Regulatory Staff are the Council’s Best Kept Secret - Kemp, 11/06/08

 

Staff like Environmental Health Officers and Trading Standards Officers are the Council’s best kept secret” according to LGA Lib Dem Leader, Cllr Richard Kemp, “ we do not often see them around but if they were not there getting on with the job our role as councillors would be seriously undermined”. Cllr Kemp will be speaking at the Annual Conference of LACORs at 2.00 p.m. on Thursday 12th June.

 

Giving the example of his own ward and experience in Liverpool Cllr Kemp will say, “It’s no good the council having grand long-term strategies and proposals if people are living and working in dirty unsafe environments. Quite simply they will not trust you to deliver the long-term and the big if they don’t think that you can deal with the here and now – especially if the here and now is making their lives a misery.

 

In my own Ward we have a major district centre called Allerton Road. Almost a third of the properties on the road are now leisure related (code for drinking!) and the abundance of such cafes and restaurants, bars and bistros means that the officers I deal with most in trying to develop the positive and control the negative are environmental health officers, planning officers, the police licensing sergeant and the traffic attendants services. On a day to day basis they take the big strategies that the council has for its district centres and converts them into a reality for local residents and users of the centres. If they did not perform their job properly the centres would become dangerous physically, dangerous to health, dirty, smelly and a nuisance to all.

 

If we take that a stage further we can see similar effects on the city as whole. There is a massive increase now in Hotels, restaurants, conference centres and of course shops in the city. Hotel rooms have increased six fold in the past 8 years, a £180,000,000 state of the art conference and exhibition centre has opened in February and our new shopping centre, the biggest new build in Western Europe, has opened in May. Yet all that investment would be in peril if the hotels served up dodgy food if the shops fiddled the consumer and traffic flows were made miserable by poor parking.

 

We don’t see them – but we need them. Too few councils fully recognise the work being done by its regulatory services officers across all the disciplines yet it is on their efforts that many councils will ultimately be judged”.

 

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