The option this government came up with was to go with total privacy over safety. The existing standard single sex public toilet block have toilet cubicles with gaps top and bottom of the doors. None of the new designs from this October mention toilet door gaps. Two of the four are fully enclosed. One single sex design (for frail people) is illustrated with a full height door. The other is not specified. We now have the real possibility that people will be in acoustically sound, fully private little cubicles with full height doors and designed to be unlockable from the outside. The number of deaths, injuries and assaults in these cubicles will go up whilst hygiene (ventilation and inability to sanitise the floor) will go down.
Why didn’t the government consider disabilities, age (frailty), sex etc in the designs, because they would realise gaps in door doors are vital to see if someone has collapsed or prevent someone from being attacked?
Well they did commission a report into toilet design for people with long term health conditions and disabilities. There was no mention of heart conditions, epilepsy, diabetes, menorrhagia, asthma or discussion of other conditions that could lead to collapse. The evidence to support fully enclosing toilets literally boils down to this sentence: ‘A better solution, supported by many transactivists, and increasingly found in trendy nightclubs and restaurants, is to eliminate gender-segregated facilities entirely and treat the public restroom as one single open space with fully enclosed stalls.’
I hope future governments realise ‘solutions’ are only as good as the data that is being inputted into them. They need to make sure the reports they commission stick to their remit. As it is there has been no safety analysis on removing gaps from toilet designs.
Pupils have been the guinea pigs for similar designs in schools. It has not gone well - this sums it up:
“Kids would go in there to have sex, to drink alcohol. They’d push other kids in and lock themselves in with them. They’d block the drains and flood the corridor.” Another responded: “The toilets were really smelly and unpleasant. Because they were fully enclosed spaces they weren’t properly ventilated, and harder to clean.”
One teacher was worried someone could collapse unnoticed in a completely enclosed cubicle. They said: “The CCTV in the corridor was only any good retrospectively. The toilets had turn locks, so you could open them from the outside if you needed to, but you couldn’t hear through the door, couldn’t see whether there was one or two people in there, or if someone had collapsed.” (Walesonline 28.01.24)
To the next government: the answer is not to enclose toilets. Safety should come before privacy. And vulnerable people suffer most.