Keeping councils honest on street cleaning

ACouncil staff quickly worked out how to get high Leams marks without needing to comply with Coplar

RECENT article (“Revealed: The dirtiest council areas in Scotland”, The Herald, November 26) raised issues about the Local Environment Audit and Management System (Leams) used by Keep Scotland Beautiful (KSB) to measure how well Scotland’s councils deliver street cleansing services: an ongoing complaint being “why did KSB award the councils very high Leams scores for many years when their streets were so filthy?”

We’ve actually had a detailed procedure for setting and measuring municipal cleanliness standards since the early 1990s. The Code of Practice on Litter and Refuse (Coplar) emanates from the 1990 Environmental Protection Act and is quite straightforward. It prescribes grades of street cleanliness: A (no litter or refuse); B (small amounts); C (moderate); and D (significant).

When Coplar was introduced, councils had to “zone” all their streets, town and city centres. The code sets out timescales for councils to reinstate littered areas: for example, in Zone 1, they have 12 hours if it reaches a Grade B status, but only one hour if it gets to Grade D. The logic is that the more littered any zone becomes, the sooner the council has to reinstate it to Grade A.

With the only subjective element being whether a zone is either B, C, or D at any particular time, Coplar was designed to be policed primarily by the public (similar to people phoning up when their bins haven’t been emptied), but it was never well-publicised. When KSB was tasked with measuring Scottish councils’ street cleansing performances, it chose to ignore Coplar and instead developed

Leams as its assessment tool and it has used it since the turn of the century. Council staff quickly worked out how to get high Leams marks without needing to comply with Coplar (or actually sweep the streets) and have been enjoying excellent scores until recently, when increasing public complaints about deteriorating street cleanliness led to the current furore.

So how could things be improved?

The zones designated by the former district councils were consolidated in the new unitary councils in 1996. There’s no reason why this data couldn’t be displayed in councils’ websites so that citizens could see which zone their street falls into, and how long the council has to clean it up when it gets dirty (these websites already tell you about your ward and your councillor so it shouldn’t be difficult). The annual requests for council tax payments could also include advice about how Coplar works and how to find out which zone you live in. It should also explain how to complain if you think your zone hasn’t been cleaned within the prescribed statutory timescale.

If KSB is to continue to be the monitoring authority, it clearly needs to find a new approach based on Coplar. And of course, maybe if everybody was more aware of their council’s responsibilities and complained to them, things might improve, but clearly Leams hasn’t worked and should be consigned to history.

The author spent many decades in the Scottish waste management industry