Street drinking is not just a problem in Blackburn

A recent article in the Lancashire Telegraph by reporter Vanessa Cornall describes her day out with the police during an enforcement day to deal with problem street drinkers in the Bank Top area of Blackburn.  This is in spite of there being a street drinking banning order in existence.  The street drinkers include local people from Blackburn and Eastern Europeans who hang around certain favoured spots in the town discarding their used beer cans and bottles where they sit.  The police are seizing and disposing of the alcohol and in some cases getting individuals banned from the town centre.

Blackburn is not, by any means, the only place blighted by street drinkers; it goes on in many of our cities and towns and seems to be a never-ending problem.  And it’s not just a UK problem either as visits to many of our favourite European cities will confirm. Further afield in Delhi there’s even a temple dedicated to looking after alcoholics who swarm around the local streets wondering in and out of the traffic begging for money for their next drink.

It’s good to see that the police in Blackburn have approached the retailers, asking them not to sell drink to alcoholics and in some cases not to sell the cheap end brands, which fuel the daily needs of the mainly unemployed street drinker.

In my experience working in King’s Cross it was more often the independent Off Licence that was fuelling the problem, evidenced by the price stickers left on the cans and bottles or stuck on the park benches.  Some of the retailers would have the drinkers’ favourite tipples literally piled up by the till ready to go and were clearly profiting a great deal from everyone else’s misery.  And they’d sell the booze to drinkers who could barely stand up in spite of warnings from the police.  In the end we managed to close down the worst two offending shops leaving the other three to trade responsibly, because they’d got the message!

Having been involved in several multi-agency initiatives aimed at reducing the problems and getting the drinkers into treatment (with some success) I can’t help thinking that this problem is generally going to get a lot worse as council’s and police try to cope with ongoing budget restrictions.