COUNCILS need a “good level” of wardens amid concerns about the rising number of dog attacks, Community Safety Minister Ash Denham has said.
She described spending in this area as preventative, adding: “If you spend the money here you are not going to need to spend it stitching people up in A&E later.”
She spoke out after Anas Sarwar outlined the growing scale of the problem to MSPs on Holyrood’s Public Audit and Post Legislative Scrutiny Committee.
There were 864 cases of people being admitted to hospital after dog attacks in 2019, he said, up from 811 the previous year. That included 33 people who needed reconstructive surgery in 2018, he said, adding that no figures were available for this for last year.
Sarwar, the interim committee convener, said more than 10,000 people had attended A&E following dog attacks in 18 months.
He said: “In 2018 the number of attendances related to dog attacks was just under 6500 – in the first half of 2019, for when we have figures available, it was closer to 4100.
“There are also stark figures, 319 charges related to dog attacks in 2019-20, 53 of them in Glasgow.
“This is a really big issue, and it is physically and literally scarring individuals and scarring lies.”
A report from the committee in June 2019 found that dog-control laws were “not fit for purpose” and failed to prevent attacks on children.
Denham insisted it was a “very serious” problem and she was “committed to driving forward action on this area”.
But she told MSPs the coronavirus pandemic had “clearly affected our ability to make progress in this area”.
The minister said: “We have made progress, we clearly have not made as much progress. If we hadn’t have had Covid we would be further along.
“We have made progress but it has been impacted by that.”
Labour’s Neil Bibby pressed her on the number of dog wardens employed by Scotland’s 32 local authorities.
He said: “There are eight councils – Dumfries and Galloway, East Dunbartonshire, Falkirk, Orkney, Scottish Borders, East Renfrewshire, East Lothian and Western Isles – that have no dog warden at all.
“That’s a quarter of all councils have no dedicated dog warden.
The numbers have gone down over the past two years from 85 to 48, and 29 of those are accounted for by Edinburgh.”
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