An established community clean-up group has suspended its operations due to a health and safety dispute with a council. Pride in Pill (PiP), a voluntary group working to clean Newport’s worst dumping spots and provide a friendly service to the city’s most vulnerable people, has suspended its waste removal operations after it claimed the city’s council informed the group it must stop all removals other than for small litter.
PiP, which originally was created in Pillgwenlly in Newport in 2014 by Paul Murphy to improve the much maligned ward and has received an MBE for its efforts, has been clearing Newport’s fly-tipping hotspots since 2014 - often of heavy furniture and drug paraphernalia, as well as doing routine cleans across the city. Following an emergency meeting this week, after which the group decided to suspend its waste work, Mr Murphy called the council’s directive to limit its work to litter picking “offensive” and “upsetting."
In 2022 PiP completed more than 100 community clean-ups, while so far this year it has completed more than 40. Newport council has recently announced that it will be reducing bin collections for household rubbish and garden waste in the city to once every three weeks. Mr Murphy said that reduction, coupled with the council “pulling its support” for PiP, would result in parts of the city “becoming eyesores again." For the latest Welsh news delivered to your inbox sign up to our newsletter.
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PiP says there has been a long-established and understood partnership between itself and the council where, even on council land, PiP collects all waste and makes it accessible for council workers to remove it. Mr Murphy said PiP has always been known to collect potentially hazardous waste and the council has never approached him with health and safety concerns before. PiP claims some of the waste it has collected had been dumped in the city for years and would not have been dealt with if it wasn’t for its voluntary clean-ups.
In a statement PiP said the council awarded the group £5,000 earlier this year to improve the group’s ability to clean up Newport’s worst affected areas, including along the bank of the River Usk near central Newport. In a statement the group wrote: “The city council has provided no evidence that our practices are unsafe, or offered to meet with us to discuss how to address their concerns. We have been operating for nearly ten years, running many hundreds of clean-up events, without any serious safety incidents.
“In recognition of our work (...) Newport City Council awarded us £5,000 earlier this year to spend on equipment and training so that we could develop the project further. This funding application was supported at the highest levels within the council. Much of this funding has now been spent, but without the city council’s agreement to support any future riverbank clean-ups, this equipment will have to remain in storage unused, which is a gross waste of public money at a time when public funds are under huge pressure.”
Mr Murphy has accused the council of not liaising with the group and being uninterested in attending a site with them to give them an opportunity to show they work safely. He explained how the group includes many first aid trained members and each clean-up is introduced with a health and safety briefing.
“We have built up a very effective working relationship with the council over many years,” the PiP statement continued. “They have been diligent and responsive in removing everything we have collected. We have great respect for individual staff we work with who have unfailingly supported our work, even during the difficult period during Covid lockdowns when there were acute staff shortages. This decision has been taken at senior management level by people who haven’t met us and who have no first-hand understanding of what we do, and with no consultation or discussion about the impact on our ability to carry out our projects.”
A spokesperson for the council thanked those who litter pick in the city and said it will continue to support voluntary litter picking groups, but didn’t make any specific reference to PiP in its response. “Newport City Council, in partnership with Keep Wales Tidy, supports volunteers and groups who wish to carry out litter picks on council-owned or council-managed land that the public has a right of entry to access and where it is safe to do so," they said. "We can assist in ensuring volunteers know where they can collect litter safely and how to keep themselves and others safe, report any fly-tipping, collect bags of litter, and support larger events with coordinated multi-agency action days.
“We ask that all volunteers and volunteer groups be registered with Keep Wales Tidy or engage with us via one of the local Keep Wales Tidy hubs. This ensures that the groups can get access to the correct equipment, and also helps us to ensure that health and safety requirements are met. The council has an extended duty of care to protect volunteers from risks to their health and safety while conducting litter picks. We work in partnership with Keep Wales Tidy and other agencies to ensure that volunteer activity is coordinated and conducted within published health and safety guidelines and that full risk assessments are completed, practice which we have required volunteer groups to follow for many years.
“We have separate policies and procedures for the collection of fly-tipping on adopted land, which we manage ourselves, but would encourage anyone who sees any to report it to us through our online reporting service. Fly-tipping of larger bulky items should be reported to us to allow for full investigation of waste offences and for enforcement action to be taken. Investigations of fly-tipping can be complex, and it can take many months to piece together evidence in order to carry out successful enforcement action.”
