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ITEM EX11

CHEWING GUM ON PAVEMENTS

1. Council on 1 April 2003 adopted the following motion from Councillor Patrick Greene:

2. welcomes the present joint co-operation between the County and City Councils in finding ways of ridding our pavements and roads in the City of the appalling spectacle of flattened and sticky chewing gum, bearing in mind the bid for Oxford to become the European City of Culture in 2008; and
3. urges the Executive to:

4. District Councils are legally responsible for cleaning and sweeping streets (including gum removal) and for removing litter. The County Council is responsible for the upkeep of the fabric of the highway.
5. The essence of the arrangement in Oxford between the County and City Councils is to keep things simple so that each authority is responsible for its own functions but carries them out to agreed standards. Thus the City Council remains responsible for chewing gum removal and they are looking for suitable equipment to do this. Within the County Council’s highway maintenance budget, additional funding of £150,000 has been provided for a higher standard of repair to highway features so as to complement City Council efforts to achieve a cleaner street scene and together achieve an overall improvement. None of this additional money is for chewing gum removal: that is the City’s part of the bargain.

Extending Partnerships

6. In my view the same arrangements as in Oxford should apply in any other town. Cleaning gum off streets ought unambiguously to remain a District Council function. It may be that Town or Parish Councils would wish to help with this in some way.
7. Improved City/Town centre management features as a part of the CCMT list of priority tasks for the County Council. The Executive could ask other District Councils to do more to remove gum from streets in other county towns. However, providing an incentive for District Councils to do this by uprating standards of highway maintenance is financially problematic. For example, to provide a similar level of service to that planned for Oxford city centre in the 10 largest Oxfordshire towns, plus Oxford suburban centres, would cost in the order of £1m a year. This is what we currently spend on the winter maintenance service, or on signs and road marking maintenance. Switching money from current activities is plainly not an option.
8. If the Executive wish to pursue an expansion of these town centre partnerships then I suggest this must be done as part of the budget planning process for 2004/05 and future years. Following the lead of Oxford, one way forward could be to follow the implementation of Integrated Transport Strategies in the country towns. This would control the extent and pace of establishing any new partnership arrangements. I cannot see any realistic prospect of doing anything more extensive than this given the Council’s financial position and the imperatives of concentrating on meeting targets for Best Value Performance Indicators of highway conditions.

Identifying and Adoption of Systems of Chewing Gum Removal

9. As this is a District Council function carried out by a range of in-house and contractor organisations - who may well have commercial tie-ups to gum removal services – I do not recommend that this is something we should spend our time on. In my view there is sufficient exchange of information among technical officers and in contracting organisations to take care of this.

RECOMMENDATION

10. The Executive is RECOMMENDED:

1. to consider the possibility, pace and scale of expansion of town centre improvement partnerships in the context of the budget planning process for 2004/05; and
2. not to agree to any work being done by officers to identify and recommend methods of gum removal to other organisations.

RICHARD DIX
Assistant Director (Highway Management)

Background papers: Nil

Contact Officer: Richard Dix Tel: 01865 815663

May 2003

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