Glasgow is not alone in facing challenges with street cleansing, the City Council leader, Susan Aitken, has said.

Councillor Aitken, said: “Our public services, along with public services right across the UK, and indeed around the world have been seriously impacted by covid and continue to be, and our cleansing and environmental services are part of that. They are in recovery though.”

She said world leaders and delegates at COP 25 in November would see a “city in transition”.

The City Council leader who has previously said in an interview she didn’t agree the streets where ‘filthy’ said world leaders and delegates at COP 26 will not see a “dirty” city when they arrive for the summit.

She said: “I don’t think it will be dirty. Glasgow has challenges but some of the descriptions of Glasgow are inaccurate and unfair."

She added: "We are far from unique in the UK or indeed in Scotland” in facing those challenges.

She said: "When world leaders and all of the many other people who come to Glasgow in November, when they look at the city, they will see exactly a mirror of the cities that they have come from. A city in transistion, a city that is decarbonising."

On the wider environmental challenges she said Glasgow was moving towards the ambition of decarbonising by 2030.

The plans include the Glasgow Metro system which Councillor Aitken said was part of a plan that takes Glasgow towards being a “sustainable city”.

She told BBC Good Morning Scotland the Metro would take 20 years to complete.

She said: “That is an intervention that will take two decades. That is the scale and timescale we are looking at.”

The council leader said the people and organisations who can help fund the Metro will be in the city during COP.

She said it would need to be a “combination of public and private finance”.

She added: “The people who make the decisions (about green finance) are going to be in Glasgow.”

Aitken said plans like the Metro are the sort of “actions cities around the world need to be delivering”.

She said it was in the urban areas where the most emissions where being generated.