Edinburgh's streets worse than London's, say Tories - but hit squad 'could change that'

Edinburgh's streets are dirtier than London's, according to Tory councillor Phil Doggart.  And he hopes a new "hit squad" to tackle litter, graffiti and potholes will start to improve things by late summer.

The city council budget, agreed last week, includes £892,000 for the Tories' proposed "Scrub Our Streets" campaign to clean up the city.  They hope residents across the city will contact the council to request their street gets a visit from the hit squad. It comes after a £750,000 "deep clean" initiative which Cllr Doggart, the Tory group finance spokesman, said had concentrated on the city centre.

He envisages telephone hotline or dedicated email address where people could ask the council to clean up their street. "There would have to be some criteria and you would need to have an initial inspection to make sure there was actually a problem, whether it was pothole issues, road issues, graffiti, litter, whatever.  Assuming the state of the street was sufficiently bad, a hit squad would go out and clean up the street - very simple, very clear. This is an issue about which people get in touch with us a lot, saying their street is really untidy, really dirty."

Litter on Smithfield Street, Gorgie - independent councillor Ross McKenzie complained a recent clean-up was only 'cosmetic'.

Cllr Doggart said the Tories wanted £2.35 million for the scheme, but settled for £892,000 as part of the deal which saw them and the Lib Dems back the minority Labour administration's budget package. "It's not as much as we initially proposed, but it will be a start," he said. "I think the cleanliness aspect of Edinburgh is significantly inferior to other cities in the UK and I want to change that.

"I'm in London quite a lot and it doesn't matter which borough you go to, it's just cleaner.  When people are heading off to work in the morning there's no rubbish from the night before, whereas in Edinburgh there's a fair chance you will see the remnants of the previous evening's festivities and that's not good enough.  We need to make it a better place for people to live, a more pleasant place for people to live."

He rejects the idea that a scheme driven by residents' requests would favour better-off areas of the city.  "Everyone wants to live in an area that looks nice, doesn't have litter, doesn't have graffiti and doesn't have weeds all over the place.  This is a chance for elected members to engage with their residents, for community councils to get involved and say 'There is a real problem here, can we get it fixed?'"

He said the budget did not take effect until April and it would probably take a few months to have criteria agreed and the scheme set up.  But he said: "Hopefully we will see things improve, probaby for some people by late summer - I think that would be a reasonable target."

It is expected that the details of the scheme will have to be agreed at committee before they can be implemented. 

Transport and environment convener Scott Arthur said the council already had website forms for people to fill in to request bins get emptied, potholes are filled and litter is removed.  But he welcomed the idea of extra staff for these tasks.

He said: "The council already has reporting mechanisms for street cleansing, graffiti and potholes, but I welcome any discussions about giving the teams responsible for that more resources."

And he added: "We would absolutely expect the resources to be deployed on the basis of need, not simply the volume of complaints."