I have received a clever-headed response, today, to my letter to - TopicsExpress



          

I have received a clever-headed response, today, to my letter to Cornwall Council about their prosecution of dog walker, Roger Hobkinson. The Council is claiming that it has a County-wide DCO which justifies them prosecuting Mr Hobkinson. They spent council money (YOURS, in other words, if you live in Cornwall!) to equip their staff with binoculars, and send them out to spy on Mr Hobkinson as he kindly walked a disabled friends dog. Since Cornwall Council havent followed ANY of the Defra guidelines, (as far as I can tell) for introducing DCOs, I have replied to them and told them it isnt valid. Sorry this is a long-letter but since Kevin Brader, from the Council, chose to quote the sections of the law the Council DO take notice of in his letter, I was forced to do the same in my response: 28th November 2013 Mr Kevin Brader Senior Environmental Health Officer Public Health and Protection Cornwall Council Camborne one stop shop Dolcoath Avenue Camborne TR14 8SX Dear Mr Brader Complaint Against Service – 101000991922 I am in receipt of your letter dated 25th November 2013 and comment as follows. You claim that ‘in Cornwall, all public land, or land the public has access to, is covered by a County wide dog control order’. I have read your county-wide dog control order, and it isn’t worth the paper it is written on. In its hate-filled pursuit and persecution of dog owners, Cornwall Council has overlooked completely all the guidance issued by Defra and the Government, on the subject of introducing dog control orders. Whilst the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005 does, indeed, allow councils to introduce dog control orders, there are very strict guidelines which must be adhered to. This is made absolutely clear in the document published by Defra, entitled “Getting to grips with the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005 – a parish council guide to environmental enforcement”, available at: “archive.defra.gov.uk/environment/quality/local/legislation/cnea/documents/parishcouncilguide.pdf. The document very clearly states: “The procedures given in the Regulations are not optional – they must be followed, as failure to do so will invalidate an order,leaving a parish council open to challenge in the courts.” Now, that guidance is for parish councils, I appreciate, but the Defra guidelines on “Dog Control Orders” clearly sets out the procedures for introducing them and reiterates that the procedures councils must follow is not optional: https://gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/218807/dogcontrol-orders.pdf Following the layout of your own letter, I have copied and pasted the relevant points from the above document and reproduce them below with my comments set out in normal print. 28 The procedure for making a Dog Control Order is set out in regulation 3 of the Dog Control Orders (Procedures) Regulations 2006. It is important that this procedure is adhered to, since a failure to do so will invalidate the order. Clearly, the Council has not adhered to procedures, because there has been no public consultation on introducing a County-wide Dog Control Order; there has been no publication of the intent to introduce a County-wide Dog Control Order in the newspapers; and you have made no attempt to justify the need to introduce a DCO. To have conducted a proper public consultation, processed the thousands and thousands of replies you would have received, and drawn any conclusions from any of it, would have cost the council a fortune and taken an extremely long time to process. Nobody I have spoken to knows anything about any such consultation, and I am quite sure it would have been in the public domain ages ago, had any such consultation ever been launched. I am also sure that dog owners’ rights groups, charities, campaigners and individuals would have been in touch to register their objections and that there would be plentiful information from those people available on the internet. There isn’t. Had the Council published its intent, the information would have been broadcast across the internet and people from across the country would have responded. As far as anyone can tell, you didn’t publish any information on any of this, NO public consultation has been conducted, and therefore, whatever County-wide DCO you claim to have introduced, it isn’t valid. 29 It is also important for any authority considering a Dog Control Order to be able to show that this is a necessary and proportionate response to problems caused by the activities of dogs and those in charge of them. Please send me copies of all documentation you compiled proving that there was a need for a County-wide DCO. Was there such a serious problem with dog mess, on marshland or woodland? If so, it would have cost you thousands of pounds in man hours alone to be able to collect that evidence, measure it against other ‘nuisances’ such a littering (which you don’t seem to be concerned about at all!) and then conclude that the problem was so serious as to warrant bringing in the DCO. You can’t justify it. You can’t evidence anything. Cornwall Council is simply on a witch-hunt against dog owners, and that’s all there is to any of this. You have no evidence, barring the fact that you’ve been petty enough to send your staff out with binoculars to spy on a member of the public and prosecute him in a pathetic attempt to make an example of him and swell your own coffers. I suggest that all you have achieved is to demonstrate how extremely petty and small-minded you are. 30 The authority needs to balance the interests of those in charge of dogs against the interests of those affected by the activities of dogs, bearing in mind the need for people, in particular children, to have access to dog-free