Leeds city centre streets ahead of Sheffield when it comes to cleaning, says litter picker

Bridget Ingle says she has always defended Sheffield when people compare it unfavourably with its northerly neighbour, but on a recent visit was shocked to find how much tidier Leeds city centre was than her home city.

The dedicated litter picker, who is the daughter of the late, great boxing coach Brendan Ingle, has called on Sheffield Council and its contractor Amey, which is responsible for street maintenance and cleaning under the Streets Ahead programme, to up their game.

She said: “I spent four hours walking around Leeds city centre and I couldn’t believe the cleanliness of the street scene there compared to Sheffield. I was blown away.

“I’ve never seen a city centre so clean. There was no graffiti tagging, no flyposting, no overflowing bins and very little chewing gum on the ground.

“One of the things they do there is to wash the litter bins regularly, which makes a real difference.

“In Sheffield, the level of street cleansing is poor. Every building or piece of street furniture you look at has graffiti on it.

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“It needs to improve if we want to attract more people back into the city centre, and I think Sheffield needs to look to Leeds as an example.”

Ms Ingle was so impressed with what she saw in Leeds that she wrote to the council there to ask how it was achieved.

Sheffield Council investing £500,000 to improve street cleanliness

She was told the annual budget for street ‘cleansing and environmental enforcement in Leeds city centre was around £2 million and there were 43 employees in total, including managers.

Ms Ingle said that in recent weeks, things had improved slightly in Sheffield, with work beginning to remove graffiti and flyposting, and the streets already looked ‘significantly better’, but there remained a long way to go to match Leeds.

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Sheffield Council recently approved plans to spend £500,000 to improve street cleanliness, including £140,000 for a graffiti ‘spring clean’, £78,000 to step up enforcement and issue more fixed penalty notices to litterbugs, and £138,000 for pest control.

Councillor Joe Otten, chair of the council’s Waste & Street Scene Policy Committee, defended the council’s record.

He said: “Routine street cleaning is undertaken on a continuous basis to help keep the city as litter-free as possible and in recent months, the council has been focused on delivering a significant uplift in some areas of the city centre to remove graffiti from privately owned buildings and walls.

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“Combatting litter remains a top priority for the council and since January 2022, the council has issued 534 FPNs to tackle the minority of people who continue to drop litter.

“In May 2022, an Independent audit of street cleansing standards in the city was undertaken using the DEFRA Code of Practice for Litter and Refuse, which found that only one street in the entire month was found to have unacceptable levels of litter.

“In 2019, the cleanliness of the city’s roads was acknowledged by central government, following an independent assessment of roadside litter levels in areas maintained by local authorities and Highways England.

“We regularly compare our performance with other local authorities, and this allows us to identify areas for continuous improvement and best practice when it comes to street cleaning.”