well something have to be done,road sweepers are never hardly sweeping our street is an occasion when they do.

Firstly, overtime is not guaranteed so Kier should ensure that they meet the liabilities with the workforce they have, or employ more staff which is better than paying current workers overtime, meaning they spend less time at home with their families.

If Kier cannot cope they should be sacked with no compensation, if the contract allows, and have someone else take their place.

Taking it back in house would be preferable, at least then residents can feel they have some input at election time.

I thought they had all been got rid of! I haven't seen a street cleaner in my roads for ages now. I used to know whent hey had been as their rubbish bags were left by the side of the road for weeks on end. I have NEVER seen one go down Midland Road, there is so much litter doen there it is almost impossible to walk on the pavements. Kier or LBWF need to sort out this problem ASAP - they take enough of our money in council tax and parking fees for these services!

Street Cleaning has declined dramatically since Kier took over. My own road in Chingford has not been swept for at least 3 weeks and is in the worst state it has ever been seen in.

It is no longer good enough for the Council and Kier to claim that this is all just "teething troubles" it is plainly far more serious than that as the Guardian's story clearly indicates.

It is time for the Portfolio Holder, Lib Dem Cllr Bob Belem, and his Executive Director, Martin Esom, to get a grip and hold Kier to at least the standards of street cleansing that existed before the change of contractor. Personally I don't care who sweeps the streets so long as someone does, but right now the evidence is that very little is actually being done to keep the service at the level that it was, let alone improve it.

"Street cleaners claim they are suffering financially from the overtime ban and voted uninimously on Tuesday to walk out if it is not overturned."

Surely overtime is to be used when it's needed and not just when workers want to earn themselves a few extra quid?

These "workers" claiming their employers are hard on them are some of the same people who stood about picking their noses and not sweeping the streets properly when the work was done in-house under very expensive, cushy conditions. I am not surprised they are complaining - they are being asked to do a decent day's work for their pay and they are not used to it. Things are not good - but lets not forget just how bad things were when these lazy, inefficient "workers" were ripping us all off on the payroll and hiding behind the union to keep their 'spanish practices' going. However things pan out with Kier, should never return to those days. Better to get a completely new work-force.

I assume that not many workers were around under the Council but if as it is said, three staff have possession notices served on them since the new contract started (It started on 1.6.2008)then I assume arrears had built up long before that when perhaps overtime was being paid. they need to get advice quickly to prevent eviction.

The Council needs to act quickly to prevent backlogs building up and overtime being needed in the first place.

one sweeper only swept the top half of Gloucester road, when I approached him and ask him why he only swept the top half,his reply to me was DONT SPEAK ENGLISH
and quickly disappeared.

From the outside looking in kiers suck.

my friend was working 7 days a week and was happy in his job for 15 years and now he wants to leave as his new employer takes over the contract and fails to listen and deliver.

Munchy wrote:
From the outside looking in kiers suck.

my friend was working 7 days a week and was happy in his job for 15 years and now he wants to leave as his new employer takes over the contract and fails to listen and deliver.

Street cleaning services is not an activity the people of Waltham Forest ask to have done for the purposes of making your friend happy in his job, though like all jobs it is a bonus if people like the work as well as the money. If your friend was working in Waltham Forest in the last few years, his happiness may have been at the expense of the long suffering residents, who were often given shoddily cleaned streets and huge council tax bills. Ask many residents and they have stories of seeing street sweepers shirking their jobs over the last few years.

It is hard work and sometimes difficult in bad weather. I also have some sympathy for the workers who now feel the same sort of insecurities that many in the scary world of insecure non-council work have always felt, but that sympathy will not go far if they don't show they want to get the work done. Once they are on top of the job, then they may have a fair case to ask the council to see how the contracts can be looked at and see how life can be made better for them. But these workers are not being exploited if they are not even doing their work properly. The argument that there are not enough of them to do the job without overtime might be a good one, but who can tell at the moment? Unfortunately, it is an open secret in Walthamstow that when the contract changed, some of these workers who now claim they are being 'brutally' treated decided to sabotage the street cleaning equipment.

No doubt it was a minority involved, but it tends to make it hard for the workers to claim they are being mistreated if they behave like that and the company decides to bring in some people from other parts of London who they trust.

At the end of the day in any case, its a free country, if they don't like being asked to do what the residents expect, and get down to cleaning the streets properly, the workers can always try and get work elsewhere. It may not be a good time for that however, as unemployment is rising. There are plenty of people in London I am sure who would like to have some steady outdoor work.

