesend was shortlisted for the best
new building in Britain by the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Q57 Chair: Mr Hampson, do you know
of any other tourist attraction loos?
Mr Hampson: I do know that there
are a number of loos around the country which are regarded as
a must-see. I am trying to remember the name. There is one in
Scotland where the gents toilets is opened up on a particular
day for the ladies to go and look at it because it has the most
splendid urinals and shiniest brass in the country or something
along those lines. In terms of the issue, they are never going
to be a mass attraction. The real issue about toilets is how much
they are a negative impact on the tourist economy and it is something
that every town, particularly that aspires to have a decent visitor
economy, should be in a position to sort out. The truth of it
at the moment is local authorities struggle to provide a decent
basic service. There are ways and means of doing that. As I was
trying to say before, there is £100 million spent after income
and broadly £4.5 million income, that is all those 20 pences
they are collecting. Frankly, it costs as much as to collect a
20p, cart it, count it, account for it as it does to collect it.
When I have asked my colleagues, "Why do we charge 20p?"
it is a disincentive: so before you go and vandalise it you have
to put 20p in, literally that is the logic of it. Instead of going
into an open toilet block and kicking every urinal and every cubicle
door in, they have got to think, "I'm going to put 10p in
it". If the cost was to go up, I would suggest that you would
then start getting huge problems with the locking mechanisms and
the costs. A modern locking mechanism costs in the order of £1,000
to replace. Since I gave my evidence one of my colleagues has
read the evidence and he cited an example where it cost £10,000
to replace the door on one of those modern cubicles, that is the
order. When you are looking at modern answers to this, for every
modern answer there is a downside. Those modern toilets are no
longer cleaned by minimum wage-type employment, they are now toilet
technicians who have all sorts of magic machines they plug into
the back of them and analyse what is wrong with them, et cetera.
It is not just a simple case of modern facilities can change the
way things are done, yes, but they have their up and downsides.
One of those cleaning toilets' base cost is about £120,000
for one cubicle, and they take time. Another colleague pointed
out that there is no way that they could be used in a lot of the
big resorts, particularly a coach park, because they have to go
through whatever it is they do to self-clean themselves. It is
literally they are not going to work where you have got mass tourism.
Q58 Chair: In my experience, they
do not work with a family either because by the time the four
of you have queued up, you have lost the will to live!
Mr Anderson: I think that is absolutely
right and if you have a large group, whether it is a coach or
indeed a walking tour and you have people saying, "Oh, yes,
look, there's a toilet round there, I can see the sign",
as you can, in fact, if you do the Thames Walk along near Tower
Bridge, and that sign points you to a very modern toilet with
one facility for the gents and one facility for the ladies. Many
of your people then give up even more frustrated, more fed up
and less likely to enjoy their visit.
Q59 Dr Pugh: It can be worse than
that. You get a sign for a toilet and then find it is closed.
Mr Hampson: That is right.
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