Extra £200,000 per year to be flushed away on running public toilets in the Stratford district

The district’s budget monitoring report, which highlights significant overspends and underspends every three months, revealed that the council had to find the extra chunk after there were no one came forward to clean, open and close public toilets within the previous budget.

This report doesn’t set out what that was but a decision to permit a procurement exercise for the cleaning, opening and closing of the district’s public conveniences in July 2025, taken by leader Councillor Susan Juned (Lib Dem, Alcester East), shows that the budget for this work in the financial year 2025-26 was set at £325,000.

That historic report notes how a tender process was undertaken in 2023. Despite "initial interest shown by a few companies” and “numerous clarification questions being asked and responded to", no formal tenders were submitted.

That led to extensions of the existing deal until March 2026 while adjustments were made to the previous tender in the hope of awarding a three-year contract, plus one-year extension options, from April 2026.

At this week’s meeting of the district’s cabinet – the panel of Liberal Democrat councillors that runs major service areas – portfolio holder for resources Councillor David Curtis (Lib Dem, Stratford Shottery) described an “unavoidable cost” which will be “taken into account when planning the 2027-28 budget”.

“The additional costs are mainly due to having staff to open and close the toilets, which is obviously rather necessary,” he said.

Councillor Sarah Whalley-Hoggins (Reform UK, Brailes & Compton) asked: “How has a new public toilet contract gone £200,000 over budget due to locking and unlocking the toilets? Is this a procurement failure?

“Can we expect this to be over budget by £200,000 every year until this contract ends?”

Cllr Curtis defended the spend on an “extremely valuable service” with the council’s finance chief Richard Burrell insisting: “It is not a procurement failure.

“We went out to procurement and didn’t have anyone come forward.

"Nobody wanted to do it for the sum of money that we were able to pay and that was the most economic rate we could get.

“It is the cleaning and the opening and closing. It has been through the process and that is the cost, unfortunately.”

Cllr Juned said that town councils had been approached during the process but “preferred not to take it on”.

Cllr Curtis added: “Surprisingly, leader, no one wants to clean toilets and open and close them.”

The issue had been picked up at last week’s scrutiny meeting with deputy chief executive Tony Perks explaining: “The main pressure is not so much the cleaning but the opening and closing because we try to open and close them all at the same time.

“It is difficult to attract local labour to do that so it has been quite an expensive process.

"We had a tough job finding someone to do it and we had to accept a significant increase in costs for cleaning, opening and closing.”