Brent has seen a surge in flytipping incidents recently. I spoke to someone yesterday who gave me an example of how the new waste & street cleaning contract can make these things easier to deal with.
Under the former contract, there was a rigid system of zones with required number of cleans per week. Most of the Borough fell under a "zone 5" (residential streets). Town Centres fell into a different zone, and had a much more frequent cleaning service to reflect the much higher footfall, and therefore the higher rate of littering. The disadvantage of this system for areas such as the streets off Ealing Road, Harlesden High Street and Willesden High Road was that those streets were counted as "residential" even though they had much worse littering than most of the Borough. The intention of the new contract was to allow for a greater flexibility of response than the old.
The example I was given was of Bertie Road just off Willesden High Road. I go down this road quite frequently, and the corner of the High Road and Bertie Road has indeed been a problem for a long time. The Willesden resident I spoke to assured me that it has recently improved which is down to (a) more frequent, responsive cleaning and (b) some of the flats above shops being provided with bins where previously they had none. This seems to be the kind of incremental and piecemeal improvement which too often gets lost in political debates.
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