Ruislip & Eastcote & Northwood Gazette
Litter’s still an issue in post-Amey days
EALING Council’s street cleaning contractor Amey’s performance in keeping Ealing clean was worse than ever in its final six months.
Now they’ve gone, the council has no one to blame for a range of environmental services such as flytips, litter, weeds, litter, dirty streets and the missed collections of our bins.
The Liberal Democrats are undertaking visits to different roads around the borough to see where the council needs to put more effort in so we can have clean and safe streets.
This time I am looking at Vale Grove, which is the most northern sited street in Southfield and close to the border near Hammersmith.
Looking at the street, there is a large amount of litter.
Some of this is generated when the new arrangements took place, after Amey, as the wheelie bins are collected and emptied.
Some of the wheelie bin contents spill out and the operatives have left without sweeping up the mess. This is a major failure.
Looking at another area of the street I can see a skip that is present where someone is doing building work, but sadly there is no night time light which is required to avoid people colliding with the skip, nor is there any skip cover, so it means that some of the litter is allowed to dirty the street.
The council has a duty to enforce this and so I have reminded an officer of this, so hopefully things will change here.
The revelation is that there was a large amount of weeds as well down this street, as well as many others in the area.
Apparently (and without telling residents) a council’s sub-contractor stopped weeding when the coronarvirus pandemic took hold and have only this week started to do the weeding.
Again, it was sad that the council failed to be open about this.
Lastly, I can see what appears to be a small pothole developing.
Given that the council inspects the streets for potholes only once per year this is not great, and it means that it will probably get the tarmac treatment which tends not to fix the problem long-term, meaning more of residents’ taxes spent repairing things again and again.
Wearing the proverbial head teacher’s hat on, I gave the council a D-minus for its performance.
Since then, and after pressing from myself, the weeds have been cleared and the street looks much tidier. It should not have taken a councillor to conduct the audit and press to get these changes. I hope this type of activity is not needed in the future.
I would love to hear from others in Ealing about their experiences of how their street looks.
Let me know at gary.malcolm@ ealing.gov.uk