Tackling the takeaways

Good neighbours

Our proposals, which will make it significantly more difficult to open a new fast food outlet in Waltham Forest (see right), have received the overwhelming support of the residents, schools and other organisations who responded to our consultation.

My favourite response came from Professor Jack Winkler from London Metropolitan University's Nutrition Policy who described our Supplementary Planning Document as "a service to the nation."

We expect to implement the new rules in the early part of this year, but we know there is still an enormous amount of work that needs to be done to deal with issues relating to existing outlets.

That's why we have been working on a council-wide project to see how we can encourage takeaways to be good neighbours, to clean up their own mess and address residents' concerns relating to anti-social behaviour, noise and other issues.

One thing we are considering is making it a requirement of all fast food outlets to brand their packaging so we can tell which outlets are responsible for generating litter in our borough.

But we won't stop there, we will also be using current powers available to licensing, trading standards, environmental health and food hygiene officers to deal with badly run outlets.

We think this is a classic example of a council using the full gamut of the powers available to it to effectively tackle a wide range of social issues and respond to residents' concerns.

We're saying enough is enough. Waltham Forest is closed to any more fast food.

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