Today’s Barnet & Potters Bar Times leads with a story about how the Safer Neighbourhood teams would like the powers to be able to deal with issues like dog fouling, low level anti-social behaviour such as littering. At present the Council has these powers but the likelihood of a warden being round to enforce them is just about zero. This leads to a situation where the law is not being enforced and therefore made a mockery of. I can think of no reason why the council should have these powers in the first place and no reason why the police should not get them back. We are in effect paying twice because we have the police anyway and the council are presumably employing wardens (not enough of them though). If the police have the powers then the wardens could be re-deployed to sorting out low level maintenance issues and graffiti removal. You would think with the current mania for outsourcing in Barnet that the administration would be champing at the bit to outsource this at no cost to themselves.