Local Environmental Audit and Management System (LEAMS)

We administer a national monitoring programme looking at litter and other local environmental quality indicators on streets and roads across Scotland. The approach we use is called Local Environmental Audit and Management System (or LEAMS).

The programme is in partnership with local authorities whereby audits are carried out at a random selection of sites across Scotland each year collecting data on litter levels, litter types, sources of litter, the servicing of public bins, weeds, detritus, graffiti, vandalism, gum staining and more.

Knowledge and evidence showing what types of litter are affecting what locations can ensure best practice and efficiencies in cleansing operations. It also informs policies and practices to prevent litter in the first place – something we can all help with to reduce the many negative impacts poor local environmental quality has.

LEAMS 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. It is also technical data feeding into developing good data on litter under the National Litter and Flytipping Strategy.

During the 2024/2025 financial year, 91 audits took place. In total, 13,704 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 a decline in the proportion of sites either free from litter or predominantly free from litter. This follows two consecutive years of improvements of this national litter indicator but remains lower than results before the pandemic.

This year’s LEAMS audit highlights the following trends:

• After two years of improvement, the street cleanliness score has declined.
• The majority of sites recorded litter, although litter free sites have increased compared to last year.
• 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 highest proportion of streets with significant litter.
• High volumes of vehicular activity create the most challenging roadside areas to maintain.
• The average number of items counted per sites has declined.
• Smoking related items 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 over half in town centres.

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

The street cleanliness score is the percentage of sites considered graded A, B+ or B.

Since last year, the national street cleanliness score has declined by 0.4% and now sits at 91.7% of sites having acceptable levels of litter. This is reported to the Local Government Benchmarking Framework.

This reverses the trend of improvements since the lowest score nationally in 2021-22, which was significantly impacted by the pandemic, and remains lower than pre-pandemic levels of street cleanliness.

Two fifths of local authorities saw a decline in their street cleanliness score since last year, four of these were by half a percentage point or less. This highlights a widespread issue of maintaining our streets and roads.

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.