Community News: Sweeping to success; OSCOTT/FOUR OAKS: Praise for trial litter team.

Byline: By Neil Elkes LOCAL GOVERNMENT CORRESPONDENT

THE scourge of litter is being swept from Birmingham streets following the launch of neighbourhood clean-up teams.

A trail scheme, under which seven council wards were given their own litter team, has been hailed as a huge success and will be rolled out across the city.

The teams were out and about picking up sweet wrappers, drink cans and other litter in Oscott, Sutton Four Oaks, Soho, Harborne, Longbridge, South Yardley, and Spark-brook.

According to surveys carried out following the three month trial under the council's new Love Your City campaign, the amount of litter on the streets has declined. Until now, Birmingham's street cleansing service has been managed from four operational depots each responsible for cleansing approximately a quarter of the city.

In Sutton Four Oaks, the percentage of sites surveyed that had a satisfactory level of litter increased 20 per cent in the 12 months to December 2007.

Coun Len Gregory, the man responsible for keeping Birmingham clean, said: "While the established service structures have achieved much, including Birmingham being judged as Britain's cleanest city, the drive to further improve standards, achieve tough cleanliness targets and allow for local accountability dictates that different approaches need to be explored.

"Following extensive research and consultation with street cleansing staff, we introduced the new ward-based approach, which has been a resounding success.

"The new arrangements have gone a significant way towards ensuring that areas like Sutton Four Oaks are cleaner, greener places in which to live."

All teams have worked to a common theme of zoning their ward into four or five areas, concentrating the available resource in each zone on a specific day of the week.

This enabled them to provide more of a target clean and also give residents an easily-understood and visible cleansing service.

Coun Gregory said that a combination of local pride and ownership of their patch was responsible for the improved performance of the litter teams.

"We will now work on how we can roll this programme out further to cover another 15 wards before the end of the current financial year, ahead of city-wide implementation."

CAPTION(S):

ACTION MEN... Alan Burton (left) and Eddie Lynch busy in Sutton Four Oaks.