Despite reports claiming it’s one of the worst towns in the North West for grimy streets, Cllr Ian Fowler says Blackpool’s streets are “cleaner than ever”.
He attempts to blame a number of things for Blackpool’s poor showing in the crap streets league table, but of course doesn’t blame himself as the councillor responsible. First of all he disputes the figures as being old because they were from 2008/2009 and says that it’s much better now. Then he blames parked cars for a build up of detritus. Hmm. He then tries to spin that the streets are dirty due to the fact that Blackpool has increased footfall compared with most other towns. Explain why the streets are minging now then Ian. We’ve not had a tourist for 7 months.
Personally, I blame rubbish councillors like Mr Fowler and Messrs Callow that are too busy claiming for first class jollies to London and touting for super casinos than getting to grips with the ongoing basics that matter to local people. The only councillor who seems to be realising this is Labour group leader Simon Blackburn, and much as I detest Labour I agree entirely with him.
The Council launched this BIG CAT scheme (Blackpool Is Getting Clean And Tidy) in April 2008 which has pissed a load of our money away and largely failed. They wasted £100,000 jetwashing Dickson Rd, Queens St, Clifton St, Victoria St, Bank Hey St and Corporation St, supposedly, as Cllr Fowler said, “to make the paving look like it did when it was originally laid”. I’ll let you be the judge of whether that’s the case.
In the print copy of the Gasjet there is an accompanying image of some workmen jetwashing the new Spanish steps that form part of the multi-million pound promenade. It’s just a shame their £250,000 cleaning machines don’t get used very often (or aren’t very good).
I was there this weekend just gone;
Someone wrote a personal message for Cllr Fowler:
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“Twat”, lol lol, it werent me Phil, honest!
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The front will always be a problem. How are drunken stag and hens ever going be persuaded to keep the streets clean? They need a lot of cleaning and regularly. Personally I always pick up any rubbish outside my house and weed the pavements and road because if I didn’t the place would soon look down and out because Fylde (despite for years telling us our street cleaning was the thing we were most satisfied with) doesn’t do a good enough job. When they do come they show such lack of common sense the place looks worse when they’ve been. The recycling crew do everything at a run – and consequently throw things onto the street and drop things. The street cleaning vehicle for pavements is driven by a moron that drives it over the soil squares where the street trees are planted – and of course the soil goes everywhere and is not removed. In fact the other day it tried to force it’s way through one that a neighbour had put pebbles on to act as a barrier for weeds growing (which is quite common as they only weed them once a year with weedkiller too late for weeds not to have seeded). 30 seconds of the idiot of a street sweeper and he tried to get through a gap far too small for the machine and scattered all the pebbles over a large distance (and of course didn’t pick any of them up). Wyre you’re in luck because you have these idiots too now. And if Alan Oldfield reads this, I’m not having a go at you. It’s some of your staff that are complete idiots. Please come up with a money saving idea of not sweeping a lot of the residential streets – they’ll look a lot better as a result too.
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To be honest I think the drunken stags and hens are part of the detritus that needs to be picked up, binned, and dispatched from whence it came.
You never see street cleaning vehicles in Blackpool, ever. Perhaps they figure that there’s no point because a good chunk of the streets look like the Luftwaffe’s just’s been overhead chucking bombs at them.
I am sure Mr Oldfield would be receptive if you emailed him directly about your local problems with those street cleaning vehicles.
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The only answer to litter is lots of bins combined with a zero tollerence approach so that if someone drops litter there is a unit on hand to fine them on the spot. Eventually people will get the message that it is not acceptable, it just needs to have people on the ground enforcing it.
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That’s all very idealistic. Who’s going to fund these units that are just hanging around waiting to fine you?
The police can only give us a maximum of 2 police officers in town at any one time, and for these litter police to have any impact there would need to be a lot more than that.
There are other options though.
Traffic wardens could have it in their mandate to issue a ticket to people for throwing litter.
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Thats a great idea phil.
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You are quite correct in your observations that the street cleaners in this town are ‘rubbish’ I watched one a couple of weekends ago, in town as I waited for my bus (so I was obviously there for ages!) and I have never seen a more desultory attempt at sweeping up in my life, He swept up 10 cig ends wafted the rest of the dust around and walked over to another bit and did the same again. Had the man no pride in his job? The other thing that is missing though is local pride – When I was in Germany a couple of years ago a stray sweet wrapper fell unnoticed out of a womans pocket onto the floor, and a local man came running (yes running, but then it was in Germany!) up to the woman to point out what had happened and request that she pick it up, which she did (but then it was Germany) What would happen I wonder if we tried to do the same here?
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When you go to Magalluf as i have you see the street cleaners out every morning cleaning the streets after busy nights out. You would have thought the street cleaners would be out every sat and sun morning. Lets be honest if the council can offer all these loans and have a reserve fund of £5million you would have thought they would use it!
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[...] report came out in June suggesting that Blackpool had the fourth dirtiest streets in the North West, and [...]
[...] war on waste has resulted in Blackpool being listed as having the fourth worst grimy streets in the North West according to a report done by the Audit Commission. As for all the [...]