Litter vandals are on the loose in Havant Town Centre!

On most days, purple bags of litter are stacked for collection by Norse, Havant Borough Council’s operations management organisation. Sometimes up to twenty bags are stacked against the Bulbeck Wall, near Santander Bank, often left overnight.

Regularly, paper, food and other detritus of all sorts, is strewn across the grass verge, pavement and road.

In the Summer months at least it is contained nearer to the bags, but come Autumn and Winter and early Spring, the wind blows this rubbish across the road, into Homewell, a Conservation area, and it looks a mess.

Who are these litter vandals tearing the bags open and spilling the contents out in this way?  They are none other than herring gulls, with the support of the black headed gulls if they can get a look in.

The herring gulls were never seen in this area in the recent past, but now thanks to this logistical decision for the collection of the town centre litter, they are permanent residents in the area.

However the real culprit who has created this litter problem, the Mr Big behind the vandal gulls activities, is Norse, to whom Havant Borough Council has outsourced waste management and street cleaning.

Sometimes this mess is a health hazard, other times just a mess, but a better, more efficient method of storing the bags, ready for collection should be devised by Norse to deter the gulls and contain the bags in an aesthetically pleasing way in the town centre.

The bags are next to the town centre multi-storey car park, where visitors and workers arrive every day. What a visual welcome is arranged for them all?

Residents want to feel proud of where they live, and the local authority has a duty to implement a policy to improve the economy and well-being of the town, rather than allowing their agent to detrimentally affect this important aim.

Perhaps the Ward Councillors should take to regularly monitoring the situation at different times of the year, or request a better way to deal with the vitally important collection of town centre litter. It would certainly gain approval from the residents.

But then again, we could ask the Havant Borough Council Civil Enforcement Officers to issue litter fines to the organisation behind the litter problem. Now that would be interesting.