Street cleaning and recycling

Street cleaning is one of local government's most visible services. But increasingly, local authorities are trying to secure value for money within these services as financial and budgetary pressures mount.

To help boroughs improve their street cleaning services, Capital Ambition and London's Environment Directors' Network (LEDNET) commissioned Tribal to undertake a review of these areas, to help local authorities understand how best to deploy their resources and improve efficiency and performance.

Collecting the data

By collecting quantitative data from 10 participating local authorities, Tribal set out to build up a picture of what a good value for money street cleaning service would look like.

"We collected a wide range of data from the 10 councils looking at, for example, how much they spent [on street cleaning], what they spent the money on, how many staff they employed and how they operated their services," explains Olivia Crill, Tribal's assistant director for local government.

The results showed that within London there is huge variance in expenditure on street cleaning - one borough's annual spend totalled less than £3 million whereas another's reached more than £17 million in 2007/08.

Performance also varied: Tribal found that the proportion of streets with unacceptable levels of litter and detritus ranged from two to 40 per cent.

To help get beneath these figures and understand why cost and performance vary so much, Tribal developed an 'ease-to-serve index' to help demonstrate the impact of different environments in which street cleaning services operate.

Those councils with a major night-time economy would, for example, inevitably face greater challenges in keeping their streets clean than those with predominantly residential neighbourhoods.

"We wanted to take into account the different factors that make it harder to keep streets clean, such as population density or deprivation" explains Ms Crill. "The challenges you face in Bromley, for example, are very different from those faced by Westminster."

Tribal has now drawn up a set of three blueprints illustrating what a value for money service would look like for 'easy', 'medium' and 'hard-to-serve' authorities. These blueprints look at the fleet, staff, expenditure characteristics as well as the activities needed for a value for money service.

These are being used by the participating councils as a resource to help them benchmark their performance and Tribal is now working with LEDNET to broaden the evidence base supporting the resource, by gathering data from 25 London boroughs.

As well as the street cleaning review, Tribal was also commissioned to identify ways in which councils could improve their recycling rates. The organisation held interviews with recycling officers and heads of service at eight participating authorities to find out how they run their recycling services and work out which factors helped boost recycling rates.

Some of the results challenged initial expectations. Tribal found, for example, that having a high proportion of flats doesn't necessarily translate into lower recycling rates, despite the difficulties associated with collecting recycling in blocks of flats.

Next steps

Tribal has produced a set of recommendations but warns that there is no silver bullet when it comes to raising recycling rates. The best step forward is to deploy a range of activities, such as well-serviced bring banks, co-mingled collections and community engagement to maximise recycling rates.

Additional information can be found on the project's webpage