when someone's front fence or hedge is 10cm higher than permissible there's always staff to enforce it ruthlessly
I am afraid those staff have probabally been laid off due to cuts too. Lack of planning enforcement and regulation of enviroment has significant effects. I have made multiple complaints since Covid about people near where I live 'confiscating' public owned grass and park space and fencing it into thier own gardens, 1 blatently enclosing public trees into thier garden then cutting said trees down to create a fenced off play space for just thier own kids. Another illiegally fenced land meaning traffic could no longer be seen if trying to pull out of a road, on a now blind bend.
Maybe the worst was someone cutting down a publically owned tree at the edge of a park. I reported it, nothing was done and then they buried the stump to hide what they did, just so the light to thier house was improved (the tree had been there for years and was 30 feet or so from the house in a public owned greenspace. I fear as nothing at all was done, they will feel enabled to soon start cutting down the other trees nearby, all of the trees and land owned and paid for by the public, so this is both vandalism and theft.
I am sick to death of short term greed and thinking. Frankly would prefer to fund the councils properly, as we are not only loosing public facilites (toilets, libraries, sports facilites, parks, care for disabled and sick) but people are now dying from pot holes while bunches of private shyster companies profit very nicely by doing rubbish work that they get away with due to councils (who are there to protect the public, we own the councils) being unable to enforce any decent standard of work due to lack of remaining staff and funding. I would far rather councils 'wasted' a bit of money keeping everything well, than everything be destroyed so private companies can rip off the public, as either way the money is gone just the same....
Roads used to be on long term planned maintainence schedules, resurfaced automatically every few years. Near here profit making contractors are now allowed to 'repair' roads by stripping the pot holed tarmac off the top and just leaving the undersurface / support exposed, which will then also start to break up so the entire road surface will be a write off, when it could just have been surfaced if there had been money and staff left to do it.
If we think this is bad now, just think what it will be like in 10 years. Back to horses as they can at least step around the broken roads? Even the motorways have huge death trap holes and they used to be the best of surfaces. Motorcycle deaths must be soaring.
Of course, another pothole has now developed just a few metres away from the original ones 