See Bob Belam's website where he has posted on June 19 "Kier Street Services are beginning to make an impact on our streets." I don't think he is trying to be ironic so maybe he is lucky enough to live in a street where a diligent cleaner is a regular sight? Things have deteriorated badly since the new contract started but the whole street cleansing system had been going to pot for the last 2-3 years. Things that were once done as a matter of course are now neglected i.e. weeding and removing litter from flower beds, unblocking drains and weeding/cutting back at the bases of trees. As the WF Guardian editorial pointed out the legal obligation to keep our streets clean lies with WF not Kier so our council needs to sort this out and stop treating residents with such apparent disdain.

Is this so far down the Council's priorities that they can't even post a message recognising the problem on their website?
We're told to pay our taxes, recycle, leave our cars at home, threatened with parking fines and spied on by cameras. All seems very one-sided!!

Daryll - I agree. It's telling that there's been very little comment from the council on the subject so far. I hope that the WF Guardian keep covering the story, and that people keep reporting the overflowing bins and dirty streets.

This is what happens when privatisation is introduced. In Waltham Forest: filthy streets. In hospitals: dirty wards. In education: academies that teach creationism. Since the Labour Party eagerly embraced Thatcherism it has only itself to blame when the electorate kick it out at the next election. Unfortunately the Tories will be just as bad. And Boris is already turning out to be oddly similar to Ken (advisers mired in sleaze allegations).

I cannot beleive what i have read i live in oliver road and could not beleive what i was seeing at 8.30 am last saturday 2 mechanical foot way sweepers then a big road sweeper come down the road with guy jet washing footways under cars street sighns i and my neghbour went out to look after they passed they had removed all dried dogs mess all the stuff between cars and under the guy even cleaned the cars down as he was going now i dont no if these guys were from bromley or the moon if these are the sdandards kier will bring to this contract .I have lived around in this street for three years and can not beleive in this day and age a council was still using 100 or so men to walk around pushing these old smelly barrows and a number spend half time in betting shops or talking to every person he has contact with on his beet. My road in the last year has got worse and worse then the council award contract to kier a massive company with proven experience when the council past over to kier they left the streets in such bad ways it no surpise it taking time to get the streets back to a standard they work to.Also it reported these guys are loosing around £200.00 a week in overtime and not all the agency people were not given full time jobs thank god as they not been cleaning streets for last year or so but i must be in wrong job cause i earn same sought of wage and i cant earn any overtime now we are catching up with the times and getting our roads swept mechancaly like the rest of the modern world their should be no need for kier to pay these guys ridiculus money to sweep streets any way good luck kier and hope you can help us take some pride back in place we live

Are you a Kier shareholder by any chance, Steve Burns?

I live and work in Leyton and travel around the area in my work. The roads have always looked a mess and it will be necessary for Kier to change the culture of the lazy, scrounging old Council workforce who have merely "turned up" each day to claim their inflated wages and unwarranted overtime. There is always a bit of pain before any real improvements. Give Kier a month or 2 to put right what has been many years of neglect.

The Council's website states;
"It is the first time that the same organisation will be responsible for keeping streets and open spaces like parks clean and tidy and the unique nature of the contract means that Kier’s performance will be measured by how clean the borough is rather than by how often streets are swept".
Surely the council is the responsible organisation and as such should be held to account for the mess that now surrounds us. Instead of spending large sums discussing a future over which we have very little control LBWF should address the current issues.

As several people have said, it's the council's responsibility.

Whatever they've been doing about street-cleaning in the past couple of years, it's been disastrous here in West Walthamstow. It wasn't bad before that. so it's obviously not a huge problem - they were getting it right before. How are they justifying the changes? Bob Belam, any chance of a comment?

Tom wrote:
This is what happens when privatisation is introduced. In Waltham Forest: filthy streets. In hospitals: dirty wards. In education: academies that teach creationism. Since the Labour Party eagerly embraced Thatcherism it has only itself to blame when the electorate kick it out at the next election. Unfortunately the Tories will be just as bad. And Boris is already turning out to be oddly similar to Ken (advisers mired in sleaze allegations).

Well put! As for the pathetic accusations re. council workers...no more than you would expect from ignorant bigots who read the Sun and Mail. The workers do a good job for low pay. We don't want our services used to provide profit for the likes of Kier who fail to deliver.

