Council working to tackle waste from unidentified holiday lets in Bath

Bath & North East Somerset Council is trying to tackle waste from holiday lets, but it does not know how many are in Bath.

The Guildhall in Bath

Uncontained waste from holiday lets is a “key issue” for the local authority, but its cleaning teams are having to go street-by-street to identify them. There is no central register of how many there are in the city.

Waste strategy manager Lisa Gore told a council scrutiny panel on 9th July: “At the moment we tackle it street by street, so as they are identified the team will do a lot of research into the background to work out if they are paying business rates/council tax and approach any lettings companies — but it is a lot of work behind it.”

The scrutiny panel was discussing the first six months of the council’s new evening business waste rules, which say business waste must be put in gull-proof sacks and cannot be put out until 6pm.

Asked about whether this should apply to holiday lets too, council cabinet member Councillor Ian Halsall (Oldfield Park, Liberal Democrat) said: “There is an argument as to whether they should actually be registered as businesses and we should be charging them accordingly but its definitely something we are looking into.”

He said the council had been making an assessment of what the appropriate action was on a case-by-case basis for each holiday let it found.

He said: “In some instances, we have taken direct action and served fixed penalty notices, other times we have just been politely asking them to get their guests to put their rubbish out on the appropriate collection day.”

Councillor Halsall said the council was campaigning for there to be a national register of holiday lets. The meeting heard that there are 1,850 holiday lets in the greater Bath area listed on AirBnb alone.

41 fines were issued to businesses in the first six months of the new evening business waste rules, which came into effect in October.

The council’s figures show that there was initially a large number of breaches of the rules, but they quickly reduced.

In the first week of the new rules in October, 61 businesses put their waste out without their name on it and 43 businesses put it out at the wrong time. By the seventh week, there was only one instance of each breach.

The requirement for businesses not to put their bins out before 6pm was highly controversial. Shops could previously put them out from 5pm, and the council’s own analysis warned that it could cost shops which shut at 5pm over £3,000 a year in additional wages for someone to stay for another hour just to put the bins out.

Two of the businesses which ended up receiving fines had previously formally complained about the 6pm rule.

An estimated 1,126 businesses are within the central Bath area affected by the new rules. Eighty businesses objected to the rules before they were introduced, and 21 businesses have complained to the council about the policy since.

John Wimperis, Local Democracy Reporter