Labour has come under fire over its plans for a toilet tax again after reversing a decision to start charging people to use five public toilets on Brighton and Hove seafront.
The U-turn comes less than a week after the party voted for a 50p fee when setting the budget for Brighton and Hove City Council for 2026-27.
The measure was expected to generate income totalling £70,000 but was criticised during the scrutiny process before the budget meeting last Thursday (26 February) when the proposal was voted through.
The 50p charge was approved for five seafront toilets – Dalton’s Bastion, the Colonnade, Shelter Hall and West Pier Arches, in Brighton, and King’s Esplanade, in Hove.
But yesterday (Wednesday 4 March) Labour councillor Tim Rowkins, the council’s cabinet member for environmental service and net zero, said that the council would not be bringing in the fee.
Conservative leader Alistair McNair said that the proposal should not have been in the budget in the first place because the sums around the 50p charge, from admin to installation, “did not add up”.
Councillor McNair said: “What other sums don’t add up? What’s the next U-turn? Children’s pedestrian training? I hope so.
“Labour weren’t ‘exploring’ a toilet tax as Councillor Rowkins has stated – it was in the budget which Labour councillors voted for and Conservatives voted against.
“Where will that lost £70,000 projected income from toilet charges come from now? No doubt Labour will now be looking for another service to cut.”
His fellow Conservative councillor Emma Hogan, who works as a doctor, said that the toilet tax would be unfair on people with life-long conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, including ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.
Councillor Hogan said: “If they are able to get out of their homes to enjoy some fresh air, they will plan trips around toilet availability and accessibility. Imagine adding a charge to this.”
The council’s then interim finance chief John Hooton spoke about a Conservative proposal, saying that removing the toilet tax from the budget “will need approval from cabinet or cabinet member”.
The amendment was voted down.
The former Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, criticised the move in an exchange with Councillor Rowkins on Facebook.
Councillor Rowkins said: “We were looking at limiting the charging to visitors only, retaining free access for residents. But it’s just too complex and costly to implement.
“We’ve reopened 13 (soon to be 14), refurbished 9 and switched the winter-only toilets to year-round. Our record on these facilities speaks for itself.”
Mr Russell-Moyle, who has since joined the Greens, replied: “You have now U-turned after, as I said, a community campaign from many which … included Greens, as well as Independents and Tories.
“It is you turning this into a them-and-us attack which is a real shame.
“Maybe you never really planned to start charging and it was all a sham. Maybe you changed your mind after the campaign. Or maybe you are slightly running scared because your party nationally has become so toxic.”
Independent councillor Peter Atkinson abstained from the budget vote over the toilet charging proposal which he said would prove “hugely unpopular”.
Councillor Atkinson said: “The ‘equality impact assessment’ on this proposal focuses mainly on young and disabled people. But, as has been mentioned by groups such as the Older People’s Council, this will hit elderly people just as much.”
The week before the budget meeting, at the Place Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Thursday 19 February, Youth Council member Jasmine Oquosa-Withers said that the proposal would affect people with protected characteristics during pregnancy, menopause and menstrual periods.
Older People’s Council representative Bernadette Kent asked what the council thought it was doing by introducing such a charge.
At the time, the Labour deputy leader of the council Jacob Taylor said that the proposals would be limited to “high-volume” city centre toilets, adding that the council would look into a residents’ pass.
He also noted that the business case had not been fully worked up as the council looked at every option to shore up its challenging financial position.
The budget has to be passed at a meeting of the full council by law.
Yesterday, the council was asked why part of the budget was changed within days of the vote held in public rather than at the meeting.
It was also asked when the decision was made to U-turn on the toilet tax, who signed it off and where the money would be found to plug the £70,000 gap.
The council had not responded by the time of publication.
Maybe it’s finally dawning on the Labour administration that everyone has lost faith in them and their Labour government.
The decision comes less than a week after the wake up call of the Gorton and Denton by election and a few days after polls show Labour will be obliterated at the next elections.
Guess they don’t realise though it’s too little too late. Nobody trusts them now, not in government or locally.
I’m pretty sure it’s because it was too complex and wouldn’t not achieve savings. There’s not a deeper meaning there.
