Three months into Ealing's new waste, re-cycling and street cleaning contract, figures show 41% of streets across the borough were ' unacceptably dirty' in the month of June. 

The council uses a nationally accepted grading system to assess cleanliness - from A to D. The cleaning contract requires that streets are typically Grade A.

Anything less than Grade A is deemed unacceptable.

A variety of written questions about the Enterprise refuse contract have been put to the council (they can be viewed here (pdf).)

Last year, (in June 2011) 8420 streets were judged to be A standard - this year in the same month the figure had dropped to 2276.

The number of residents reporting missed collections has more than doubled.

In June 2011 it was 966, last month it was 2053.

 

Percentage of Ealing streets unacceptably dirty in a month

Conservative spokesman for Transport and Environment, Phil Taylor says:

''Ealing has been visibly dirtier for months now.  The Labour administration has consistently tried to underplay the size and duration of this service failure.  It has affected the whole borough for the whole of the first quarter of the council’s financial year. 

''When we met to discuss this issue at our special council meeting on 8th May the Labour leader of the council asked that we put events in context and said that the service was ‘essentially back to normal’.  If this is normal then the new normal is a lot worse than the old normal.”

Councillor Bassam Mahfouz, portfolio holder for transport and environment, has sent this response:

'' We know that there have been problems with this contract but things are improving all the time. On Tuesday we saw all streets in the borough returned to kerbside sorting with the complete roll out of new recycling vehicles.

''The data Cllr Taylor is referring to is now up to four months old. As we mentioned in a council meeting two weeks ago grade A streets for cleanliness was back over 80% in the first week of July and improving solidly. Our May recycling figures were the best we have ever recorded for May at 44.46%

''The Tories are desperate for this contract not to work and have offered nothing but a broken record whilst we've been hard at work to turn this around. We have a contract that provides around £4.5m of savings from £85m inflicted by the Conservative led government whilst improving the targets for service delivery.''

 

What do you think? Have things improved?

 

2nd August 2012