Danfo

Prompted by chatting yesterday to the chap who looks after a swathe of public toilets between Shanklin and Yaverland (lower left in the snap above), who lives in Brading and who happens to use the Wheatsheaf there. Further prompted by not being able to remember the name of the Swedish company for which he worked.

I felt sure that the name was not very long and probably started with a ‘D’ – but my telephone did not help at all and I had to wait until I got home to a proper computer with a proper search facility. Bing was not very helpful, although it did turn up some bits and bobs, and it took the power of Google to track Danfo down. Bing seemed to get stuck on page two of the relevant search results.

After which the story seems to be as follows.

There is a whole industry out there dedicated to the provision of public toilets, complete with trade associations, standards and all the rest of it. We have the substantial, if a little elderly, document at reference 1 which mentions Danfo no less than seven times. ‘Publicly available toilets: Problem reduction guide’, originally produced by or for the Staffordshire Police.

Clearly an important matter for an area – the Isle of Wight (IOW) – which seeks to attract lots of holiday makers to its beaches, esplanades and associated facilities – for example, elaborate, dinosaur flavoured crazy golf courses.

There is a county council (web-sited at reference 2), although I believe certain services – such as the police – are run jointly with Hampshire. That said, I dare say the IOW council has overall responsibility for the public toilets on the island – while there does also seem to be a fair bit of delegation to town and parish councils.

The bottom line seems to be that a fair chunk of the island is moving to smart new, pay-to-use toilets from Danfo, a Swedish company which operates in this country among others. I dare say including the same tap-to-pay that we learned to love during the plague years. See references 3 and 4.

Which might be another facet of the public finance initiative, the wheeze whereby government avoids the capital costs of public services while incurring possibly massive ongoing charges for same. A bit like going to a loan shark. In this case, Danfo do the work and make their money from the pay-to-use. Special arrangements for special needs, such as those of the disabled.

And while I don’t care for the public finance initiative, seeing it first as a very expensive way to pay for public services and second as a way of continuing to pretend that we can have such services without raising the taxes needed to pay for them, I do not object to this particular move to pay-to-use. The public at large might have more respect for services that they have to pay at least something for. Over the years, I have heard various medical and dental people make the same point.

Other players for this slice of IOW business include, or have included, Fountain (which suddenly went under), Top Mops (reference 5) and Nviro (reference 6). Seemingly at least, rather more modest operations than Danfo. There is lots of material on all this out there in the public domain, on the Internet. Some of it from the councils themselves, some of it from the local press and some of it from the companies involved. There might even be a handy report setting out the whole story. In any event, given time, I dare say, without needing to stir from home, I could produce such a report. But not today.

PS 1: see reference 7 for an earlier foray into this arena.

PS 2: fine rock cakes usually to be had from the café in the middle of the snap above, to the right of the blue caravan.

References 

Reference 1: http://fombl.org.uk/Publicly+Available+Toilets+2010+current+SMALL.pdf. 

Reference 2: https://www.iow.gov.uk/. 

Reference 3: https://danfo.co.uk/. Their front page today is very dinosaur aware. Clearly very go-ahead people.

Reference 4: https://danfo.com/. 

Reference 5: https://topmops.net/.

Reference 6: https://www.nviro.co.uk/. 

Reference 7: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-sanitary-engineer.html.