Public toilets in London

Our Assembly report calls on Mayor to help map out London's public toilets as current information is inconsistent and incomplete.

Public toilets are a vital service for Londoners and visitors and access to them will become particularly important with extra visitors expected in the capital for the 2012 Games.

However, across London there is a lack of information on the locations of public and community toilets, which are often poorly advertised. Our Health and Public Services Committee says the lack of public toilets planned at new Crossrail stations is also a missed opportunity.

There are now just 401 local-authority maintained public toilets in London, and some boroughs no longer provide any facilities. Provision has been supplemented by community toilet schemes, operated by 358 businesses across the capital.

To further boost numbers of public toilets, the report suggests:

• the Mayor should push Crossrail to include public toilets at its stations.
• the Mayor, along with the GLA, boroughs and other providers, should capture information on public toilet locations in a format which is easy for the public to access, and the Committee has developed a tool for doing this.
• the Mayor should direct the GLA group to allow the public to use their toilets, where possible.
• boroughs should include places like libraries and town halls in community toilet schemes.

Alongside the report, the Committee is publishing a new standard open data format for public toilets. This is a spreadsheet that all toilet providers can complete and publish, listing the locations of their toilets and further information about them. The purpose of this is for all data owners to provide exactly the same information, in the same format, so that it can be accessed by the public and redistributed by any organisation.

Access the spreadsheet and guidance on how to complete it.