Liverpool City Council launches £4.6M cleanliness initiative to Keep Liverpool Tidy

Liverpool City Council is rolling out a £4.6m investment boost to improve cleanliness around the city.

Liverpool City Council is launching a Keep Liverpool Tidy Spring Clean campaign with a programme of more than 50 community events planned across the city over the next fortnight – with a goal to double that by the end of the month.

The new funding has already translated into the recruitment of 18 new streetscene staff to focus on litter hot spots – with more staff to be hired to target enforcement and issue fines.

The Spring Clean campaign launches today, (Friday, 15 March) with a community litter pick in Dovecot, and the Council is encouraging people to help play their part either by joining in one of the organised events or even creating their own.

The city has seen a 200 per cent uptake in community litter-picking since it first joined forces with Keep Britain Tidy in 2022 – with some groups collecting more than five tonnes of waste a week.

Ward councillors, supported by Liverpool Streetscene Services Limited (LSSL), will also be playing their part throughout the fortnight supplying community skips and delivering targeted clean-ups.

A key focus of the Spring Clean campaign will be to support schools, community litter picking groups and friends of parks groups, with free materials supplied for participants.

To gain access to equipment and register activity people are encouraged to go online here.

The City Council, which this financial year has spent £9.5m to clean up litter, has also announced it will be improving its weed-spraying schedule in response to warmer and wetter winters. The schedule will see the number of spraying programme double this year.

As part of its environmental push, the Council’s new green maintenance programme which was piloted last year will continue this spring and summer to encourage more biodiversity in the city’s parks and open spaces.

Both the weeding schedule and green maintenance programmes will begin this month and will be made available for the public to see once it’s published on the Council’s website.

Keep Liverpool Tidy. Credit: Liverpool City Council

The Keep Liverpool Tidy Spring Clean campaign will also see a push to improve the city’s domestic recycling rates with a call to residents to avoid contaminating recycling by not putting bags in their blue bins. At present, 23 per cent of recycled waste in Liverpool is lost due to contamination.

This campaign will also dovetail with the Food Waste Action Week, which runs from 18-24 March. It’s estimated 60 per cent of food waste produced in the UK comes from households, and that an extra eight meals could be made each week if we collected the food we throw out.

The Council has also sought to improve recycling and reduce street litter, by installing a dozen underground bins to tackle the issue of black bag waste for more than 27,000 households. And it has also recently been allocated £3.7m to develop a plan to improve what is the second-lowest domestic recycling rate in the country.

As well as installing larger bins in many of the city’s major parks, the Council has also invested in CCTV to identify and prosecute fly-tippers. The Council currently deals with more than 1,300 incidents a month, of which more than 85 per cent are cleared within five working days.

At the end of the campaign, the Councill will publish data on how many additional litter picks were undertaken and the tonnage of waste collected and recycled.

Did You Know?
1. More than 300,000 bins are emptied every week in Liverpool by LSSL
2. Just 0.03 per cent of these are reported as a missed collection.
3. And a total of 475,000 street litter bins are emptied every year.

Cllr Laura Robertson-Collins, Cabinet member for Neighbourhoods, Streetscene and Communities, said:

“We’re all beginning to see the impact of climate change and Liverpool needs to play its part. We need to become a zero-waste city – and that is going to require a radical shift in behaviour in what we buy and what we throw away.

“This may feel too big to achieve on our own, but every little step counts and we can all make a difference by the simplest of actions, be it not dropping litter, to making sure recycle items are cleaned. If we all improve by just 1 per cent what we do in our homes or schools, the impact will snowball which will eventually translate into savings of millions of pounds.

“The Council is investing in making Liverpool cleaner but even with new staff and more enforcement we can only do so much. We all have a part to play in making our communities clean and tidy. The added bonus of joining as a clean-up volunteer or a friends of park group is that it’s also a great way to meet new people and feel good about ourselves and our city.”

Council leader, Cllr Liam Robinson said:

“Everyone benefits from a cleaner city and everyone has a role to play in making that happen.

“The Council takes its responsibilities extremely seriously, as evidenced by this new investment but we cannot keep Liverpool tidy and clean on our own. This is on all of us – residents, businesses, schools and community groups working together and having a collective pride in the look and feel of our city.

“I’m deeply encouraged by how many people are now trying make a difference in their community and I thank everyone who gives up their time to help make this city a better place to live.

“Of course, a cleaner Liverpool saves money too and at a time when public budgets are stretched to their limit a cleaner city means we can spend more time and money on other frontline services that make a difference to people’s lives.”