Is your town centre/high street clean or just littered with rubbish?

LITTER is a bugbear for us all.

While the blame unquestionably lies with litterers, councils have a large part to play in tackling the issue.

From ensuring there are enough bins to getting street cleaners pounding the pavements, a tidy high street is largely down to how councils allocate resources.

I visited town centres across Tayside and Fife for a snapshot of how tidy – or not – they are ahead of next week’s local elections.

Here, I rate Dundee city centre and the high streets of Lochee and Broughty Ferry.

Throughout the week, I will publish our findings from Angus, Fife and Perth & Kinross.

City Square and Reform street were looking clean, but scratching beneath the surface an uglier picture emerged.

Bags of empty glass bottles were inexplicably left next to a food bin at the Yeaman Shore car park.

A nearby lane was a midden with overflowing bins.

There also appears to have been an increase in graffiti recently. A consequence of lockdown?

But the most eye-opening find was a broken toilet in a shady lane off Commercial Street.

Stay classy, Dundee.

The number of staff employed by Dundee City Council whose main role is street cleaning has nearly halved in the last decade.

In 2012, there were 40 street cleaners. That included four parttime workers and three temporary staff.

The overall figure was still 40 in 2017 – although the make-up of temporary and part-time street cleaners was slightly different.

However, now there are only 22 dedicated street cleaners – 18 full-time and four part-time.

Dundee City Council failed to comment before our deadline.

This broken toilet was dumped in a lane off Commercial Street.