Figures released by the council on Friday show that the whole borough has endured a third month of dirty streets since the new waste, re-cycling and street cleaning contract started on 1st April. In a written answer to a question (number 40) asked by me it emerged that 41% of streets across the whole borough were unacceptably dirty in the month of June. Coincidentally 41% of streets across the whole borough were unacceptably dirty for the whole first quarter of the new Enterprise contract.
Ealing has been visibly dirtier for months now. The Labour administration has consistently tried to underplay the size and duration of this service failure. It has affected the whole borough for the whole of the first quarter of the council’s financial year. When we met to discuss this issue at our special council meeting on 8th May the Labour leader of the council asked that we put events in context and said that the service was ‘essentially back to normal’. If this is normal then the new normal is a lot worse than the old normal.