North Lanarkshire street cleaning budget drops 13 per cent

North Lanarkshire Council has been named as one of the worst-performing Scottish councils in terms of its street cleaning services.

A report presented to the 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 – a decline of over 13 per cent.

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A council spokeswoman blamed dwindling budgets, saying: “The situation in North Lanarkshire is similar to other local authorities across Scotland, with reductions in budget for street cleaning leading to a reduction in the workforce at the same time as increasing requests for services, particularly in dealing with incidents of fly tipping.

“However, the council introduced new programme to manage street cleaning, litter picking and 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 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 is available at www.northlanarkshire.gov.uk.”