Icare streetcare in gloucester provided by Gloucester City Council in partnership with Accord

The Council agreed at its meeting on the 30th November 2006 to award a 15 year contract to Enterprise to deliver streetcare service in Gloucester as from February 2007.

What services are included in Streetcare?

• Refuse and recycling services
• Street cleansing
• Public conveniences
• Ground maintenance
• Parks & Open Space
• Street Management

What is the Council responsible for?
Primarily strategic, developing strategic plans and visions for the services, setting standards, determining investment and service priorities, leading on new developments, capacity building in the community- development of neighbourhood partnerships and strategic level consultation, leading on external funding opportunities, partnership development, contract management development.

What is Enterprise responsible for?
Primarily operational - delivering services, community engagement, consultation with residents and users and promotion and development of the services, responsible for delivering and introducing methods of working to bring about service improvements.

What is the Council seeking to achieve  by doing this?

• Improved performance and customer satisfaction: resident satisfaction levels with Streetcare Services: to be in the top 25% councils in the country.
• Flexible, timely and responsive services with a capacity to meet future demands and able to deliver solutions to meet local issues and changing political and economic influences:  measured by the number of local issues identified and resolved.
• Joined up and integrated services:  that deliver consistent standards across the city and that they are coordinated: measured through achieving agreed standards of performance (performance indicators).
• Cost effective and competitive services: improvements achieved within the existing budget and without increasing the cost to residents - cost of the service.
• A motivated workforce: measured through reduced level of sickness and good staff morale, level of training and development.

What changes and improvements will we see and when?

Refuse and recycling

• 50% recycling target met by end of 2008, this will provide residents with the opportunity to recycle up to 70% of their waste. New scheme to be implemented Spring 2008 following consultation and an education and awareness programme - current recycling rate 22%
• Green waste collection extended to all appropriate households to start early summer 2007 to include the collection of kitchen waste from 2008 - current garden waste service is to 26,000 households
• A new weekly kitchen waste service to be provided for all households not suitable for the green waste collection service in 2008.
• Increase in weekly collections of other material collected to include: Cardboard, Plastics, Textiles, Investment in new refuse and recycling fleet.

Public conveniences

• Extended opening hours -The city centre public convenience opening hours to be   extended to 0800-2000hrs Monday to Saturday and 1000-1800hrs on Sundays
• Twice yearly deep cleanse, hourly inspections city centre, 3 inspections per day outlying areas, 6 monthly review and report.
• £250,000 investment in public conveniences

Street cleansing

• Extension of City Centre Night Owl Service Mon - Sat 10pm - 4am  (including steam cleansing) - currently Tues to Sat funded until Christmas 2006.
• Increased cleansing standards.

Parks and Grounds maintenance

• £320,000 investment in parks, play areas and street furniture in the first year of the contract.
• Introduction of individual parks management plans to be prepared
• Introduction of a parks marketing plan aimed at increased public use and satisfaction

Improved depot facilities

• Investment in Eastern Avenue Depot for Streetcare Services to provide a modern and  efficient facility to deliver improved recycling performance

Community engagement

• The streetcare service in the city will be managed through four geographic areas

There will be an integrated multi skilled neighbourhood teams allocated to each of the above areas. The size and nature of the teams will reflect the needs of each area. Each team will be headed up by a team leader who will be responsible for linking with communities and centrally provided streetcare services (refuse and recycling and grass cutting ) to make sure the services reflect  local priorities.

How can local communities businesses get involved?

The Council has agreed to create a Streetcare Partnering Board and Streetcare Forum

The Streetcare Partnering Board will be responsible for advising the cabinet member for streetcare on the effective management of the contract and for championing high quality standards of streetcare in the city. It has been acknowledged that the board, if it is to be effective, must be business focused, able to operate at a strategic level and enable the cabinet member for Streetcare to make decisions on behalf of the Council. It should not become a "talking shop" that stops improvements.

Membership of the board

• Cabinet Member for Streetcare
• 2 x Council members or nominated deputy
• 2 x Community representative plus a nominated deputy
• 1x Business representative
• 1x Chief Executive Streetcare Partner

The Streetcare Forum will support and complement the Board. It will be the mechanism by which the residents and businesses are able to influence, input and provide feedback from the residents and businesses to the Board and  the Cabinet.  The Streetcare Forum will be an important vehicle for bringing community issues and priorities together with Council, regional and national priorities. Views of the Streetcare Forum will inform the Streetcare Board in the development of their proposals to the Council's Cabinet on future priorities.

Membership of the Streetcare Forum

• Cabinet Member Streetcare  (Chair)
• 2 x Councillor reps from the Streetcare Board
• Assistant Director Streetcare  (GCC)
• Streetcare Contract Manager  (partner)
• 1 x community rep (with a nominated deputy) from each neighbourhood partnerships or   similar -1 x housing tenants rep
• 1 x business rep
• 1x friends of parks/nature reserves
• 1x allotments representative
• 1x Civic Trust
• 1x Environment & Ecology Representative
• 2 x youth reps
• 2x staff reps

Last Updated: 30/05/2008