Edinburgh tops league for dirtiest streets

01 March 2007

Edinburgh’s streets have been rated the dirtiest in Scotland, according to official figures.
And the capital’s council has been told that it needs to clean up its act on refuse collection, after its service was found to be below standard.
Figures released this week by Audit Scotland and Keep Scotland Beautiful show that out of Scotland’s 32 councils, the City of Edinburgh Council’s streets were found to have the most litter – including cigarette butts, sweet wrappers, fast-food packaging and animal faeces, compared with streets in other local authority territories.
Using surveys undertaken by all councils, Edinburgh’s council score dropped one point to 65 in 2005-2006, compared with 66 in 2004-2005. The national minimum standard is 67.
Moray Council’s streets were the cleanest, with a survey score of 78, the figures showed.
In a best value report, also released this week by Audit Scotland, the council displayed many examples of good service delivery, but lacked in its refuse collection service and with its processing of planning applications.
Areas that were of a ‘high priority’ to upgrade included improving its refuse-collection service, and roads and footway maintenance.
While street cleansing ‘remains a problem for the council’, it has allocated an extra £1M for tidying up the streets in its 2006-2007 budget to improve its performance, the report said.
The council’s executive member for environment and streetscape, Cllr Robert Cairns, said: ‘Over the past few years our cleanliness index has improved, but I recognise that we are still not achieving what I consider to be an acceptable standard. We have allocated extra resources to this service again in this year’s budget and are also reorganising neighbourhood arrangements to give a greater amount of local accountability.
‘I hope and expect that these will begin to effect positive changes and that people will notice the improvements.’

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Edinburgh tops league for dirtiest streets

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