9:30am Saturday 4th July 2009
By Arron Hendy
DRUNKEN vagrants are driving visitors away from Weymouth and damaging businesses.
Traders and visitors say they are fed up with drinkers disturbing the peace on the seafront and want more action to remove them.
Business owners fear the behaviour of the drinkers along the Esplanade could deter tourists from using that part of the seafront and beach or returning to the resort.
They claim the drunks often congregate around St John’s Church in the evenings and spend much of their days drinking on the seafront.
The Section 30 dispersal order being used by police and Police Community Support Officers to ask groups of two or more people acting anti-socially to move on has expired.
Robert Gutteridge, owner of the Tea Cabin, said: “It’s a nightmare for businesses because if you get off the bus and the first thing you see is alcoholics then the first thing you are going to do next is get back on that bus and go home. We’ve got to make ourselves family orientated.
“That’s where our roots are.”
Mr Gutteridge said he often found beer cans outside the café in the morning.
He said: “We’ve seen the drunks and we do still get the regular ones that don’t seem to have got the message yet. So we are still getting the same faces.
“The police don’t seem to be dealing with the old drunks so I wonder whether they are exempt. And I think drunks are aggressive generally.”
Kirsty Attree, who works at The Beach Café, said an 'old man' had recently been seen drunk in the town centre in the middle of the day hitting people with his bag, urinating and then exposing himself.
She said: “We’ve had a few down here and one came into the café. He must have been on something and he was getting aggressive and saying he was going to smack someone.
“We tried to ignore him and hoped he’d go away and he did eventually. They tend to go in the toilets and sleep.
“Sometimes we can get quite worried when they start coming in the café.
“You never know whether they are going to kick off or not and I don’t think the queen will be impressed.”
Beach hut trader Simon Ellard said: “They’ve been congregating in a shelter and they are a damn nuisance. They get rowdy and lie on the beach and we keep trying to get them moved on.
“It just looks bad for Weymouth especially as business has picked up and there are a lot of people here.
“When you walk along the seafront you don’t want to see a group of people out of their heads.
“There’s smashed bottles on the beach and that’s what I don’t like if there’s kids jumping on the beach here.”
Weymouth and Portland Borough Council’s tourism spokesman Brendan Webster said he has received 'a cry for help from seafront beach traders' and said one closed early one day for fear of injury to his staff.
He said: “I am very concerned for our tourist industry.
“We desperately need effective policing and we should not have to rely on Section 30.
“I am sure there are laws other than this that could be used to remove menacing behaviour.”
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