Street Cleansing

Twerton Focus Team member Sean Moore has started a campaign to get the streets across the city cleared of the ever increasing quantity of overgrown vegetation.  Sean has written to every Councillor in Bath and North East Somerset asking what they are each doing in their own wards to tackle this issue.

The overgrown vegetation, mainly weeds, is getting so out of hand across the whole council area that they are starting to cause damage to our footpaths and roads, which in turn uses up value revenue to repair, this revenue could be used elsewhere if a proper maintenance programme was in place.  The council does spray the weeds, however, these are then in turn left to rot down, providing more debris on the edge of footpaths and in gutters in which new weeds can grow.

We have gutters that are now green and drains that will be totally ineffective throughout the winter months due to the amount of grass and weeds that is growing in them.  The weeds not only cause damage but they make our streets look a mess and litter gets caught up in them making our streets look even worse.

The street cleansing teams are issued with brushes, shovels and even garden hoe's, however, these are rarely used, which is why the weeds have reached such levels.  Sean is asking for council employees to revert back to using the full range of equipment they are supplied with instead of just walking the streets with a bag and litter picker.  The use of the brushes and shovels means that the weeds have no debris left in the footpaths and gutters in which to grow

Here in Twerton we are aware of this issue affecting a large number of our roads and footpaths are are actively speaking with the council;s cleansing team to get this cleaned up.

If you have any particular issues in your street that you would like us to look into, please do get in touch.

What do you think about your Neighbourhood Environmental Services?

Bath & North East Somerset Council would like residents feedback on the Environmental Services they provide, by completing a short on-line survey.

The survey can be found here and the deadline for this is 8th July 2015.  Make sure you have your say.

Joint working to keep our area clean and tidy.

We have been working on getting Curo and the Council to work together on matters of interest in the area.

In the past the council has litter picked certain areas and Curo has done others, the same goes for grass cutting.

The practice above has not worked at all well as several blog entries recently have shown. Residents are rightly confused as to who does what and why, whether they are private householders Curo tenants or tenants of other housing associations.

We are now working with both the council and Curo to finally define who does what in our area and to try to teach some joint agreement that can be published in map format.

It could be that the council may take on certain responsibilities from Curo or the other way round to create a more sensible balance.

What we want to end up with is a clear definition that the public can easily understand, when this is complete we will publish the details and insist that they are also on The councils and CURO web site.

The above we believe will end the culture of  each blaming the other when it goes wrong.

By Councillor Tim Ball

Windrush Close

Please clean me up

We have asked the council to ensure that all the leaves are removed from the communal footpaths at Windrush Close as soon as possible.

It is now February and the leaves should have been removed by now even given the really bad weather that we were getting just after they all came down in the Autumn.