Local Environmental Audit and Management System (LEAMS)

Clean streets, towns, cities, parks and open spaces are important to all of us. They make the places where we live, work and travel more pleasant and ultimately improve our quality of life. Issues such as litter and dog fouling spoil our environment. They give the appearance of places being uncared for and devalue neighbourhoods as locations in which to live and work. Not only this, each year these issues cost Scotland more than £60 million to deal with.

To monitor issues such as litter, dog fouling, flytipping, flyposting and graffiti, and in partnership with Scotland’s local authorities, we carry out annual local environmental quality surveys at a random selection of sites across Scotland every year. This information enables local authorities to be efficient with their local cleaning activity and informs their policies and campaigns to tackle these issues. It also supports the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and the Code of Practice on Litter and Refuse (Scotland) 2018 which require local authorities and others to keep specified land and public roads clean and litter-free.

The approach we use is called the Local Environmental Audit and Management System (or LEAMS) and the audits collect information on litter levels, types and source. Alongside this, other indicators such as servicing of public use bins, weeds, detritus, graffiti, flytipping and vandalism, are also recorded to provide an overall picture of every site. Audits are carried out by each local authority as well as by us (to provide independence and validation).

During the 2023/2024 financial year, 89 audits took place. In total, 12,808 individual sites were assessed for litter and local environmental quality. The audits were spread out evenly over three reporting periods in the year.

This year's LEAMS data shows, for the second consecutive year, the proportion of sites with "acceptable" amounts of litter has increased compared to the year before. Taking into consideration that the pandemic disrupted service delivery in 2021/22 and 2022/23, this result is still lower than all years other than the two impacted years.

This year’s LEAMS audit highlights the following trends:

• The majority of sites record litter and it is a widespread problem.
• There is a strong correlation between litter and deprivation using the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation with poorer standards found in areas with higher levels of deprivation.
• In street scenes, high density residential areas have the lowest proportion of streets graded as acceptable.
• High volumes of vehicular activity create the most challenging roadside areas to maintain.
• Smoking related items (including vapes) are the most common litter type observed, both in frequency of sites affected and proportion of individual items counted.
• Food and drink packaging litter is common, making up over a quarter of litter counted.
• The majority of road channels were found to be either free or presenting only a minor presence of detritus.
• Over a quarter of sites are affected by gum staining, increasing to half in town centres.

Please use this interactive dashboard to understand the litter issues across Scotland, as well as other indicators of local environmental quality. You can use the buttons at the top of each page to navigate the data and several pages have filters so you can explore the data yourself.

LEAMS uses a standard approach to record litter. Five grades are used to assess the overall presence of litter at an audited site:

Sites that score either a grade C or D are considered unacceptable and require cleaning. The street cleanliness score is the percentage of sites considered acceptable (graded A, B+ or B).

Since last year, the national street cleanliness score has improved by 1.7% and now sits at 92.7% of sites having acceptable levels of litter. Thie is reported to the Local Government Benchmarking Framework.

While this is a positive change, it should be viewed with caution in consideration that the pandemic disrupted service delivery in 2021/22 and 2022/23 and it is a lower score than three years ago.  Further positive indicators are observed at local level, with 23 local authorities maintaining or improving on their street litter cleanliness score since last year. While local authorities are by in large keeping the majority of sites maintained for litter removal, this does mask a number of areas that are clearly providing challenges which can be explored above.

Across local authorities there is a wide range of scores nationally and between benchmarked clubs – grouping local authorities of similar characteristics. When benchmarking across local authorities, we must consider the many reasons for differences in scores and the context. There are differences in levels of deprivation in each authority area, with a skew to more deprived areas found in urban areas. Further, the budgets and severity in decline of resources will be different across Scotland. The clubs are therefore used to mitigate against the wider difference and help local authorities benchmark with similar areas.