Cleaner streets
We know how important it is for you to walk out of your home and see your street clean. This is why cleaner streets is one of our three priorities.
Last year we invested heavily in services to make your neighbourhood look better. We put our street sweepers out for longer and more often and caught more fly-tippers and other perpetrators of envirocrimes (ie environment related crimes). Your refuse and recycling is now collected on the same day and you can recycle plastic from your home.
As a result, our streets have officially been rated as cleaner than they were a year ago by independent inspectors. But more importantly, we hope you are noticing the difference.
Abandoned vehicles
Clinical waste
Dust and odours
Dog
fouling
Flytipping
Graffiti
Gully cleaning
Licensing
Parking
Pest control
planning permission,
Rats
Recycling
Refuse collection
Street cleansing
Street trading
Facts and figures 2007/2008
What to expect in
2008/2009
Reality checks
The
reality checks initiative helps to make sure
the borough’s streets are kept clean through a series of
unannounced inspections.
Facts and
figures 2007/2008
Published March 2008
-
Graffiti has been slashed by 18% in the past 15 months – in August 2007 alone, 2,000 graffiti tags were removed.
-
We now investigate 96% of abandoned vehicles within 24 hours of them being reported and 82% of these are removed within 24 hours of us being legally entitled to do so.
-
Your roads and pavements have been resurfaced and renewed, and are now being cleaned by an extra 50 street cleaners thanks to an additional £1.5 million investment. Figures in December 2007 showed 87.9% of the borough’s streets are now free from grime – up from 66.7% in 2006.
-
In 2006/2007 our borough’s recycling rates increased from 19% to 25% and is continuing to rise. In November 2007, we introduced plastic recycling, same-day refuse and recycling collections, weekly garden waste collection and same-day pick-ups for missed refuse collections. We recycled 1,400 tonnes of dry waste in November 2007 – a 20% increase compared to the same month a year before. We also recycled 319 tonnes of garden waste, which was a staggering 103% increase.
-
The total weight of plastic collected in the first few weeks of plastic recycling collections was the equivalent of 28 Indian elephants, or 11.5 double decker buses.
-
Cycling routes received a £900,000 cash boost.
-
Our 'showcase streets' programme swept through priority areas, repairing and replacing more than 4,000 square metres of paving and pruning nearly 700 metres of overgrown vegetation.
-
From 1 April–31 October there were 1,259 fly-tipping investigations carried out by the council.
-
A new street washing scheme will clean all roads in town centres with high pressure jets, at a cost of £146,000.
-
From June 2008 it will no longer cost you any money for the removal of unwanted fridges and freezers – we will do it for free.
-
The council’s envirocrime teams will continue to investigate illegal fly-tipping and waste disposal and take offenders to court wherever possible.
-
Our weekly Partnership Taskforce Day events will continue to hit towns across the borough to continue to blitz grime, graffiti, abandoned vehicles and fly-tipping.
-
We intend to keep our impressive recycling rates on an upward curve and maintain our weekly collections of rubbish and recycling from homes.
-
We’ll be offering you reusable sacks to collect and store plastic bottles before we collect them from you each week.
-
We shall be continuing our work to improve street cleaning further.