Contractors
Some of us remember when local authorities and other public bodies employed their own workforce to do repairs and maintenance, and indeed work in general. Nowadays all that is contracted out, and private contractors do the work. I remember the justification for the change was that private contractors would be more efficient, having to compete for contracts. In practice, local authorities tend to award contracts for several years at a time, and so contractors often get complacent. They know they are unlikely to have any trouble from the council while they are doing its work, and that their level of performance won't actually matter until their contract comes up for renewal.
This explains why F.M.Conway, Westminster's roads contractor, have a compound occupying road space on Bourne Terrace that has been there for months while no work actually takes place. The compound, which is clearly storing materials, is placed on double yellow lines a few yards in from the junction with the Harrow Road, which makes turning into Bourne Terrace much more difficult than necessary, a situation which is exacerbated by some drivers' fondness for turning off the Harrow Road and stopping there. Complaints from borough councillors seem to have made no difference.
The complacency of contractors is demonstrated by the alacrity with which they get their vans repainted to proclaim that they are working for the council. They wouldn't do it if they were afraid of losing their contact. As I write this I am looking at a Morgan Sindall van, which is also branded City of Westminster, and is parked on a yellow line in Chippenham Road in the middle of the day, a place where it has been parked continuously for more than a week. One day last week I counted four Morgan Sindall vehicles illegally parked at various spots within yards of the crossroads of Elgin Avenue and Chippenham Road. Of course contractors sometimes need to park in abnormal places when doing emergency works, but that is not what is happening here; the drivers know that Westminster's traffic wardens will not bother them, and so they are completely contemptuous of parking regulations, parking where it is convenient to them.
Shameless
I have to say that I have been surprised by public exhibitions of shamelessness recently. A few days ago, walking home from St Peter's, I was passing a set of big black bins, as an employee emerged from business premises carrying large bags of rubbish. He could see me, but was entirely blatant about heaving these bags of rubbish into the household rubbish bin. He was wearing uniform, so I could hardly mistake which business he had come from even if I had not seen him come out of the door, and it was obviously commercial rubbish.
Meanwhile, a couple of hundred yards away, on Shirland Road, I was walking along one teatime when a man emerged from some flats. he was an upright gent in his seventies, with a tweed cap and a stick, and he proceeded to throw a plastic bag of rubbish at the base of a tree. He did this with no subterfuge or embarrassment; in fact the bag flew past me across the pavement, but he didn't turn a hair. I suppose I was the more shocked because he looked like the sort of person who might be vociferous in complaining about such anti-social behaviour, but instead was completely shameless.
This is the more vexing because at St Peter's we are constantly accused of being responsible for bags of rubbish against the trunks of trees. There are quite often bags left along the pavements near the corner, and people (particularly from the flats next door) assume that our hall users are the ones who do it, when in fact they are not. Our regular users know the rules and know that they are to take their rubbish away. In fact they produce little rubbish anyway. So now I am laminating signs to put up on trees asking people not to dump rubbish, which I expect will have as little effect as the ones I put up urging people not to feed the pigeons.
