The last council meeting, on the 18th September, was a themed meeting, on the topic of ‘A Clean Borough’. I wanted to take a moment to share some of the information from that meeting about some of the work that is being done to help make our streets cleaner.

Several years as a councillor have taught me more than I ever imagined I would know about street cleaning and I’m still very aware that there is much more to learn, and certainly plenty more to do. One thing I have definitely noticed myself, though, is that the end of the summer always feels like a bad time in terms of street cleanliness. I’ve been a councillor for nine years now, and generally I have noticed that in September a feeling of of ‘the streets are a mess and it’s worse than ever!’ descends upon everyone, including me.

I don’t necessarily have an answer as to why that is, but I do have some ideas. Fly tipping and rubbish always increase when the weather is warm, and we all spend more time outside… and of course extra time spent outdoors means that we all notice the rubbish more. I imagine that like the rest of us, street cleansing officers take proportionately more leave during the summer. Weeds on pavements (on which more later) grow furiously over the summer, which both increases the impression of mess, and also can ‘catch’ litter and rubbish and make it hang around for longer.

The last time I blogged in a substantial way on street cleansing was here, when I’d had a flurry of casework and was keen to understand a bit more about what was happening in the service. That post outlined various plans to make structural and organisational changes to street cleaning, the kind of work that takes a while and is frustratingly ‘behind the scenes’, but which is vital to making a more modern and efficient service. I was pleased to look back and see that although some progress was delayed by factors like the refuse strike, others have progressed and are now in place.

So I turned to my colleague James Asser’s speech from Council, where he gave an update on various bits of work that have been done, or are being done, and thought I’d summarise some of that here.

Work already done:

Brought street-cleaning services back in-house in a single borough-wide service.
Invested in new uniforms for staff
Invested in new street-cleaning equipment to make the frontline staff’s work easier and more effective
Invested in new drain cleaning equipment
New gum busting kit to clean our pavements
New bin lorries, that will be more reliable and have modern electric bin lifts to reduce the noise during collections.
Expanded the amount of waste that can be recycled
Removed the worst fly-tipped recycling points and are investing in the remaining ones to make them tidier and cleaner

Work underway:

Rolled out a new revised street-cleaning strategy with new rounds and new ways of working (this is happening now)
Bringing in new vehicles for gritting and tackling winter conditions on pavement and bike lanes
Additional vehicles to meet growing demand on the waste service
Modernising our mechanical sweepers
Moving to weekly recycling collections to meet our commitment to increase the amount we recycle and meet the resident demands for more recycling opportunities.
Changing collection of waste from flats above shops to reduce the waste and time it is left on high streets

As well as those, James also mentioned the work LBN is doing jointly with Keep Britain Tidy on the Better Streets project (which you can read about in more detail here), and a new borough-wide approach to fly tipping on private land. Regular correspondents with me about fly tipping may be aware of the frustrations that previously occurred when a fly tip was on land that is privately owned, for example a forecourt in front of a building. Often reports on the Love Clean Streets app would be marked ‘closed’ whilst officers at the Council contacted the landlord, but in the meantime the fly tip remained, sometimes attracting more rubbish. Now, we are now clearing these areas anyway and then working with the landowner on costs, speeding up the clearance rates on privately owned public areas.

Another project that I mentioned in my post last year was the commissioning of an external contract for Enforcement, and that has also happened, with a company called Kingdom now providing additional resources to issue Fixed Penalty Notices against people fly tipping and littering. You can read a bit more about that here.

If this information has whetted your appetite and you’d like more, you can read the substantive paper that went to Council here. You can also read the really excellent research done by Keep Britain Tidy (which has driven and informed so much of our work in Newham since we started working with them in 2018) ‘Beyond the Tipping Point‘. I might blog about this research separately as it’s so illuminating about the factors that contribute to fly tipping and gives a really helpful UK-wide perspective.

I was pleased to see that inspecting our street cleanliness and reporting on it is now, as promised, not done by Council officer but has been outsourced to Keep Britain Tidy. This means we’re not ‘marking our own homework’ (though actually, previously going out on a street inspection visit with a Council officer was very reassuring in terms of seeing how rigorous he was!) and gives us some really robust data to track how things are changing over time. The stats show an improvement. Honestly, I am not sure we’re quite seeing or feeling that in Forest Gate North at the moment, but that combined with all the other work happening does make me feel cautiously optimistic for the future.

I need to finish by saying that of course I’m not complacent. Litter and fly tipping continue to be one of the most common issues that residents contact me about, and as the excellent research from Keep Britain Tidy showed us, they are thorny problems with no easy solution. Our streets in Forest Gate North are a wonderful and frustrating mix of the best and worst of Newham: peaceful low traffic neighbourhoods, speeding vehicles, healthy school streets, careless drivers endangering people on bikes and pedestrians, re-surfaced pavements smoother and perfect for scooters and wheelchairs, road surfaces blighted with pot holes, new and old small businesses lighting up the high street, recently empty shops, people improving our streets with projects and litter picks, and other people dumping their rubbish without a thought. Of course 13 long years of austerity are a hugely important factor here, with council services along with all public services visibly hanging by a thread after years of Tory government. Along with Sasha, I’ll carry on doing my best to improve things, and will always try to be honest and up front about what we can achieve, and what we hope for.