areas and areas where dogs are kept under strict control, and the need for those in charge of dogs to have access to areas where they can exercise their dogs without undue restrictions. A failure to give due consideration to these factors could make any subsequent Dog Control Order vulnerable to challenge in the Courts. Well, one only has to look at the way Cornwall Council has allowed dogs to be banned from every beach in St Ives to know that the ‘interests’ of dog owners have not been taken into account at all. It is plain as day that the Council wants dogs removed from all its beaches and dog owners moved to the outer edges of society. To your Council, owning a dog is a crime, and you are treating us as criminals, encouraging parish councils who wish to ban dogs not because there’s any real, provable problem with them, but because a few individuals wish it. Dog owners need to be able to exercise their dogs properly. Indeed, it is a legal requirement on us that we do so. The vast majority of us clear up after our dogs and it is an insult to accuse us all of being irresponsible owners. There is very little dog mess left anywhere now; and what there is pales into insignificance, compared to the disgusting amounts of litter left strewn across the beaches, pavements and countryside by the public you do want to attract (families with children only, it seems). We have photographic evidence of the dangerous littering left on the beaches of Cornwall. Can you substantiate your accusations against us with any photographic evidence of failure to pick up dog mess that in any way equals the amount of litter you are apparently content to deal with? Why are you attacking dog owners this way? The beach and countryside are full of other animals whose faeces would not be good for anyone who consumed it, either. Both are littered with the rotting corpses of animals, marine life on the beaches and birds that have died and are left to decompose, out in the open air. Why have dogs been selected for special persecution? It’s utterly ridiculous. In addition, the sea itself is full of human excrement, pumped into the oceans around us every day. Further waste is all over the land and runs off into the water supply. It is utterly ludicrous that you think you can persecute dog owners in this manner. 31 Authorities should also consider how easy a Dog Control Order would be to enforce, since failure properly to enforce could undermine the effect of an order. This is particularly the case for orders that exclude dogs completely from areas of land. These will be easier to enforce if the land is enclosed. However, such orders should not be ruled out for unenclosed land where a special case for them can be made, for example to provide dog-free sections on beaches. Sickeningly, the newspapers report that the Council had nothing better to spend its money on than to position members of staff with binoculars to spy on the gentleman you have prosecuted, in order to catch his dog defecating on marshland. Have you really got nothing better to do, with council finances? Are you really so petty-minded that you’d rather spend your manpower and financial resources on sending teams of people out to spy on dog owners? Can you please tell me how many repeat-litterers you have dealt with in a similar fashion? How many teams of people have you sent out this year, to spy on litterers with binoculars and drag them up in court? NONE, I expect. Because the height and sides of all this is that Cornwall Council wants to persecute dog owners. Personally, I think Roger Hobkinson has a case for prosecuting you for your conduct in spying on him with binoculars, and I hope he pursues it. You cannot, however, successfully spy on every single dog owner who traverses land in the County with their dog. Therefore, you cannot enforce your County-wide dog order. Therefore, it is invalid on those grounds alone. 34 Authorities must also publish a notice describing the proposed order in a local newspaper circulating in the same area as the land to which the order would apply and invite representations on the proposal. The notice must: (a) identify the land to which the order will apply (and if it is access land state that that is the case); (b) summarise the order; (c) if the order will refer to a map, say where the map can be inspected. This must be at an address in the authority’s area, be free of charge, and at all reasonable hours during the consultation period; (d) give the address to which, and the date by which, representations must be sent to the authority. The final date for representation must be at least 28 days after the publication of the notice. As far as anybody is aware, you haven’t done any of this. Therefore, your County-wide DCO is invalid. Not worth the paper it is written on. 35 At the end of the consultation period the authority must consider any representations that have been made. I am not expecting you will be able to provide copies of any representations that were made, because your intention to introduce a County-wide DCO was never published, with clear maps showing that the whole of the county was to be covered and invitations extended to the general public to submit their comments. The Defra guidelines for parish councils also state that: Where a dog control order has been made to cover the whole parish, it is never going to be practical to put up a notice at each point that someone can enter a parish. In this case a more practical solution is to put up signs at different locations, adjacent to, or on the highway, throughout the parish. Presumably, Cornwall Council would also have been expected to adhere to this requirement and must have spent a small fortune making clear signage that has been erected right across the county, has it? Please detail how much you have spent on this signage and whereabouts it has been positioned. You also have no legal right whatsoever to impose a DCO on land which you don’t own. So, there can be no ‘County-wide’ DCO, unless you can provide evidence that each and every private landowner has been consulted and has agreed to allow you to introduce this order on their land. It also cannot be a ‘Cornwall-wide DCO’ because you have no authority whatsoever on land owned by the Forestry Commission. