Wild weeing – outdoors, wherever the mood takes you, rather than in some tiled facility designed for the purpose – is not like wild swimming. It doesn’t have disciples, people don’t yammer on about it, and you won’t find articles about where’s best to do it and how freeing it is. It seems to be an entirely personal preference, unfreighted by cultural association. I know someone who split up with a woman because she took an adventure wee while hiking. I know someone else who wees in his garden when his toilet is closer. I personally look down on it as a sign that you drink too much water.
As an inalienable right of the free, however, people do seem to be quite attached to it – as Dacorum borough council in Hertfordshire discovered when they fined two men, one of whom has a weakened prostate, for weeing in a layby near some woods. Lawyers weighing in for and against the council subsequently have been careful to distinguish between rural and urban wild weeing, the latter being more likely to class as litter, because it would leave more trace. I don’t even agree with that; the trace is part of the charm. If you couldn’t catch the scent of urine on the air, would you even know you were in the West End? But don’t listen to me, I disapprove of water.
The council wouldn’t back down when challenged and said that it would be an inappropriate use of funds to correspond further; they’d reckoned without the tenacity of a person fighting for a principle. The uncle of one of the men fined put a Freedom of Information request in to obtain parts of the legal advice the council was working from. So that got the lawyers arguing, and if there’s a better way to piss money up a wall, I don’t know it.
Both fines were eventually rescinded. But beneath the stubbornness on every side, there is a sad little portrait of council business: the only way people can be fined for weeing in a layby is if there are officers stationed there to apprehend them. This work was subcontracted to a private company that is allowed to keep 78% of the fine; the council gets the rest. Such an arrangement can only work for the company if it catches enough people red-handed (sorry about the image, couldn’t be helped) to pay the wages of the enforcer. So what the council claims is a commitment to making “these spaces [laybys?] pleasant and usable for all” looks much more like a trap – driven by profit – than it does a deterrent.
The private company has given itself a public-sector sounding name: District Enforcement. The council, meanwhile, with its sheer determination to uphold the fines, has allied itself with the company, rather than the residents. This is a pattern of local authority outsourcing that is visible in disputes everywhere: between tenants and management organisations, and between adults with social care needs and private providers. The contractual relationship between the public and the private sectors takes on a heft of loyalty and interdependence that doesn’t so much supplant as obliterate any pre-existing sense that the local authority exists to serve its residents.
This would have been a good conversation to have in 2014, by which time it was plain where austerity cuts were really going to fall. We were, however, preoccupied by the sheer spite of the “big society”: the bedroom tax; the benefit sanctions and resultant surge in food banks; the disability assessments that were themselves privatised; the state hiding behind a private company (Atos, then), in effect outsourcing not just the decisions but the accountability.
But the extraordinary reduction in central government spending mostly fell on local government, which was reduced by 40% in real terms between 2010 and 2020. The full catastrophe for local authorities first became clear in 2018, when Northamptonshire became the first council to go bust for 20 years. Since 2021, six more have declared bankruptcy, and a quarter of English councillors consider it likely their council will go the same way in the next five years.
While the blast zone is adult and children’s social care, the impecunity has crept into every interaction between local authorities and residents. When the positive precincts (libraries, swimming pools) are reduced, the warmer relationships (Sure Start, youth services) destroyed, no wonder we are left with petty-minded, semi-privatised surveillance. Even though I could see the benefits of low-traffic neighbourhoods and Ulez, I could see immediately too why they aroused such ire. Rather perversely, this resentment has been pressed into political advantage by the very politicians who created the parsimony in the first place – and it appears to be having an effect. The public can take a lot from a local authority whose generosity you can see elsewhere. When penalties are all you can see, even their pro-social intentions are hard to acknowledge.
Does this mean weeing in a layby now counts as a citizens’ fightback? Not quite. As dirty protests go, it’s just not that dirty.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
