Bureaucracy in Exwick
There are two Councils governing Exwick; Exeter City Council and Devon County Council, and both councils are responsible for different things.
According to Exeter City Council's website, Exeter City Council is responsible for services in the city including:
Devon County Council is responsible for services across the county including some in the city such as:
- Collecting council tax and business rates
- Providing housing and council tax benefits
- Managing elections
- Providing council housing
- Providing a range of environmental health services such as dog wardens, pest control, food safety
- Providing parks, leisure facilities and museums
- Providing markets and halls
- Collecting refuse
- Sweeping the streets
- Providing recycling facilities
- Providing car parks and residents parking
- Deciding planning applications
- Managing the council's commercial properties
- Promoting the city for tourism and business
- Providing a wide ranging events programme
- Supporting the arts
- Running schools
- Providing social services
- Managing transport and traffic congestion
- Maintaining the highways
- Monitoring trading standards
- Disposing of waste and running the tip
- Providing recycling facilities
- Promoting the economy and tourism
Exeter City Council
Exeter City Council has three Councillors is in charge of Exwick Ward. Here is a link to their pages about Exwick. Two of the Exeter City Councillors for Exwick are Liberal Democrats and one of them is Labour. Only the Labour Councillor actually lives in Exwick Ward: One of the Liberal Democrats lives in Newton St Cyres and the other lives in St Thomas, at the same address as the Devon County Councillor for Exwick & St. Thomas. Full contact details, addresses and telephone numbers for the three Exeter City councillors can be found at the Council's website here, here and here.
[Personally I have no time for most politicians, and particularly those who don't live within the constituency which they pretend to represent.]
Exeter City Council also has Dog Wardens who enforce the various Dog Control Orders and will fine you if you don't have your dog on a lead, Litter Enforcement Officers who will fine you if you drop litter, Community Patrollers who will spy on you and "enforce Byelaws and dog fouling regulations" and a total of seven Mobile CCTV cameras (four 'Temporary deployment cameras' and three 'CCTV vehicle mounted') to assist them all.
Exeter City Council's Dog Wardens, Litter Enforcement Officers and Community Patrollers are notoriously hard hearted. Exeter City Council made fame for being the first council in England and Wales to prosecute a woman for putting the wrong things into her recycling bin (not in Exwick), and people in Exeter are regularly given fixed fines of £75 for failing to pick up after their dogs or dropping cigarette ends, when a simple warning might possibly have sufficed. [according to press releases dated 19th January 2006 and 17th August 2006, during 2005 Dog Wardens carried out 1500 patrols in 4 months and issued 100 on-the-spot fines, and in 2006 the newly appointed Litter Enforcement Officers issued more than 70 £75 fixed penalty notices in just one month.] Their most recent triumph, in September 2008, was spending over £500 on taking a man to court for throwing a cigarette end into a street drain.
Ennerdale Way
In one well-publicised case in 2007, a middle-aged woman was given a £75 fixed penalty fine for allowing her 12-year-old dog off the lead in Ennerdale Way, near Exwick Playing Fields. The woman said that she had parked her car in Ennerdale Way, allowed her dog to get out of the car and dropped a ball beside it - at which point a dog warden approached and said she would have to pay a £75 fine for not having her dog on a lead where it could have caused an accident.
Ennerdale Way is a short cul-de-sac which runs between 'The Thatch' public house and Exwick Playing Fields, and the traffic is mainly people taking their dogs to walk them on the playing fields. It is a pity that the woman was intimidated by such aggressive tactics (as most law abiding citizens would be), as she would probably have had a reasonable case if she had taken it to court.
The fine would have been issued under Exeter City Council's Dog Control Orders - in particular The Dogs on Leads (Exeter) Order 2006 which requires dogs to be kept on leads on each and every length of road (which includes pavements and/or footways). However, the first schedule to the Order plainly states that it is not applicable to public footpaths and bridleways.
If she had used Devon County Council's website for Public Rights of Way and used the gazetteer to find Ennerdale Way, she would have found that there is a public footpath (Exeter Footpath No. 38) running along the whole length of Ennerdale Way right past The Thatched House and up to Exwick Road, so she would have had the reasonable excuse of assuming that, as she was on a public footpath, the Dogs on Leads (Exeter) Order 2006 would not apply.