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a responsible dog owner who fully agrees with fines and legal action against dog owners who don’t pick up after their dogs in public spaces such as parks, beaches and pavements. The very small minority of offenders do nothing to help the reputation of the rest of us and, believe me, we object to their actions even more than you do. However, most sensible councils would agree that it would be impossible to enforce a DCO on open fields, marshland or through woods. And the farmers where I live would object most strongly if dog owners were running across their fields, through their crops, to pick up dog mess dropped somewhere in the middle of it. Most sensible dog owners I know wouldn’t pick up after their dogs in woods and fields, because there is a good argument for saying it is best left to be decomposed naturally. This particularly applies if you haven’t provided dog bins absolutely everywhere, including across marshland (as outlined in the Defra guidelines) and people are tempted to leave plastic bags full of dog mess all over the countryside and woods. For these reasons the Fouling of Land Act exempted woodland, marshland and fields from the legal restrictions around dog fouling and I doubt that the Government ever thought, when they introduced the Clean Neighbourhoods Act, that any council would be as fanatical and extremist about it as Cornwall Council and so many of its parish councils seem to be. Your Council has applied absolutely no common sense to any of this and are clearly hell-bent on just conducting a witch-hunt against dog owners. It seems to me that you consider yourselves above adhering to the Defra guidelines, which – as previously quoted – “are not optional”. Unless you can demonstrate that you have followed the guidelines to the letter, and that you have the consent of every single landowner to introduce a ‘county-wide’ DCO across their property, then the county-wide DCO you claim to have isn’t valid and isn’t legal. I don’t know why Cornwall Council has decided to conduct such a vicious and unfounded attack on dog owners, but you may be quite sure that (after years of holidaying down there, every year), I will not be coming any more. Neither will any of my family, or my friends. In addition, the reputations of Cornwall Council, Perranporth Town Council and St Ives Town Council have suffered tremendously because of the discrimination and persecution that you have implemented with such enthusiasm and the resultant online campaigns that your actions have triggered. Irresponsible dog owners are few and far between, these days, and there are nowhere near as many of them as there are disgusting litterbugs. I have launched my own, national, campaign and am inviting dog owners to take photographs of the littering that you are apparently quite happy to live with, and which is left so casually by thousands of other holidaymakers. Broken glass, plastic bottles, filthy babies’ nappies, used barbecues, rusting tins, fish hooks and a host of other items are a far greater hazard to dogs and humans than a bit of dog mess here and there, which as Mr Hobkinson pointed out, will be washed into the sea in coastal areas anyway. Given that the sea is already so polluted with human excrement, and both the land and the sea are full of the excrement of millions of other animals, Cornwall Council’s obsession with dogs just looks pathetic and ridiculous. Your hate campaign against dogs and dog owners is splitting communities, fuelling mistrust of all dogs amongst the general public and making many dog owners ‘anti-kids’ in the process. I cannot believe that you are actually trying to construct a society in which dogs and their owners are treated as disgusting outsiders, and the active way in which you are causing hatred and disruption within formerly happy communities. I find it difficult to understand what possible benefit there can be in encouraging people to hate those who perhaps have different interests to their own. In all the newspaper reports about the St Ives dog ban, it was repeatedly stated that the row over the extended DCO had split the community and created a situation in which people who had been friends for decades were no longer speaking to one another. I cannot see what possible benefit you can see in creating such a society. I hope that in time, a government enquiry will be launched into the misapplication of DCOs which has been so enthusiastically adopted by Cornwall Council and several of its parish councils, and by other councils across the UK. I think the dog owners of Great Britain will very easily be able to prove their legal argument that they have been discriminated against and that those involved in the persecution we are enduring have spread misinformation and outright lies about us and about the pets we love, who are an important part of our families. Apart from anything else, it is difficult to understand why – in these recession-bitten times – Cornwall has decided to do so much damage to its tourist industry, and its own reputation, by pursuing such a hate campaign against dog owners; the very people most likely to holiday in Britain whatever the weather and to remain loyal to your county when choosing their holiday destinations. I am sure we will be in touch again. Yours sincerely
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 17:34:36 +0000

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