A PUBLIC toilet for the disabled on Minehead sea front which has been closed for several weeks was expected be open again by the weekend.
The Free Press received complaints that Minehead Town Council was keeping the Warren Road toilet locked 24 hours a day and ‘disabled people are left to suffer, and feel discriminated against and feel abused’.
One woman said: “Though there is another toilet, it is about a mile away in the town.
“If you are trying to spend some quiet time at the beach area, this end is the quietest away from the traffic and busy shops, but it is the only disabled toilet anywhere at that part.
“You do not want to travel a mile, use the toilet, to travel a mile back to your friends.
“There are several hundred disabled people who live in Minehead, and several hundred disabled people that visit that end of the beach on holiday every week as well.
“As well as elderly people, or people with disabilities.
“This is thousands of people every month that are being mistreated by Minehead council not giving us our human rights and legal rights, to be able to go to the toilet when we need to.”
Town council operations manager Ben Parker said the authority was committed to ‘providing welcoming, clean, and fully-operational toilet facilities in the town’.
Mr Parker said: “Our toilet facilities are also open to the public 365 days a year.
“Unfortunately, the accessible toilet at Warren Road has had an intermittent leak underneath the toilet itself which has flooded the flooring and created a slip risk on the floor.
“As the leak is intermittent, it has been particularly difficult to identify and, therefore, repair.”
Mr Parker said the council tried carrying out running repairs to keep the toilet open but with ‘varying levels of success’.
He said: “We are hoping to be able to keep the facilities operational as much as possible during the summer months with the aim of carrying out a more extensive repair in the winter months.
“We are hopeful that the latest ‘repair’ will be sufficient enough to open the toilets by this weekend and are again hopeful that it will be robust enough to see us through the busy summer period.”
The town’s Quay West public toilets near Minehead Harbour, which had been closed since early May, were reopened by the council last week after a £60,000 refurbishment.