Street care and cleaning
Street cleaning programme dates
For details of your street cleanse dates and free neighbourhood skip service days, please visit street cleaning programme.
How we keep our streets clean - street cleaning schedule
- We mechanically sweep approx 833 kilometres of roads on a four-weekly basis.
- We aim to empty the borough's 3000+ litter bins before they become full
report a full litter bin. - We are rolling out 400 new litter bins to replace the older and less functional litter bins across the borough.
- We have restructured our street cleaning into five areas, each with a team of dedicated street cleaning staff, an area supervisor and dedicated mechanical street sweeper to clean residential streets on a four-weekly cycle.
- Search for your street cleaning dates
- Visit our maps section for our street cleaning programme map.
- If you are a returning user of the maps section, then go direct to the cleaning cycle map
- Streets reported as not being up to the required level of cleanliness are returned to the appropriate level within 24 hours.
- We will investigate all reports of dumping and fly tipping.
- We offer a twice yearly neighbourhood skip service
(PDF: 684KB). Last updated, 9 January 08; last entry, 13 November 08. - To improve street cleansing even further, we are deploying street cleansing 'hot spot teams' to deal with litter at busy locations.
Want to know more? Visit: street cleaning programme.
Cleaner Borough Strategy
- Read our Cleaner Borough Strategy (PDF 1.23MB)
What we do
We are responsible for keeping the borough's streets clean. Our streets are cleaned in line with the requirements set out in the Environmental Protection Act 1990 (as amended).
This means that all streets are expected to be kept to an acceptable standard of cleanliness.
Each street in the borough falls within one of four ‘zones’:
- Zone one - town centres, shopping centres and major shopping streets, major transport centres, central car parks, and other busy public places
- Zone two - high density residential areas, busy recreational land, suburban transport centres, and industrial estates with a high density of premises
- Zone three - low density residential areas, other recreational land, other transport centres, industrial estates with a low density of premises, and high technology business parks
- Zone four - all other areas.
Cleanliness standards
We regularly inspect streets following street sweeping, to ensure they are being cleaned to a high standard. A street is graded according to the Environmental Protection Act:
- Grade A: no litter or refuse
- Grade B: predominantly free of litter and refuse apart from some small items
- Grade C: widespread distribution of litter and refuse with minor accumulations
- Grade D: heavily littered with significant accumulations.
Even though the law states that we have to keep our streets at Grade B standard, we aim to achieve Grade A. If a street falls below Grade A on inspection we aim to get it up to Grade A within 24 hours.
