Wasting cash on people who couldn't care less

On the face of it, the news sounds good.
Boston Borough Council has got a grant of £100,000 from Lincolnshire’s Health and Well-being Fund to expand a neighbourhood scheme called Boston Placecheck.
The project will bring let communities decide on what needs to change in their locality and give them a budget to make the improvements.
It has been piloted in one ward of the Borough "to great effect" according to Lincolnshire County Council, and the cash will expand the project into five neighbourhoods in six of the most deprived wards in Boston.
Boston Borough Council and South Lincolnshire Community Volunteers Service will help to set up community steering groups to identify local issues, and issues such as litter, graffiti, poor street environment, traffic congestion, or parking can be dealt with and new initiatives such as community events started.
As we said, so far, so good.
However, the fact that the pilot area was the notorious Daisy Dale gives us cause for concern.
We've lost count of how many times the hapless residents of this delightfully named area have been bailed out by the do-gooders of Boston.
Back at the end of 2007, an inspection found illegal parking, littering, fly-tipping and discarded drug paraphernalia mainly on a patch of land at the end of Daisy Dale nicknamed "the wasteland."Turn the clock back to March,and "Operation Grime" was launched to tackle a major problem of rubbish dumping with a multi-agency scheme aiming to enhance the Daisy Dale area."The big clean-up is desperately needed in the area," said one of the town's PCSO's at the time "We have a problem with rats and this is due to people dumping their rubbish in the streets. It's a practice that really has got to stop. We are doing all we can to tackle the issue, but we can't do it alone."
Volunteers who came forward for to help spruce-up the area found mattresses, fridge freezers, broken glass and burnt rubbish – and after just two hours 14 tonnes of litter had been carted away.
"We hope that once the area has been cleaned up, there will be more of an incentive for people to keep it clean. We had installed a litter bin a while back, but it was set fire to soon afterwards and as a result the council would not collect from it. Litter in and around the area grew over the course of seven months, and rats and dogs started ripping open rubbish bags in the street. There is a big rat problem due to people dumping their rubbish in the streets – a practice which really has to stop. It only needs one person to fly-tip something and others follow suit. A big part of this operation is about educating people as we cannot keep doing these clear-ups. We now plan to install cameras and fine anyone captured dumping rubbish."
Again, in or around 2005 there was another clean up involving Longhurst Housing Association. At the time it was described as "a fantastic example of partnership working and it shows the commitment ... to ensure neighbourhoods are places people want to live in. I am sure residents in the area must be delighted with the outcome and I hope they will continue to keep up the good work already started.”
The clear message from the residents of Daisy Dale is that they don't give a monkey's about the tidyness of the area where they live.
We're also sorry to say that the same attitude probably exists among the residents of the other areas to get the "Placecheck" treatment.
At the end of the day this is using money that could and should be better spent elsewhere to do jobs that exist only because of the lack of a tougher line on the people who offend.
Perhaps if we policed the borough better we might not have black spot areas such as these.
We are also spending money to carry on tasks for which money is already theoretically allocated - the collection of litter is is the job of the council.
Yet we increasingly see tasks that used to be carried out by the borough being flanked off on to other organisations. Passing Boston in Bloom to Boston BID is another example, as is the combination of back office tasks and the privatisation of other council services.
The argument is that all of this saves money.
But it does nothing to enhance the borough in the long term - and what on earth is happening to all the money that's being saved?


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