Graffiti management

It is an unfortunate fact that Graffiti is rife throughout most towns and district centres within Greater London if not the UK.

Up until recently (in 2021), Purley BID had an extremely good relationship with the Environemental Response Team (ERT) in Croydon Council. The BID’s engagement manager would daily patrol the town and report any graffiti to the ERT, and within a couple of hours, they had arrived and the graffiti was gone. This worked so well for a long time, Purley benefitting the most out of the ERT as out of all district centres we had a dedicated resource to report any issues.

However, with all the cutbacks within Croydon Council, the ERT were regrettable one of the first to go. This was devastating for Purley and the whole of Croydon.

There is something called the “Broken window syndrome” where if one window in a block has a broken window, it can be quite predictable that many more will follow very soon afterwards, and so is the case with graffiti.

So once the ERT disbanded the Purley BID diverted some of its funds to being directed to graffiti removal. It is our belief that if a town id friendly to young children, then the parents are happy and more likely to stay and spend in the town. Graffiti will make no one happy or comfortable. It is also one of the reasons why the BID helped establish the Purley in Bloom Project as towns in Bloom tend to have less graffiti and anti social behaviour than non-bloom towns, that and extra security patrols all helping to reduce the menace.

However, Graffiti still appears and over lockdown has flourished. That said, there has been a point of close to a year where the BID has not paid for Graffiti removal. Their reason for this was that there was a promise of a large grant from a European fund that Croydon Council could use to recover from the pandemic. Purley BID was on the board directing how that money should be spent. Our number one point was graffiti removal. So much so that the BID’s pressure moved the proportion of the grant funding out of 10 topics, up from the tenth priority to the number one. Purley BID was therefore not going to be spending our businesses money on a task that was going to be covered by this European grant.

The big issue was the project dragged on and on and on, graffiti increased and eventually, again through lack of resources, the whole grant project was cancelled and the funding disappeared. And so did our hope of external funding to remove Graffiti.

The BID has therefore stepped in again and hired new contracts, some of whom worked on the previous ERT. At the end of January 2022 the team blitzed Purley and removed almost all graffiti in the town (with the exception of junction boxes, for legal reasons). Purley ahs now become the cleanest business district in Croydon.

We appreciate that it will not last and the BID has to be mindful of the allocation of the levy funds. But where possible we will look to keep Purley as free of Graffiti as we can.