Charging for toilets is an issue being faced by most if not all Councils at the moment. We have some thoughts on charging which we hope will help you in your decision making.
Most people when asked will say that they are happy to pay for clean and safe Public Toilets, and the generally accepted rate is 20p. However, when you install a charging system to toilets, you should expect to reduce the number of toilet uses by around 40%. Most of those who stop using the toilets will be locals, with alternatives to the Public Toilet. The visitors to your town or city will be generally happy to pay as long as the facilities are clean and well maintained.
There are two principle functions performed through charging:
Revenue
We would expect a set of four busy semi-automatic toilets to have 50,000 uses per annum, equating to £10,000 of revenue. This will represent about 1/2 of the actual cost of running the toilet (including utilites, consummables, cleaning, maintenance etc). This level of usage will only happen in a busy location with a high number of visitors to a town. (One paradox of higher numbers is that users tend to hold the door open for one another and hence can lower the revenue in really busy times)
A busy single APC installation will deal with 20,000 people per annum, equating to £4000 of revenue against a cost of approximately £12,000. However most APC’s will be located in less busy areas, where they perform at their best, and will earn more in the region of £2000.
A typical attended facility costs around £50,000 per annum to run and therefore needs 250,000 users to breakeven. This is highly possible in a busy tourist destination, but most smaller towns will struggle to justify an attended facility.
Security
A charge will reduce the amount of casual vandalism done to a toilet. 20p will not put off a determined drug taker or graffiti artist, but it will reduce the number of school children hanging around a toilet and causing trouble.
At the other end of the scale, if you charge too much (£1 and above), the toilet becomes a no go area for everybody except the drug pushers themselves.
The type of toilet you need will depend on a number of important factors:
How many people do you expect to use the toilet? and will they come in a steady flow, like in a park, or in a great rush, as in at a bus arrival point?
How bad is the vandalism and other anti-social behaviour in the area? Do the toilets need to take special measures to ensure a longevity of life?
How well monitored is the toilet and will it be out of sight in the evenings? Is the site important for the night time economy?
How easy are the utilities to bring to site and will they cost a reasonable amount?
When asked, Healthmatic will survey the propoosed sites, and help you decide which is the best option for you. In numbers terms, as a general rule, you would expect to install an attended toilet for sites which expect more than 150,000 users per annum. 50-150,000 will be managed by semi-automatrics and below this number by APC's.
The factors which lead to an APC might be the need for 24 hour provision, the location being out of the public eye, a steady flow of users, or a high level of vandalism in an area.
The semi-automatic will cope better with higher numbers, where vandalism is less of an issue. This may be at a bus station or central town car park type location.
Cottaging is a problem throughout the World! Not just in your local town or district. We see trouble from men from the most celubrious parts of Mayfair through to the toughest parts of Toxteth.
We probably have one Council on per week worrying about the fact that one of their toilets has been spotted on a 'good cottaging spot' web site.
There are three key approaches to dealing with cottaging:
1. Remove all lobbies from the toilet. In most cases this means making the toilet direct access.
2. In an APC we would introduce weight plates to the floor. The door can be set not to shut in the event that more than one man walks into the toilet. Word quickly gets round the community that XXX toilet is not a good place to go.
3. Ensure that the toilet is in the Public Eye, well lit and preferably with some CCTV obvious. This is a reasonable defence, but determined cottaging will still continue without introducing points one and two.
We have encountered full parties in toilets, and seen cottaging so in the public eye that it must have been part of the thrill. There is no need to tolerate it, and there are very effective measures that can be taken.
You can see them in Reading, Westminster, Watford, Taunton, Stroud, Colchester and Newquay. Five are just being installed into Lambeth. We also always have Urilifts at our Works, so please just contact us for a demostration. Over 100 have been installed in total around Europe.
Yes, all our new toilets are DDA compliant and are accessible by Radar key.
The approximate time is 14 weeks after the survey and ordering. Most of our clients go through some form of competitive tender process prior to placing an order. Sometimes this is full blown OJEC, sometimes as organised by an architect.
We can install toilets anywhere as long as we are able to get the electricity and water to the site. We have used septic tanks in some locations. The toilet in this photo is on a walk in the Campsie Hills above Glasgow.
We pride ourselves on being able to adapt the toilet surround to the environment
It is placed in. Already we have camouflaged into the Cotswolds and niched in Northern Ireland. If you need to see any of our more attractive toilet surrounds, do contact us.
Typically we clean and maintain all out toilet installations. In addition we also clean and maintain many toilets which were installed by others.
Although unfortunately we can not stop anyone doing graffiti we do use materials that fight back with anti-graffiti paint that is easy to clean off and using rippled edges that is hard to make any significant markings on.
We can help to reduce this by placing a toilet at a strategic site, our Urilifts are doing a good job at helping with this. They are easy to use and retract into the ground in the day making the shopping experience better for the shop keepers and the shoppers.
No! They have to have an officer/person in charge within sight of the Urilift to push a button to set off the mechanism in order for the whole Urilift to begin lowering itself.
