Council should come clean over the tourist tax - Iain Whyte
If you want a weed-free and clean city for the summer season, it seems you will just have to wait. It certainly won’t be spick and span soon given the current state of things.
Many consider August as the festival season, but it is already here. The Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival (EJBF) is in full swing, and a Folk and Food festival and other pop-up events are taking place at Fringe venues.
On Wednesday I was at the Usher Hall for the EJBF and things outside were a mess. Weeds festoon the stepped pavement opposite the Royal Lyceum Theatre while litter blew around the feet of concert goers at McCrae’s place outside the Usher Hall.
Worst of all, the fly tipping at a bin hub on Grindlay Street had been deposited everywhere by nesting gulls, giving a dystopian impression of the view of the Castle in the background.
Despite successful Conservative budget amendments in the last few years, adding extra funding for street cleansing and initiating the scrub our streets initiative, there is much more to be done.
This is hardly the welcome we expect to give visitors and residents, however the paralysis of the council is apparent in everything. The council leader even criticised my Conservative colleague, Cllr Jason Rust, like a naughty schoolboy for suggesting there might be a bit more urgency in determining when Princes Street can reopen after the fire.
Safety is paramount, so make the investigations and engineering calculations needed on the building façade an urgent priority. With festivals starting, businesses closed and huge public transport disruption “for the foreseeable future” just doesn’t cut it.
As of today, we are charging visitors 5 per cent extra in Tourist Tax for their stay. The council attitude is that every improvement relies on this additional tax in the vague hope that it will make a difference in the future.
But with criticism from Scottish Ballet over the impact of the Tourist Tax on touring artistes the council has scored an own goal or two in the publicity stakes this week.
Would it not have been a good idea to pump prime some of the promised clean up? That way, visitors might have gone away thinking the tax was being spent wisely rather than wondering where it is spent.
Otherwise, they might tell friends that Edinburgh is expensive and dirty. Is this the advert the council thinks our hospitality businesses need?