The advent of the ‘cleaner, safer, greener’ agenda has encouraged councils to consider some innovative approaches to maintenance of the public realm. Kate Worsley reports

Tidying up after other people has long been the dreariest of tasks. But now, at least as far as local councils are concerned, the tidier-uppers are on the up. The Government’s ‘cleaner, safer, greener’ agenda – and funding – has, over the past few years, buffed and polished a number of public realm maintenance schemes into gleaming displays of lateral thinking.

There’s the innovative ridged fibreglass anti-flyposting panels, dreamt up by Portsmouth’s streetscene team and made to order by apprentice shipwrights – ‘they’re self-peeling, posters just fall off in a few hours’; the green and verdant London Borough of Enfield’s leaf composting programme, that: ‘cost peanuts and saved us thousands in slips that don’t happen and gullies that don’t get blocked’; Cambridge City Council’s drug needle chutes in public loos; not to mention Southwark’s giant walking fag ends.

Overall, councils have responded to the agenda by involving local communities more, reorganising internal systems into local, targeted teams, designing and altering infrastructure to require less maintenance, and ramping up enforcement and education, particularly since the Anti-social Behaviour Act of 2003 that allowed councils to retain monies from litter fines and similar.

“We’re really pushing for councils to involve the communities, giving them responsibility for reporting and/ or maintaining sites,” comments Richard Hebditch, policy and campaigns manager at campaign body Living Streets.

The resulting ‘street leader’ schemes, such as those at Southwark and Lewisham in south London, combat the sense of alienation many residents feel with geographically dispersed bodies, such as the highways department. Street leaders are issued with a book of slips on which to note their maintenance concerns which they then mail to the council. “This can also substantially improve the council’s intelligence gathering,” notes Hebditch.

“But we do have some concerns at this trend in terms of accountability and social inclusion,” he adds.

“If you’re transferring responsibility to the community, you have to ensure that everyone has equal access.”

At environment campaigner ENCAMS, which runs the ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ campaign, Sally Wolstencroft manages the Cleaner Safer Greener Network for local authorities and land managers. She is compiling a set of case studies of recent good practice in public realm maintenance for the Department of Communities and Local Government.

South Tyneside’s ‘Blitz It’ teams are, she says, a textbook example of the benefits of “moving from large numbers of maintenance and cleaning staff who do lots of different jobs, to a system of small teams who do everything in a small area”. After failing a number of environmental inspections, the council trialled the Blitz It approach with Neighbourhood Renewal Funding in 2003. It reorganised its street cleansing operatives to work in small groups in specific areas, and trained them to ignore artificial labour divisions. They now pick litter from shrubberies, as well as roads, rather than leaving it to grounds maintenance contractors. The teams report environmental crime and streetscape issues, such as broken paving.

Creating teams with responsibility for only a few streets has given council workers a sense of ownership and more job satisfaction. As Hebditch explains: “The post-war trend to greater centralisation has been reversed in recent years as people have realised that it can easily be more efficient in theory only.”

Litter and graffiti results improved by 11 per cent in 2004 and the Blitz It programme won a Green Apple Award in December 2006 and reached the finals of both the ENCAMS Cleaner Safer Greener Network Awards and the street- cleansing category of the Association for Public Service Excellence national awards.

For councils with capital to spend on regeneration works, ‘designing out grime’ has become a bit of a buzz word (see box below). Even further back from the front line, however, the most innovative councils are putting their money into education.

“Holistic improvements are the future,” confirms Wolstencroft, citing the novel approaches of councils such as Southwark (see box opposite). “There’s only so much you can do to improve on the efficiency end. Ultimately, you have to change behaviour and have systems in place to deal with the consequences of non-compliance.”

And perhaps the outsourcing tide may finally be on the turn. After advertising across Europe for bidders for its street cleaning services, South Norfolk Council says it has saved £100,000 by taking the services back in house for the first time in a decade. Despite the new in-house service having 15 staff, seven vans, two mechanical road sweepers (the current contractor has 12 staff, five vans and one sweeper), the decision will save two per cent on individual council tax bills. “In addition to the financial saving,” says councillor Philip Waltham “our in-house service will offer considerable advantages over the commercial services because it is designed for local conditions, especially in the rural areas.”

