Cllr Shahed Ali, Cabinet Member for Environment, has won a silver award in recognition of his leadership of the Council’s street cleaning strategy. The award was announced at the fourth annual Improvement and Efficiency Awards held by iESE (Improvement, Efficiency, Social Enterprise).
What impressed the iESE judges about Cllr Ali’s leadership was the innovative approach to street cleaning. Prompted by the need to clear the streets before the Olympics, Cllr Ali began by clearing streets along the Olympic route of bulk rubbish and clutter (including large rubbish bins, which hoarded rubbish while being an eyesore). After the Games, Cllr Ali introduced more frequent collections of rubbish which residents and businesses alike put out in pre-paid rubbish sacks. Clearing the sacks up to three times a day seems to have done the trick, getting the rubbish out of the way before it can accumulate. The new system seems also to have increased the amount of rubbish being put into recycling bags, which has brings a further benefit to the Borough. Cllr Ali has been rolling out the new approach from the Olympic route in small stages.
Accepting the award, Cllr Ali immediately thanked the staff who do the day to day work in keeping the borough clean. He was also congratulated by Mayor of Tower Hamlets Lutfur Rahman.
This is the second award Cllr Ali has collected this municipal year: in November last year, he was awarded the Environmental Elected Member of the Year award at the annual Keep Britain Tidy Network Conference in Sheffield in November 2012 for his contribution to improving the cleanliness of Tower Hamlets.
The awards have wrong footed the Labour Group, which had been trying to peddle the line that the Borough was not as clean under Mayor Rahman’s Administration as it had been under the previous Labour administration. Last year, Labour Councillors went round Bow picking up litter to try to prove their point.
During this period, an ELN reporter called at Labour Party HQ in Cambridge Heath Road and was shocked to find fag ends on the pavement outside: clearly party activists were very busy picking up other people’s litter and didn’t have time to deal with their own pavement. On a later visit, ELN found a fast food wrapper on the pavement and, taking pity on the Labour Party, put it in the bin for them.
A survey at the time found that the Borough’s streets were cleaner than in the past, a finding which seems to have been confirmed by the recent awards – though Labour “rubbished” the survey results at the time.
Labour has made no comment about the second independent award received by Cllr Ali this month. Nor, for that matter, have they staged any further stunts involving them picking up rubbish themselves.