BRIGHTON and Hove City Council are currently advertising for an environmental enforcement officer (EEO), with the successful candidate being expected to carry out foot patrols across the city and act on any environmental crimes that they come across.

This very much includes instances of graffiti, such as that depicted in Tuesday's edition of The Argus.

Good news so far but the ad I saw on the council's website made no mention of the hours to be worked, other than it was a full-time post, something which, to my mind, flags up a major problem with having EEOs in the first place,

To my mind they need to be around at the times when the vast majority of antisocial behaviour, such as daubing absolute nonsense on buildings all over the city, namely the hours of darkness.

In other words, it is little use if these council members of staff are out and about on the streets of our cities and towns mainly during daylight hours because the chances of paint being splattered on virtually every wall and window in sight during the day are virtually zero.

Yes, they will be able to catch folk dropping cigarette ends and sweet wrappers and issue them with fixed penalty notices but they would be far more effective if their hours of work were, say, 10pm in the evenings until 6am in the mornings, the hours during which the yobs are out and about trashing the city and making it look like a tip.

A perfect example of that was seen by millions of people who watched the last episode of Grace on television this week and saw the state of what looked like the Black Rock area of Brighton - hardly an inch of space that wasn't daubed all over.

Up to that point the programme had depicted the city as looking like a quite nice place to visit but that mass of graffiti must surely have caused an awful lot of potential tourists to have second thoughts about spending their time, and more importantly their money, in "one of Britain's premier resorts".

Eric Waters

Lancing