Voices from The Mounts
The Mounts is a living, working community — full of families, workers and neighbours who care about where they live. Today we walk it knee-deep in litter, with fly-tipping on what feels like every corner. Ask anyone who actually lives here.
We all have our theories about why. But one thing keeps coming back: the decisions are made by people who will never have to walk these streets — and it is The Mounts that pays for it.
Residents here feel voiceless. We watch it get worse by the day, while the replies come back as copy-paste, red tape and box-ticking from behind a keyboard. So this site exists for the people who feel unheard — and who cannot get their heads around how it was ever allowed to get this bad.
We say this plainly, and without insult to anyone: we doubt that a single person making these decisions would accept this on their own doorstep. We are only asking for the same standard they would expect for themselves. This is not anger for its own sake — it is what is left when every other door has been closed.
The “task force” the community never met
A message from an Earl Street resident & volunteer · 13 July 2026
The Mounts was chosen — in the back end of last year — for a pilot the Council calls Thriving Communities, which it describes as officers, partner agencies and residents working together to improve the area. There is one problem with that description: most of the community it was meant to serve knew nothing about it — there was not so much as a poster in a shop window. In our honest opinion, it was a waste of time and an embarrassment for the Council.
This is not guesswork. A meeting was held on 13 July 2026 with people who are active in The Mounts in all kinds of ways — a diverse, open-minded group who are out in the public spaces every day, who talk to their neighbours and know what is going on. Not one of them had heard of the initiative. If a “community-led” project cannot reach the very people who already live, work and volunteer here, that is a plain communications failure.
That meeting revealed something else, too: it was another litter-picking group in The Mounts — and there are several, dotted across the area, quietly doing the same good work in isolation from one another. It is time they came together. One organised community voice is far harder to ignore than a dozen separate ones.
A “community-led” initiative that the community was never really part of will have carried a cost to the public purse. We may never know exactly how much — perhaps it was modest — but it was a cost all the same. And the streets tell you plainly what it delivered.
“Supporting communities – strengthening local services… and enhancing community connections.”
West Northamptonshire Council — One West Northamptonshire Plan. Source →
A “community-led” pilot — its own Thriving Communities project — that most of the community it was meant to serve say they never knew about.
Quick observations
Short, honest, and offered as constructive criticism — the kind of thing residents say to each other every day.
- We are told the area is cleaned daily. The litter that has sat here for weeks says otherwise.
- A scheduled service with no record of a single completed visit is not a service anyone can check.
- Report it, get a reference, get a target date — then watch the date pass.
- The response time in the app is not the response time in the Code. Ours should be measured in hours, not days.
- No published zonal map means no published response time means no accountability.
- The only independent inspection graded us a “C.” We live at “C” every single day.
- Bins overflow before they are emptied — then the people who use them get the blame.
- Thousands of enforcement notices; prosecutions you could count on one hand.
- Being “consulted” has come to mean being told, not being asked.
- Every reply reads the same, because nobody who has ever held a litter-picker wrote it.
- We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for the minimum the law already requires.
Why this site exists
Not to attack the people who work for the Council — many of them care, and would not want this outside their own front door either. It exists because a community was left with no other way to be heard. When the letters stop working, when the reports vanish into a system, when the answers are copied and pasted — this is what is left: writing it down, dating it, and putting it where it cannot be ignored.
What happens next — watch this space
This is only the beginning. Once our marketing and PR strategy is confirmed, there will be an official public push to make sure every resident of The Mounts knows this record exists and how to use it.
Local businesses are already engaging and are happy to help spread the word — through shop-window posters and QR codes that take people straight to the evidence. If you run a business on these streets and want to get involved, you would be very welcome.