Streets behind
North Lanarkshire Council has been named as one of the worst-performing Scottish local authorities in terms of its street cleaning services.
A report presented to a recent session of the council’s Audit and Scrutiny Panel shows that North Lanarkshire’s per capita expenditure on street cleaning has slipped from 27th out of 32 councils to 30th place since 2010.
The council’s expenditure on street cleaning has dropped from more than £22,000 per thousand residents to £19,400.
This is a decline of over 13 per cent.
A council spokeswoman said this was a result of dwindling budgets across local authority areas.
She said: “The situation in North Lanarkshire is similar to other local authorities across Scotland.
“Reductions in budget for street cleaning are leading to a reduction in the workforce at the same time as increasing requests for services, particularly in dealing with incidents of fly tipping.”
The spokeswoman did note the introduction of a new scheme last year.
She added: “The council introduced a new programme to manage street cleaning, litter picking and a fly tipping service in autumn 2018, designed to improve customer satisfaction and implement a budget saving of £450,000.
“The impact of this is not reflected in the reported figures, so we expect to see an improvement in service delivery over the next year.
“In addition, there are new initiatives coming into effect which will see further improvements, including the use of new technology.
“Issues like dog fouling, littering and fly tipping are all avoidable and take time and money away from general street cleaning.
“We would appeal to the public to play their part in keep North Lanarkshire clean and safe simply by putting litter in a bin, cleaning up after their dogs and taking rubbish to a recycling centre.”
More information on recycling is available atwww. north lanarkshire. gov.uk.