Anonymity is granted only at the discretion of the editor, who also reserves the right to edit letters.

It’s time to subsidise

A headline in the Advertiser, September 7th 2007 read “ Let Businesses Help to Give Some Relief ….New Scheme to ease town’s toilet problem”. On behalf of the Council’s Public Toilet Task Group I presented their recommendations to the Cabinet. In exchange for a council subsidy, pubs, cafes and retail outlets would open their own toilets for public use. I stated “The common factor when it comes to public toilets is that people like to use a facility similar to the comfort and cleanliness that they would find at home.This is why many do choose to use those in our cafes and pubs that are only really intended for customer use.”

The final words in the article: “The report will now be submitted to the council’s Executive Committee for consideration.” To date I have never seen a written response containing the results of that Committee’s deliberations.

Perhaps the answer was the council has no legal requirement to provide or maintain toilets. The cost of maintenance was recognised by the Task Group as something which was getting out of hand through rising vandalism and a haven for the taking of drugs and its attached problems. Subsidy would appear to be the practical and humane answer.

Mick Bray, Freshbrook, Swindon

Businesses offer relief

Reece Chaplin’s article on the alleged scarcity of public toilet facilities demonstrates everything that is wrong about bare statistics. I am sure the claim from The British Toilet Association (does any other country have one?) is true when it claims that SBC operates a third of the toilets it did at the turn of the century. However, to suggest, as Coun Stan Pajak does, that “we need to see more public loos in this town” is to ignore the fact that the lack of local authority run facilities is more than compensated by those provided by the private sector. In the town centre almost every major store provides facilities for public use, as does the library and the myriad coffee shops. All of which are far more appealing than the quite disgusting facilities provided at the expense of the public purse.

In the Orbital Centre, not only are there modern facilities provided and managed by British Land, which are always spotless being cleaned seven times every day, shoppers can use the facilities at Asda, Marks & Spencer, Next, Costa and McDonald’s.

I congratulate The British Toilet Association on their campaign to encourage businesses to open their facilities to non-customers, however, I think they are a little behind the times as most businesses I know are very welcoming to customers to use their toilets.

As for the comments by Gillian Kemp of Truckers’ Toilets UK which infer her members might use alleyways and wooded areas as a convenience, one would hope she would offer an unequivocal apology as I’m sure truckers would not wish to be associated with her remarks.

Des Morgan, Caraway Drive, Swindon

Consider the disabled

The law protects disabled people like Jennifer Weatherhead who in your story (SA 15th August) has a condition that prevents her getting around without having an assistance dog to come with her.

The Equality Act 2010 simply requires services providers like coach companies to make practical adjustments for her, and in this case, given notice, by the disabled person, to allow her dog on board as though it was an officially registered dog.

As a town planner myself, I know of a similar adjustment for disability that all councils in England were instructed to make very recently, on 26th July 2018. This was to pause all shared space schemes they were planning such as the one where cyclists are to share and cross the paths of walkers in Wellington Street, opposite the station, because of the actual disadvantage to disabled people, that these schemes are revealed to cause.

Other more attractive solutions to cyclists, motorists and walkers are available. Keeping quality kerbs, widening pavements, giving cyclists on-road segregated tracks and never using tactile paving in place of kerbs, are ways that always highlight streets as being firstly people places, not traffic arteries.

Let us hope the council will look very carefully into its own duties, and be positive about taking out the Regent Circus shared space, and the other most complained about “shared spaces” in the town, as soon as it practically can.

Peter Monk, Unlawater Lane, Newnham