HOURLY wake-up calls are being made by BCP Council security teams in a bid to deter overnight beach campers.

Cabinet member for community safety, councillor May Haines, revealed the new strategy earlier this week in response to concerns the issue is not covered in a planned new order to tackle anti-social behaviour.

Speaking at Monday’s scrutiny board meeting, she said the new approach had put off dozens of campers over the past two weekends.

The process of creating a new conurbation-wide public spaces protection order (PSPO) was started last summer in response to the chaotic scenes of anti-social behaviour.

One of the main aims of it was to tackle beach camping but the council said this would not be a legally-sound inclusion.

Instead, the new PSPO, which will be considered by the council’s cabinet next week ahead of its planned introduction next month, focuses on alcohol-related anti-social behaviour.

Councillor Vikki Slade, who was the council’s leader last year, said she accepted this but said the new Conservative administration had not put forward any ideas for how it will tackle the issue.

“My concern is that that the issue was discovered very early on [in September] and I can’t see any evidence of what we are doing to tackle this, and other anti-social behaviour,” she said at Monday’s scrutiny board meeting.

“It’s been a long time but we have already had five or six weeks of summer and recently a massively busy weekend, so if we aren’t yet starting to do anything alternatively around beach camping or litter, when are we likely to see something on that?”

In response, Cllr Haines said the council was now asking its security teams to carry out “hourly wake up calls” to people sleeping on the beach.

“Last week we did this to 12 groups of campers in Southbourne and they left as a result of this and nine more were dealt with this weekend,” she said. “It’s a complex issue but we have a plan and it is working.”

She said the council had also recently started to review the area’s by-laws to see whether they could provide greater powers to deal with other issues of anti-social behaviour.