Two of the mobile CCTV vans
During 2008 Exeter City Council installed state-of-the-art CCTV cameras into three of their Community Patrol vans (although newspapers at the time only reported that there were two). The two most obvious Mobile CCTV camera vans used in Exwick (and Exeter) are quite plainly that. They are small white vans (Ford Transit Connect, registration numbers WJ08 MUA and WG08 AEO) with a conspicuous CCTV camera on a short mast bolted to the roof. The third was a quite different proposition, however. It was a white Peugeot 207 van, registration number WG08 BVV, and from the front could easily have been taken for a normal white car - until you noticed the writing on the bonnet. All three stated that they had 'Mobile CCTV in operation' on the front, back and sides, but on the Peugeot it was remarkably small and easy to miss, unless you were looking for it. (In the picture the Peugeot is the small van at the back and the writing is can just be seen below the black stripe on the driver's door.) Fortunately, for those people who care about their privacy, the camera in the Peugeot now appears to have been removed (November 2009) and it seems to have reverted to a normal Community Patrol van again. The Fords continue with their semi-overt surveillance, however.
The mast mounted cameras are generally not used while the vans are in motion (it would not be safe for the driver to operate them while driving) and when I've seen them they are invariably pointing downwards towards the roof, but do not be fooled by this - there is an additional forward facing camera mounted on the dashboard which is probably recording your every move. If you get close enough to the vans you can see that there is a very small yellow notice (about 8"x3") above the windscreen and rear door advising you of the fact. [This is presumably to comply with the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1988.]
Mobile CCTV van WG08 AEO
According to an article in the 'Express and Echo' dated 30th August 2008, these camera-equipped vans will operate throughout the city, seven days a week, 7am to midnight, and the cameras will be recording continuously while the vehicles are in use
. They will apparently be able to produce quality images for evidence where prosecutions and other enforcement actions are necessary
. The article also quoted the 'lead councillor for community and environment' as saying that "the new van-mounted cameras will greatly assist the work of the community patrollers..."
As part of the remit of the Community Patrollers includes the enforcement of Byelaw and dog fouling regulations, it might be wise for dog walkers to keep a good look out for an innocuous looking white van nearby with a small, almost invisible camera behind the windscreen, as it will be recording the actions of their pet with the ultimate aim of fining them under the relevant byelaws. Current 'state-of-the-art' mobile CCTV as fitted to these vans have low-light colour and infra-red cameras with 18x optical zoom and will work in very poor light conditions, so even if the owner can't see what their pet is doing, the Community Patroller will.
The CCTV-equipped Community Patrol vans can regularly be seen cruising the streets of Exwick looking for miscreants, and will undoubtedly be of great use in providing Exeter City Council with video surveillance evidence to help them to secure convictions of more people who put the wrong sort of rubbish in their bins, or throw cigarette ends into drains.
Devon County Council
Devon County Council's electoral division is called 'Exwick & St. Thomas' and covers the two wards of Exwick (18UCFY) and St.Thomas (18UCGL). Here is a link to Devon County Council's pdf map of the electoral division. There is only one councillor in charge of this electoral division - who also happens to be a councillor for St Thomas ward on Exeter City Council as well, and who shares the same address as one of the Exeter City Councillors for Exwick. The Devon County Councillor for Exwick & St. Thomas is a Liberal Democrat. Full contact details for Devon County Council's councillor for Exwick & St. Thomas can be found on the Devon County Council's website here.
Recent legislation has seen Devon County Council becoming responsible for 'enforcing parking restrictions on the streets of Devon' with 'Civil Enforcement Officers' and this is carried out by the City Council on behalf of Devon County Council. Devon County Council's website says that Civil Enforcement Officers "are trained to be customer focused" but it would be more realistic to assume that they are as similarly 'customer focused' as the Dog Wardens and Litter Enforcement Officers. An article in the 'Express and Echo' on 17th July 2009 reported that Exeter's 27 'Civil Enforcement Officers' wrote out 19372 parking charge notices in their first year of operation and that Exeter is the only authority within Devon County Council's boundaries to make a profit (£38033) from parking fines.
Devon County Council do not have any CCTV cameras in Exwick (yet). The closest is in the car park of 'The Mill on the Exe' keeping an eye on Millers Crossing Bridge and looking across the river towards Exwick.
Despite all of the above, so far there have not been any reported cases of either Devon or Exeter City Councils using the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) for what have been termed 'minor offences' such as under-age smoking, dog fouling, littering or suspected fraudulent school place applications (as Dorset and many other Councils have done).