Visit: www.cleanersafergreener.gov.uk and www.encams.org

Cv One, Coventry

While good public realm maintenance is clearly key to the public image of all councils, few have gone so far as to buddy up street cleansing services with marketing, as Coventry City Council has done in CV One. Seven years ago, the Audit Commission labelled Coventry ‘the dirtiest city in Britain’. In 1999, the city centre management team was merged with Coventry and Warwickshire Promotions. Its remit is unique –covering street cleansing, greening, car park management, tourism, major events and image profiling. CV One contracts English Landscapes to run its cleaning and greening programme. Cleanliness figures in Coventry are now around 90 per cent, according to the ENCAMS measurement system.

“My personal opinion is that this approach works because there’s simply very little bureaucracy involved,” explains operations manager Gary Pittaway. “Things get done very quickly.”

His biggest challenge is cigarette ends. “When we do our weekly street score we found that of all the things that weren’t getting picked up 60 per cent of the problem was cigarette ends.” They set up an education programme for street cleaners, who were overlooking cigarette ends as small fry, and bought a street-cleansing machine specifically for fag ends.

And, for the past few months, environmental health officers have been issuing cigarette littering fines rather than warnings, which has, he says, made a noticeable improvement. When premises ask for outdoor seating licences once the indoor smoking ban comes into force in the summer, picking up their own fag ends will be one of the conditions of a licence.

Visit: www.cvone.co.uk

Sheffield City Council

“We could see the problems coming,” says Sheffield city centre manager Richard Eyre of the skateboarders and bathers who turned the city’s Peace Gardens area into ‘Sheffield Lido’ shortly after it opened five years ago. “The design was never intended to be interactive. But people just got in there. The nozzles of the central fountain were ten centimetres wide, just big enough for a child’s foot, and we had some injuries.”

When Eyre’s city centre management team took over the area they took instant remedial action – reducing the size of the water nozzles; applying a ‘sacrificial’ coating to the York stone to repel graffiti – and gradually moved towards what Eyre, with his background in asset management, calls a “standard asset management approach of targeting 70 per cent of resources at preventive measures, and 30 per cent at responsive measures.

“We work out the likely lifespan of light bulbs and carry out block changes, for instance,” he explains. “It’s cheaper in the long run to have regular preventive teams going out than sending out ad hoc responsive teams.”

They threw out the 140- page city-wide cleansing spec based on inputs (ie empty this bin three times a week) and replaced it with two sides of A4 of out-put specifications (empty this bin when it is three-quarters full).

“Since contracting out came in it’s been easier to price on input specs, but you don’t get the best results,” explains Eyre. The privately owned Millennium Square has bought in their services, making money for the council and they received around a dozen awards for their public realm achievements.

Other efforts to ‘design out maintenance’ include: abandoning block paving laid with sand joints, which were simply blasted away by mechanical sweepers; planning street furniture to be easily negotiable by mechanical cleaners; and installing easy-to-clean stainless steel bins.

“It’s hard to calculate the savings: the capital costs have been more expensive but using high-quality materials means there’s less maintenance,” explains Nick Hetherington, head of street scene.

Visit: www.sheffield.gov.uk

Southwark Council, London

If anyone can make street cleansing sexy, it seems Simon Baxter can. As client enforcement manager at Southwark Council he has recently achieved personal fame with a series of eye-catching – some would say gimmicky – stunts, designed to promote and enforce the ‘cleaner, safer, greener’ agenda.

‘Stalking litter’, for instance. People dressed as half-eaten burgers and the like chasing litter bugs to highlight the £50 fine for littering. Or ‘Blingin’ or Mingin’ –an online quiz to get children to think about how their actions affect the environment. Then there’s ‘No Butts’ – free stubbi holders to deal with the 75 per cent of litter in the borough that is smoking related, doubling the number of litter bins and adding an ashtray to them. And ‘Flag the Poo’, placing orange pennants on every pile of poo in the park and handing out over 20,000 free poop scoop bags.

As a result, Southwark was the overall winner of the 2006 Cleaner Safer Greener Network Awards and its cleanliness figures shot up 14 per cent in 2006, putting it in the top 25 per cent of London boroughs for cleanliness. It intends to roll out its Environmental Business Awards Scheme borough- wide. It also plans to: register ten Eco Schools in the borough at Bronze level; register 45 schools for the London Schools Environment Award; expand its street leaders scheme (adult and junior versions); expand the borough-wide anti dog-fouling campaign; maintain links with every school in Southwark; and establish a voluntary code of conduct for fast food restaurants.

Visit: www.southwark.gov.uk