Cleaner, Greener and Safer

Cleaner

Tackling graffiti

You felt that the Council was not doing enough top combat graffiti so we have increased the numbers of staff tackling graffiti - with 3 teams now dedicated to removing graffiti from homes and buildings. Working with street wardens, the graffiti hot spots around the borough are now patrolled more often too.

As part of this clampdown on graffiti, the Council's environment and enforcement team have also been prosecuting the small minority of people who litter, fly-tip or spray graffiti.

We have also invested in state-of-the-art equipment and regular training for our staff.

We also launched a graffiti charter earlier this year to help businesses take more responsibly for tackling this type of antisocial behaviour. Businesses will have graffiti removed from their premises at a reduced rate once they sign up to the charter.

Once businesses have signed up the Council will clear all existing graffiti from the shop fronts for free as part of the scheme.

Business owners will then be obligated to ensure that if their premises are targeted again by graffiti vandals that they will remove obscene graffiti within 1 day of finding it or being told and all other types of graffiti within 3 working days.

We are also developing a web-based incident reporting system that will allow you to pinpoint on a map where an environmental crime like graffiti has taken place.

Residents will then be able to take pictures of the graffiti and upload them to the Council's 'report a problem page' on the website. Once the graffiti has been removed, we will upload new pictures to show this.

This will help to build a picture of areas that are constantly being defaced and the types of graffiti tags. It is hoped that the technology and information collected will also help prosecute known vandals.

The Council's street warden service

The street wardens have been targeting areas across the borough where we have received large number of complaints about litter. They have carried out covert surveillance operations and issued fixed penalty notices forcing people to clean up their rubbish. We have also issued fixed penalty fines of up to £100 for people that are caught littering the borough
Barking Abbey Pupils have carried out a clean up of Barking Town Centre with the street wardens and street cleaners, to help the pupils understand the effect litter has and how difficult it is to clean up
We have introduced more litter bins to the borough and these are place at bus stops, major roads and outside takeaway shops to help reduce the amount of litter in the borough

Revamping the cleansing service

Waste area mangers have been introduced to work with the local community, voluntary street leaders, housing estate officers and street wardens to tackle persistent problems such as litter and fly tipping in their neighbourhoods
Street cleansing has been revamped with specialist cleaners already introduced to shopping areas such as Barking Town Centre, Heathway and the Rylands Estate, Westrow Drive, Thames View Estate and Scrattons Terrace will also benefit from extra cleaners
The shift patterns of staff have also changed making sure that when schools finish street cleansing will be on hand to deal with the increase in litter

Keep it clean

Contact

Barking and Dagenham Direct:

Tel: 020 8215 3000

Fax: 020 8227 5184

Textphone: 020 8227 5755

Email: 3000direct@lbbd.gov.uk|

Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 8am - 8pm.