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 £50 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 types and source. Alongside this, other indicators such as weeds, 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).

The 2021/22 LEAMS audit

During the 2021/2022 financial year, 89 audits took place. In total, 12,803 individual sites were assessed for litter and local environmental quality. Although less restrictive than in 2020/2021, the Covid-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the ability to carry out street cleansing and litter monitoring duties.

This year’s LEAMS audit highlights the following trends:

• The number of locations with unacceptable amounts of litter has increased since last year, continuing the decline
• High proportions of local environmental quality issues tend to be in urban areas
• High density residential sites have the highest frequency of unacceptable litter levels
• Strategic roads are least likely to be completely free from litter
• The most deprived areas continue to have higher litter levels than less deprived areas and the gap is widening
• Cigarette litter is the most common litter type
• Food and drink packaging litter is common
• Most sites record a presence of litter from pedestrians but litter from domestic waste has increased
• Detritus is increasing in frequency, the most likely recorded indicator after litter with weeds following
• Graffiti, flyposting and gum staining are more common in town/city centre and high density residential areas

The reasons for these trends are complex and there are many factors which play a part. The pandemic has had a considerable impact on the ability of local authorities to meet expected street cleansing standards. The ongoing decline in the level of public resources is also making it harder for local authorities to deal with litter and other cleansing duties.

However, alongside these challenges there are other factors which are also having an impact – an increase in packaging litter, particularly single-use disposable food and drinks packaging, and population dense communities also play a part.

About the LEAMS approach

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.

LEAMS records the following:

Type of local authority

To enable easier comparison, local authorities are grouped together into four ‘clubs’. These are based on population and the distribution of population. Club 1 authorities are generally more rural, clubs 2 and 3 are mixed rural/urban (with club 3 having more urban areas than club 2) and club 4 covers the most urban authorities.

Street cleanliness and litter-related results

Scotland-wide street cleanliness

Since last year, the overall Scotland-wide street cleanliness score has gone down by 0.4% and now sits at 89.7% of sites having acceptable levels of litter. This means that there are far too many sites in Scotland spoilt by unacceptable amounts of litter, which devalue our neighbourhoods and cost money to clean up.

Furthermore, our data continues to show a correlation between litter levels and levels of deprivation. When looking at the 20% most deprived areas 32.7% have unacceptable litter levels compared with 4.6% in the 20% least deprived. This gap is widening and is most keenly felt in urban local authorities which also suffer the highest frequency of unacceptable litter levels. Over 40% of sites in the most deprived areas in urban local authority areas have significant or severe litter.

This year two thirds of authorities saw a drop in their score of percentage of sites recording acceptable litter levels. These scores, a key performance indicator for local authorities, allow tracking of progress in street cleansing. Seeing so many areas of Scotland in decline shows us this is a national problem.

Across local authorities there is a wide range of scores nationally and between benchmarked clubs. 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. The covid-19 pandemic also impacted all authorities differently, certainly impacting staffing, cleansing, and monitoring. Lastly 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.

Common litter types

Wider local environmental quality results

As well as litter-related issues, there are a number of other factors which can negatively impact the places in which we live and work, and which we record as part of the LEAMS process:

Conclusion