Southwark Council voted down a plan to add more street cleaners into the budget last week, despite complaints over the dirtiness of the borough’s streets.
Southwark’s Liberal Democrats wanted to spend £666,000 on hiring more street cleaners. The party also proposed adding more staff into the council’s contact centre with a spend of £245,000. The proposal was voted down by Labour.
As the News has reported, Southwark cut the number of street cleaners by eighteen per cent between 2010 and 2021, despite a steep increase in the borough’s population over the same period. The budget for street cleaning has fallen by 21 per cent over the same period.
The council blamed the reduced budget on the heavy cuts it has had from central government since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to power in 2010.
Southwark was also the eleventh-worst local authority in the country for fly-tipping, out of more than 300, from April 2020-March 2021, the latest figures available.
There were 21,386 incidents over the period, an increase of more than 20 per cent from the previous year, when there were 17,782 incidents. Fly-tipping incidents went up across London as a whole by about seven per cent over the same period, from just over 360,000 to about 384,000. Southwark says it ranks so highly because it logs all fly-tipping, not just incidents reported by the public.
Cllr Dan Whitehead, Southwark Liberal Democrat finance spokesperson, said: “Southwark residents are sick of Labour ignoring them and refusing to listen to complaints regarding basic services. We can see that our streets are getting dirtier, that phone calls from constituents are being left unanswered, and that Labour continues to dither and delay on climate change. The party could have changed its attitude on all of this, but decided to snub residents instead by voting down our amendment.”