Slippery statement from Brent on leaf clearance

Last autumn Brent Fightback launched a campaign to reverse street cleaning cuts.  Amongst the concerns was the ending of the seasonal autumn leaf clearance. Instead, responsibility for cleaning leaves this was to be combined with normal street cleaning of litter with street sweepers now cleaning streets less regularly.

A section of the petition to the council stated:

The ending of the seasonal leaf service will result in hazardous conditions for pedestrians as leaves rot and will open the council to compensation claims for injuries. (September 2011)

The impact depends a lot on conditions - dry weather results in crisp and crunchy leaves but wet conditions and frost result in slimy, slippery leaves that rot on the street. Last year conditions favoured the council but this year there has been wet weather which has produced complaints from residents and criticism from Cllr Daniel Brown at the council meeting earlier this week. In response Cllr Jim Moher seemed to imply that residents should clean up their own leaves.

Brent Council issued this statement:

We are operating a reduced leaf clearance programme in 2012. In previous years we deployed extra, seasonal resource to clear leaves. That resource was removed this year.

The onus is now firmly on street sweepers to clear leaves as they go about their normal duties.

Dealing with this extra workload is obviously more difficult, especially as litter clearance remains our firm priority.

We must reasonably expect that leaves will take longer to remove this year and full clearance will only be done over a number of weeks.

We are coming to end of the period of 'leaf fall' so things should start to improve.

For a reminder of last year's campaign watch this video: (apologies for the horrible pic of me on screen - can't get rid of it!)