Edinburgh residents say cleansing services 'need reform' as streets branded 'disgusting'

The state of Edinburgh’s streets is “disgusting and disgraceful” and the city cleansing services need “root and branch reform” councillors have been told.

A petition put before councillors in the Transport and Environment Committee claimed the problem was being caused by an over-reliance on agency workers, and said ‘no-one takes pride in their job and no one is held accountable’.

Speaking on behalf of residents in Broughton and Bellevue, who had started the petition complaining about the state of the local streets, Shane Carter said the Royal Mile had been kept spotless daily while the late Queen lay in state.

“If the council can do this for royalty why can it not do the same for the residents of Broughton and Bellevue who pay the council tax bill year in and year out?,” he said.

Mr Carter said he had lived in Edinburgh for eight years and found the “city uniformly dirty”, compared to Dundee.

He added: “Whenever I go to Dundee the city is spotless on both commercial thoroughfares and in residential streets. Whoever is recruiting workers, managing, supervising and monitoring them in Dundee to ensure that a consistent high benchmark is achieved is doing an excellent job.”

“The standard in Dundee is something that residents in Broughton and Bellevue have every right to expect and Edinburgh would do well to emulate.”

He said that one of the signatories to the petition from streets around Bellevue and Broughton had said they wanted staff to take pride in their jobs; where currently, he said, there is no pride and accountability of this service.

“There’s systemic failures in the way the street cleaning is currently organised and delivered in a world class city.”

Mr Carter told councillors: “A significantly better standard of street cleaning is achieved where councils do not have collective teams and where there’s an aspect of individual responsibility. A higher standard is likely to be achieved if each cleaner is responsible for keeping a patch of street cleans to a specified standard the collective working practice of teams makes it impossible for managers to hold individual workers to account for poor work and under performance.”

“It needs root and branch reform, it needs a mover and shaker. I‘d really like to see a street cleaning working party set up where representatives from every community council comes together where councillors participate in it. By the exchange change of ideas we could be probably achieved a service we could be proud of.

Councillor Iain Whyte said the committee had agreed to put more resources into street cleaning.

“I appreciate additional resources being committed but it is not producing value for money I think individual accountability where workers are given a patch of street and told it is your responsibility to keep these streets clean, free of weeds, free of detritus.”

Chairing the committee, councillor Stephen Jenkinson suggested Mr Carter’s proposals be considered as part of a report on street cleansing which is to be presented to next month’s meeting. This was agreed.