Littered streets prompt petition to bring cleaning services back in-house at Sheffield Council

The council contracted the service out to Amey in 2012 as part of the Streets Ahead deal to maintain the highways but Mohammed Faysal Ansar, who has petitioned the council on various waste issues, thinks the service would run better in-house.

He launched a new petition calling for the council to take over control of street cleaning.

In his petition statement he said: “[We want] the council to [take] back control with regard to the cleaning of Sheffield’s streets.

“Do you love going out for a walk in your local area? If the answer is yes you would expect to go out for a walk and enjoy the scenery around you. You would also expect it to be nice and clean and tidy. But today around the streets of Sheffield you see streets full of litter and people going for a walk in their local area which is a total mess.”

He gave Page Hall as an example of an area that was once “tidy and beautiful” but now residents clean the streets themselves because they are concerned about the amount of rubbish, he said.

The petition will run on the council’s website until September 22 and can be found here: https://democracy.sheffield.gov.uk/mgEPetitionDisplay.aspx?ID=10295&RPID=11958200&HPID=11958200

In 2021, Sheffield Litter Pickers – which at the time had 3,000 members – made three demands to the council to tackle the problem.

They wanted longer opening hours at tips, the return of Bring Out Your Rubbish days and regular skips in areas with high turnover of residents, and better enforcement outside of the city centre.