Paul wrote:

Tom wrote:
This is what happens when privatisation is introduced. In Waltham Forest: filthy streets. In hospitals: dirty wards. In education: academies that teach creationism. Since the Labour Party eagerly embraced Thatcherism it has only itself to blame when the electorate kick it out at the next election. Unfortunately the Tories will be just as bad. And Boris is already turning out to be oddly similar to Ken (advisers mired in sleaze allegations).

Well put! As for the pathetic accusations re. council workers...no more than you would expect from ignorant bigots who read the Sun and Mail. The workers do a good job for low pay. We don't want our services used to provide profit for the likes of Kier who fail to deliver.

This resident reads neither paper. What he has seen over the last few years have been workers who have not done the job we've been paying them for. Of course, poor management has a lot to do with that, but to claim these workers do or have done a 'good' job in recent memory is just fanciful. Hiding behind a load of empty political slogans and analysis about the past does not disguise the fact that in a council where the work was managed in-house, the workers did a poor job and it cost a lot. If they had done a good job for good value for money, I am sure few people would have wanted changes. The workers have had their chance doing it their way and they blew it. Now we just want the streets cleaned up properly, and I for one don't care who organizes it or is paid to do it as long as it is done and the council tax bill does not go up as a result.

Steve burns wrote:
I cannot beleive what i have read i live in oliver road and could not beleive what i was seeing at 8.30 am last saturday 2 mechanical foot way sweepers then a big road sweeper come down the road with guy jet washing footways under cars street sighns i and my neghbour went out to look after they passed they had removed all dried dogs mess all the stuff between cars and under the guy even cleaned the cars down as he was going now i dont no if these guys were from bromley or the moon if these are the sdandards kier will bring to this contract .I have lived around in this street for three years and can not beleive in this day and age a council was still using 100 or so men to walk around pushing these old smelly barrows and a number spend half time in betting shops or talking to every person he has contact with on his beet. My road in the last year has got worse and worse then the council award contract to kier a massive company with proven experience when the council past over to kier they left the streets in such bad ways it no surpise it taking time to get the streets back to a standard they work to.Also it reported these guys are loosing around £200.00 a week in overtime and not all the agency people were not given full time jobs thank god as they not been cleaning streets for last year or so but i must be in wrong job cause i earn same sought of wage and i cant earn any overtime now we are catching up with the times and getting our roads swept mechancaly like the rest of the modern world their should be no need for kier to pay these guys ridiculus money to sweep streets any way good luck kier and hope you can help us take some pride back in place we live

Just had one of these machines down my street. A great improvement.

The council cleaners do a reasonable job. I worked there for a while myself and could see how the service was being diluted by outsourcing. I don't want my coucil tax being used to subsidise profits for private companies. They will go out of their way with PR to win people over then dilute the service.
Privatisation doesn't work for workers or customers. FACT.

Paul wrote:
The council cleaners do a reasonable job. I worked there for a while myself and could see how the service was being diluted by outsourcing. I don't want my coucil tax being used to subsidise profits for private companies. They will go out of their way with PR to win people over then dilute the service.
Privatisation doesn't work for workers or customers. FACT.

Fact: We voted out 2 out of 3 of the Labour Councillors in High Street ward at the last election, partly because the council was lying to itself about how great the streets were. They weren't great, they were mediocre.

If you were working there in the past couple of years, you were probably part of the problem. The workers did not deliver under the old system.

My road was cleaned in far less time by a machine this morning than the old barrow and brush guy used to do it. When finished it looked better than it had for years, even though they have not yet dealt with all the weeds that have been allowed to grow up on the pavements. But at least they are weeds and not litter.

Before, you could see a trail of fag ends and other rubbish which the sweeper would deliberately pretend he couldn't see or would push under cars. When he was finished with pretending to clean the road, he'd dump grey sacks on the curbside which would lie there for days until they split and scattered their contents back down the road. The new system has not been delivering until this morning in my street, and its not perfect, but at least, like Steve Burns, for the first time in years I have seen a glimmer of hope for an improvement.

Like any major operation - there will be some pain before the patient starts to recover. How short sighted some people are. If Paul honestly believes the council workers and management were providing a decent service, then he is deluded. Too much time on picket lines, reading the socialist worker and feathering your own nest Paul...Get real. Things are getting better already. The evidence is there (or rather is no longer there) for all to see.