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Parks chief, Cllr Flick Rea - 'We need to be very strrong on dog fouling' |
‘Docile’ dog owners’ revolt
Emails show how councillors went back on pet control proposals
after protests
COUNCIL environment chiefs considered scrapping plans to control anti-social dogs as they struggled to manage a storm of protest from “usually docile” residents, the New Journal can reveal.
As resistance mounted to the council’s February proposal to launch dog control orders, which would subject owners to fines of up to £1,000 for walking dogs off leads in parks and for committing other new ‘offences’, the Lib Dem and Tory administration admitted making up “policy on the fly” to limit the damage, according to emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
On March 13 the Conservative at the centre of the storm, Councillor Mike Greene, wrote to officers in his environment department demanding that the framework of the month-long public consultation be changed to a softer questionnaire format, adding: “We have very seriously underestimated the damage this consultation could cause and I even wonder if we should go as far as withdrawing the current consultation and replacing it in a month or two.”
Two days earlier he had proposed softening the original proposals to ban dogs being walked off leads on streets to a discretionary power for officers to ask dog owners to put their pets on leads “as a forced piece of making up policy ‘on the fly’”.
He added: “This isn’t something I usually advocate I admit, but I am pretty convinced that unless we adopt that approach, it will prove politically impossible to adopt the ‘dogs on leads’ element of the orders.”
By mid-March, when the original consultation was due to expire, the council had been inundated with responses from thousands of residents, some of whom branded councillors ‘dog-haters’ and ‘anti-dog’. Parks staff wrote to Richard Bradbury, the street environment services officer responsible for the scheme, begging him to stem the constant calls from residents to the parks emergency hotline “as some of them are getting slightly heated when we tell them we cannot give them an answer at 10.30pm”.
Meanwhile, parks chief Cllr Flick Rea wrote to officers, saying: “We need to be very strong on dog fouling (but) in connection with dogs on leads and banned from parks I believe these proposals to be too all-embracing, unenforceable and politically unacceptable. The whole issue has snowballed beyond belief and I have a massive postbag of complaints from all across the borough including the usually docile people of Fortune Green!!”
The Town Hall extended the consultation by a month. Cllr Greene said this was in order to “head off a lot of criticism and ensure people really understand this is a genuine consultation”.
Councillors agreed a heavily revised set of dog control orders in May, imposing fines for owners who refuse to pick up dog faeces, but dropping proposals to fine people whose dogs are off the lead in parks, on the street, or in housing estates.
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