I’d rather have an admistration that does change it’s mind and listen to the electorate by reversing them than the years of grossly unpopular decisions we have had foisted upon us by administrations of a different political flag. The media hype it up as a U-turn to make it sound as though such an action is bad, when the outcome is actually (in this case) beneficial!
Well said!
It does get annoying that it’s a U-turn or an administration that refuses to listen to the public.
Restoring £800k pa lost revenue by reinstating all the cancelled parking bays to Madeira Drive to facilitate more visitors who then spend more money in what is supposed to be a tourist resort would be a much cleverer and more popular idea. Aren’t all vehicles either emissions-tested or electric anyway? It is not the council’s job to penalise visitors for deigning to visit Brighton and Hove. They already have a nasty bus gate snare as they leave.
I maintain looking a tourist tax in devolution seems like a logical way forward to offset costs from tourists.
LRM being a perpetrator of toxicity again, then complaining about people being toxic…
Exactly. He does this passive aggressive thing where he attacks Labour and then says everybody is to blame when his own political u-turns are highlighted and his half-truths are exposed.
If only the Greens, his new symbiotic political mates, had used the same good sense and U-turned on the i360, the city would be at least £50m better off and we wouldn’t be discussing spending a few Pence at the toilet.
If only Labour hadn’t taken out more than £1 billion PFI debt in the early 2000s, then we residents would still not be paying off more than £165 million in outstanding loans and interest. If only Labour had handled the fallout from the 2019 City Clean dispute with more moral integrity, and acted on claims of bullying and deep-rooted issues then more money would not have been wasted.
The list goes on and on. Labour are very good at pointing the finger of blame, but using distraction techniques when challenged on their own failings.
I’m not saying for one moment that the Greens don’t bear some responsibility for the i360 issues. But people should always look at who is doing the finger pointing and screaming loudest, and question what their motivation is. From what I’ve seen, there’s a huge amount of distraction being implemented to divert attention from bigger issues. People are starting to see through it thankfully!
Councils that didn’t use PFI often lost access to capital funding. However, on your other point, that’s got me thinking; when you’re talking about decisions made a quarter of a century ago, the people involved and the circumstances were completely different. At some point, local politics has to move past endlessly relitigating old decisions and focus on what the city actually needs now.
I’m not a big fan of political mudslinging for that reason. It usually ends up distracting from the thing that should matter most: Brighton and the people who live here.
Well it reinforces what a scandal PFI has been if the government restricted access to capital funding for councils not getting themselves into huge debt.
Brighton council’s PFI deal with Veolia was over £1 billion and we are still paying for it now.
Politicians should reflect on poor past decisions they made and costly policies their parties introduced, especially when residents are still paying debts off. It’s not political mudslinging to say politicians (from any party) should learn from past mistakes. I don’t think it’s wrong either for people to be alert to politicians screaming loudly and using distraction to avert from their own failings. It just always comes across as a bit rich to me when certain politicians finger point about i360 debt, when residents are still paying off PFI debt that has over 3x more left to pay decades on than the amount of the i360 debt.
Neither debt is a good thing. One debt always gets talked about, the other not even though it has and continues to cost vastly more
Memories are short-lived when it comes to politics.
Benjamin, the problem isn’t just whether the scheme would have saved money or been complex to implement. The issue is that it was already voted into the budget with a projected £70k income. If the numbers and logistics weren’t properly worked out beforehand, that suggests the proposal wasn’t fully thought through before councillors approved it.
Budget decisions aren’t small policy experiments – they’re meant to be based on realistic figures. Reversing a measure within days raises legitimate questions about how solid the financial planning was in the first place. If the council knew implementation might be too complex or costly, that analysis should have been done before putting it into the budget.
So while it’s good that they listened to concerns and scrapped the charge, people are still right to question why it got that far without a proper business case. Otherwise it just looks like policy being added and removed on the fly.
Again, not the point I was making. Fifth time this week.
Back of a fag packet budget.
I’d say other budget decisions equally not thought through, Wellington House day centre closure being another example. Care needs service users have won’t disappear it will simply money being used from one pot rather than another – meanwhile causing a huge amount of distress for service users and their families. But the council don’t factor in or care about the cost of anxiety and the distress their changes will cause.
it’s actually called a “u-bend” and it stops sewer snakes crawling up into your loo