Get benefits claimants back to work – cleaning our filthy streets

Excuse me while I side-step steaming piles of rubbish and try not to tread on the remains of someone’s take-away. The pavement is so flecked with blobs of chewing gum and putrid pools of God-knows-what that getting from A to B by Shanks’s pony requires a hopscotch-style jump/walk.

When exactly did our streets become so disgusting and why don’t we do something about it? After all, it doesn’t have to be like this – as anyone who has travelled to well-run towns and cities in other parts of the world knows. Take Tokyo, which hardly has any bins but is litter free, because pedestrians have been conditioned to take their rubbish home. Then there’s Dubai, where some pavements literally shine. 

The last time I was there, I spotted a single piece of litter on the road, and it was a noteworthy event. Sure, there’s less alcohol sloshing around, but this is as much about civic pride, general standards of behaviour and the prioritisation of local government resources as it is about booze. Anti-social behaviour, marauding around tossing half-eaten kebabs in the gutter and throwing up on the pavement just isn’t a thing. 

By contrast, back streets in certain deprived areas are now little short of a health hazard – as shocking images posted on social media by the MP Lee Anderson recently exposed. His video of an alleyway in Blackpool outside “homes of multiple occupancy” featured plastic bags, dirty nappies, even a dead pigeon – a damning illustration of a total loss of respect for public spaces in some areas.

As councils grapple with a soaring population and salami-sliced budgets, street cleaning is taking a hammering. Numerous local authorities have warned that they are likely to cut such services in an effort to make ends meet. Greenwich council recently floated plans to save more than £1 million by reducing the frequency of street sweeping from weekly to as little as once a month. When the rat population explodes, any initial savings will doubtless be swiftly negated by pest control bills.

Back in the Blair years, a spirited Labour minister called Hazel Blears was widely lampooned for suggesting that offenders could play their part in cleaning up Britain. Rather than festering in their cells, they could be made to don orange jumpsuits and set to work. Obviously it wouldn’t have been successful on a Saturday night in Soho, but a carefully managed programme could have worked wonders by the plastic-strewn A34. Unfortunately, it all sounded too “Texan chain gang” for the Islington commentariat and the idea hit the buffers.

During the Coalition years, Iain Duncan Smith came up with a variation of the same theme with a “Work Activity” scheme aimed at the unemployed. In 2011, the Department of Work and Pensions announced plans to force benefit claimants to undertake community work, such as litter picking, in return for handouts. Cue howls of indignation from the usual suspects about “demeaning” those who were out of work. The tentative scheme lacked the political conviction required to get it – and any rubbish – properly off the ground, and it was eventually scrapped.

Around this time, a high-profile legal case brought by a young benefit claimant who didn’t like being sent on a mandatory work placement at Poundland made such initiatives more difficult. In a ruling that undermined the vital principle of attaching conditionality to welfare, a judge stopped short of agreeing that the scheme constituted “slave labour” but declared it unlawful on a technicality. The decision reinforced the idea of something for nothing, and erected more political obstacles to the introduction of other such schemes.

All that was over a decade ago, and the number of young people hanging around doing next to nothing courtesy of hard-working taxpayers is larger than ever. But there is plenty for them to do. Millions of smokers still seem to think cigarette butts evaporate on contact with the pavement. Council refuse collection services are no match for the scale of detritus from street-food stalls. The paucity of bins – a lingering legacy of the Troubles, when they made a perfect hiding place for IRA bombs – are a partial explanation, though no excuse. Nobody is ever fined, so they keep on throwing.

According to the latest official figures, not far off half a million young people aged 18 to 24 are on out-of-work benefits, the vast majority of whom would be physically able to do some work. Many complain of mental health problems that might well be alleviated by fresh air; camaraderie, and a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. The physical exercise associated with compulsory litter-picking sessions surely wouldn’t go amiss. 

So let’s fill their yawning days with a sense of purpose and get them doing their bit, transforming our streets from an embarrassment into an urban landscape befitting the sixth largest economy in the world. Once the scheme is under way, I’ll wager that there will be a rush of applications for more salubrious jobs.