Following local speculation that there are planned redundancies for street cleaners in Harrogate, the leader of the Council has issued a statement.
The statement confirms that there is a review in place, but that they are committed to clean streets.
Councillor Richard Cooper, leader of Harrogate Borough Council, said:
We are looking at improving our street cleaning service. Lots of people will have noticed the deep clean we have given to town centre streets across the district, and the chewing gum removal, which has had great results. We are buying new bins for the town centres too. It’s a proper early spring clean for our streets.
We are also in the process of buying new street cleaning equipment and while we are doing that we are reviewing the rounds that street sweepers have to ensure that we get to the streets with the most severe litter problems with the correct machinery.
We are committed to tidy streets, as our activity in our retail centres has shown, and if we can achieve this to an even higher standard using modern equipment and better organised rounds we would want to do so. It may be that this requires fewer people, it may require more. It may need less cash, it may require more. It’s too early to say yet and speculation of redundancies at this stage is unhelpful. But in respect of litter collection our streets will be maintained to the current high standards or better in whichever scenario.
It’s scary that in this day and age the council see polishing up the pavements as an activity worth doing. Personally I would rather they didn’t spend that cash and left it in my pocket where I could spend it on more worthy projects!