In order to meet your duty to keep streets clean and land free of litter in line with grades and rectification times, as set out in COPLAR (the statutory Code of Practice on Litter and Refuse), street cleanliness inspections are still crucial to measuring and maintaining the standards that your communities expect and for your reporting of inspection grades.

Reacting to inspection reports is an inefficient way of working. Having to move resource quickly from one location to another to meet target times has a knock-on effect on other work and can mean teams spending more time driving and less time cleansing. You can end up developing support crews from resource you need to carry out the cyclical cleansing.

But how can cleansing teams meet performance targets and maintain public satisfaction if not by reacting quickly?

We believe there is a better way, and one that will ensure you'll never fail to meet a target time again. By redesigning street cleansing schedules based on the rate at which different streets deteriorate, councils can create a service design that applies the correct resource at the correct time to each location. This maximises the effectiveness of every single team member and minimises under and over-servicing – what some people might term ‘more bang for buck’. We are adding the ability to adjust your resource plan to fulfil the COPLAR duties.

And what you may not realise is that you actually have the data to do this already. Using our software and methodology, councils can evaluate the character of each of their locations and match this to the frequency at which they plan to service the area. This offers a more measured way of reducing resource in some locations, so it can be applied to areas of greater need.

For some councils our methodology and software will highlight the gap between rectification times and the available budgeted resource, for councils with sufficient resource you can then ensure they are in the right place. Re-active teams work can reduce, enabling more efficient scheduled cleansing.

With the right resource, in the right place, at the right time, performance and efficiency both improve, which is good news for councils and good news for citizens.