Instead of calling for bans, local councils should try doing their basic job better

If councils attended more to making the places they represent cleaner, safer and more pleasant maybe there’d be less need for yet another ban.

The Local Government Association wants the government to ban disposable vapes.

“Single use vapes, such as Elf bars and Lost Mary should be banned on environmental and health grounds, councils say for the first time today.

The Local Government Association, which represents councils in England and Wales, is calling for the Government to ban the sale and manufacture of single use vapes by 2024.

The LGA said it is crucial that that ban comes into effect rapidly, as with the EU proposing a ban in 2026 and France rolling out a ban in Dec 2023, there is a risk that as markets close disposable vapes will flood into the UK.”

The LGA’s main argument is that disposable vapes are a terrible environmental hazard because they are difficult to recycle (a problem they share with disposable electronic toothbrushes but they, apparently, aren’t an issue) and people throw them away irresponsibly. Plus of course we have to protect the children: “...more and more children – who have never smoked – are starting vaping.” This is despite Action on Smoking & Health reporting that fewer than one-in-twenty 11-15 year olds are currently vaping. Not to mention that the same report has the lowest levels of teen smoking since we started the surveys.

But I’m not here to make the case for supporting vaping (it really is a no-brainer) but rather to argue that local government in England should do its day job better rather than call for more powers, more bans and more limits on lifestyle choice. If we are blunt about it, the means to control the problems with disposable vapes already exist - councils have recycling schemes, pick up litter, enforce environmental crime and control trading standards. If these councils attended more to making the places they represent cleaner, safer and more pleasant maybe there’d be less need for yet another ban.

Were I to walk out the door and ask people what they think their council does (or rather should do but doesn’t) cleaning the streets and picking up litter would be high in the lists of things people mention. A clean environment matters to people and they believe strongly that not only should their council keep the place clean but that it should take firm action against those who make it dirty by littering and fly-tipping. The Clean Up Britain Campaign reports on how badly England’s councils are doing:

• Councils which use private enforcement agencies issue significantly more fines for littering than those which don’t

• Almost all the councils which use private enforcement agencies have contracts in place which are at least cost-neutral

• Some councils don’t know how many bins they manage

• Some councils have responsibility for managing bins and some apparently don’t

• Virtually no councils separate out the cost of litter picking from their overall street cleaning contracts, meaning the true cost the of the problem is difficult to identify and therefore reduce

• The amount that you are fined for littering and the likelihood that you will be fined for littering varies hugely from one area to another

Bradford Council spends less than 1% of its budget on street cleaning and has pared back its enforcement teams focusing them on car parks rather than litter other than in the City Centre. This pattern is repeated again and again across England as councils cut visible services - the services that their residents think are the priority - so as to prop up failing social care and pressured children’s services. But the priorities of councils, even within the reducing budgets for those ‘place’ services, are still misplaced. Councils spend millions on cultural services, pretending that this will somehow provide a fix for their failing highstreets and declining city centres. And, by cultural services, I don’t mean having theatre, concert halls or other spaces for the arts, but rather funding for what an old Labour councillor friend called ‘juggling and face painting’.

Councils have closed down park nurseries, changed park planting, filled in ponds and lakes, reduced schedules for maintaining children’s play areas, sacked the park wardens and rangers, and reduced litter picking to the barest minimum. Only the fear of getting sued means councils carry on with leaf-clearing services and even then anywhere but main roads only get attention because good local councillors shout at the cleansing services. Nearly everywhere outside London has fortnightly refuse collection, usually interspersed with a parallel recycling collection, and some places are considering three-weekly or even monthly collections. Household waste sites have been closed and where kept open ever more strict rules about who can use the sites are introduced. These are the very basic services that we all expect from our council.

Instead of simply calling for bans (and remember that bans don’t work), maybe councils should be looking at recycling schemes for disposable vapes - about half of appliance batteries are recycled so we know this can be effective - and maybe helping vapers shift to refillable products instead of disposables? There are dozens of ways in which the use of disposable vapes can be managed and controlled but councils, instead of thinking creatively, simply call for a ban.

“But think of the children” comes the plaintive cry of the council leaders:

“Councils are especially concerned by the marketing of vapes with designs and flavours that could appeal to children, in particular those with fruity and bubble gum flavours, and colourful child-friendly packaging. Strict new measures to regulate the display and marketing of regular vaping products in the same way as tobacco are needed.”

The LGA is careful to avoid claiming that anyone is marketing vaping to children, choosing instead to adopt the ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ approach of hinting very strongly that this is the case. Marketing or selling electronic cigarettes to under-18s is illegal in the UK. And enforcing this ban is a duty of local trading standards who are run by those local councils. Instead of enforcing the law, councils want a new law that pushes the illegality even further into the criminal world.

I am a fan of local councils but English local government is obsessed with chasing economic development rainbows, parading its social virtues (often involving rainbows too), funding NGO sector cultural activities that add little or nothing to a district’s cultural life, and giving endless lectures about ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate action’. Meanwhile basic services like street cleaning, littering enforcement and trading standards are treated as dull and unimportant. The salami slicing of services like refuse collection and household waste disposal sit poorly next to the flying of ever more bizarre flags and the promoting of desperately hopeful regeneration schemes.

In his latest newsletter, American urbanist Aaron Renn talks about how population decline in secondary cities leads to their capture by an NGO network:

“As my friend Connor has noted, one of the big problems facing cities of all varieties is the excessive power wielded by what he calls the “NGOctopus.” In smaller cities, where there’s little in the way of individual wealth or for-profit industry to counterbalance these, NGOs are particularly powerful.

Virtually all NGOs, whether community non-profits, universities, philanthropies, etc. are 100% compliant with national/global left ideology. The people who staff them are often true believers, but even if not, it would be almost physically impossible for them to say or do anything that conflicted with these ideologies because it would destroy their future employability. Remaining bankable in society at large outweighs every other consideration for almost every business or civic leader everywhere in America.”

There is so much truth in this observation for the UK context. While the voluntary and community sector will also squeal about how their support is being cut by local councils, they also represent a uniquely influential network in most UK towns and cities. A great deal is invested by this network in engagement with local council decision-makers. The typical councillor or council officer will have far more contact with professional staff in NGOs than with local business and professional services leaders. And such groups would much rather see the council spend its money on funding campaigns to get bans on the grounds of moral panic over health, than get street cleaning, litter picking and trading standards enforcement right.

This problem is set to get worse as the Centre for Cities vision of local government becomes dominant. We will see huge, hardly local, councils that give their attention to grand regeneration schemes and the farming of central government grants. The basic job of local government - making the place better for those who live there - will be relegated to parish councils where they exist but more commonly a partnership system dominated by that ‘NGOctopus’. It isn’t that people on the front line don’t try hard to keep their town, suburb or village clean and smart but that the funding goes to things given attention by leaders, and those grand schemes, virtue signalling and the fake culture loved by NGOs will win out every time.