Community Payback

Sandwell Valley has, in the last few years, become a wonderful place for Sandwell to send its minor miscreants and forget all about them.

They can while away their community payback hours endlessly cutting grass which doesn't need to be cut and chopping down trees which don't need to be chopped down.

I suppose that community payback is like custodial sentences, in that the withdrawal of liberty is the punishment. Doubtless the community payback chaps could think of a thousand things they would rather do on a Saturday or Sunday than strim grass or hack away trees.

But that's how it is.

In Sandwell at any rate.

But to what extent, if any, are the non-miscreant residents of Sandwell benefitting from this 'free' labour being so generously and routinely expended at Sandwell Valley?

The answer is, not at all.

Far from receiving any sort of 'pay back' the Sandwell residents are continuing to 'pay out' in one way or another.

Why?

Well, for a start, the 'free' labour doesn't come free. Someone has to pay for the bus that carts the miscreants around; the employment costs of the minder that oversees them, and the overheads that oversee the minder. So it's far from free.

Secondly, the work which these people carry out is at best pointless and at worst, positively destructive.

Take last weekend's work for example.

A good part of the 'free' payment made back to the community was expended in clearing some briers and the like from deep down alongside the run up to a motorway bridge. Such a clearance is completeley unnecessary. Nobody walks there as there is nowhere to go. Nobody looks there as there is nothing to look at. The partial clearance was just a futile and utter waste of time; effort and money.

But worse still, just around the corner from this useless exercise was (note the tense) a row of lime/yellow stemmed shrubs which are grown, (where people know about these things), primarily for their colour during the winter period. There is another similar shrub, grown for the same purpose, which has red stems.

You are probably ahead of me.

Last weekend, having done such fine work in clearing some of the undergrowth alongside the approach to the motorway bridge, the community payback people were, apparently, redirected towards the lime/yellow stemmed shrubs, and proceeded to chop the first few yards of them down to the ground.

The photos here show the space where some of the shrubs were, and some of the remaining ones. I fully expect to publish photos in due course showing that all of them have been 'grounded.'

This is only the latest instance of the community payback people being used to further Sandwell's systematic urbanisation of Sandwell Valley. Practically everything they do is destructive in one way or another, and, on the other hand, it is rare that you see them being used to do anything useful like picking up litter.

On one occasion in May a couple of years ago, just as the wild flowers were getting into their full swing alongside the path that runs parallel to the M5/M6 link road, the Community payback people were being used by Sandwell, (trumpeters of the Sandwell Valley Country Park, Green Flags et al) to cut these wild flowers down. When asked why, the minder said that he had been told to cut the borders back to keep the 6ft wide tarmac path clear!!

Grief!

(Ihave have not published the photos of this in case any of the chaps are recognised.)