Glasgow's political leaders clash over city's cleanliness ahead of Glasgow City Council elections

Susan Aitken, SNP Group leader, Malcolm Cunning, Labour leader, Thomas Kerr, Conservatives, and Jon Molyneux of the Greens were pressed by Glasgow Times political correspondent Stewart Paterson on the big issues facing the city ahead of the council elections on Thursday, May 5.

The cleanliness of the city was a key issue for all four leaders, as a reader branded the refuse service "shocking", as was the state of Glasgow’s roads.

In his opening statement, Conservative group leader Thomas Kerr blasted the current SNP administration as "incompetent and useless" for "letting down" the citizens of Glasgow.

Promising to "clean up the city" if elected, Mr Kerr said: "We believe the city has never looked as bad as it is with fly-tipping, rats running rampant, overflowing bins, potholes not being filled."

He continued: "There has been a complete denial by the council leadership that there has been a problem.

"We’ve been told the city apparently needs just a spruce up, it is ludicrous the amount of excuses we’ve heard from the council leadership rather than accepting there’s been a problem.

"We’ve got a five-point plan and that does talk about reversing bin collection cuts and returning the main door properties back to a two-weekly collection, we would scrap the bulk uplift charge, we want to create an Environmental Enforcement Team and we want to invest £10million into frontline staff over the next five years."

Describing some areas of the city as a "disgusting mess", Malcolm Cunning said if elected the Labour Party would demand fair funding and "put Glasgow first" to allow them to tackle issues such as reinstating around 250 frontline cleansing staff who have "disappeared".

He said: "The state of the city is not because the people are particularly dirty or messy, the state of the city is because we have not got the resources at the moment to keep up with the pressure that’s on the department because we simply don’t have the people on the ground."

He continued: "Out in the street, speaking to people at their doors, people now think that Glasgow, not only in their communities but they keep mentioning the city centre as well, is dirtier, more graffiti-ridden and less attractive than it has ever been and that is a consistent message from the residents.

"We need significant investment in frontline people actually sweeping the streets, actually lifting the litter, actually tidying up public areas and parks and open spaces across the city because many of them are currently a disgusting mess."

While Susan Aitken said it was "understandable" that the city’s cleanliness was a key issue for Glaswegians, she stated that although the pandemic had taken a toll on cleansing services, the SNP had made "significant progress" in the last five years.

She said: "We as the SNP inherited a service that was badly in need of modernisation and had been underinvested in for a long, long time.

"We inherited some challenges but Covid had a massive impact, there was a huge impact on our workforce, up to 50% absence rates at some point and so we did have to pull people off of services, particularly day to day street cleaning in order to make sure that the bin collection of domestic refuse continued throughout the pandemic which it did.

"And I have to say we collected 99.8% of bins during the height of the pandemic.

"We know there’s a lot of catching up to do and the SNP in their joint budget with the Greens that we put forward, and was passed in February, have put very significant investment into recruiting staff, into more investment in infrastructure in cleansing and into returning services that haven’t been delivered by the council for a long time like cleaning up leaves."

Jon Molyneux agreed the city is in a "shocking state" but said while many are upset by a "denial" of the problem and pushing the blame onto citizens, there also needs to be a cultural change.

He said: "We are not going to solve this issue unless we get people doing the right thing and working with us to make sure our services are working, and that’s about working on a much more local level."

He added: "The throwaway society we have is part of this.

"This is an entirely avoidable problem, we’re spending public money picking up litter that shouldn’t be there."

The state of Glasgow’s roads was also a key issue with readers highlighting potholes and broken pavements as the main problems.

Susan Aitken said in the last five years, £81m has been invested into the city’s roads and there has been a move away from short term fixes, adding that independent surveys have found Glasgow in the top 25% of Scotland’s local authorities for the condition of its roads.

However, Thomas Kerr said although he agrees with the move away from short term fixes, Glasgow’s roads are not at the standard they should be and if elected, a Conservative administration would aim to double the capital budget by the end of their five-year term.

Referring back to fair funding for Glasgow, Malcolm Cunning highlighted one of the main issues for the council is the funding mechanism from the Scottish Government which means the Clyde Tunnel gets the same amount of funding as a country road that has far less traffic.

He said maintaining the tunnel takes "millions" out of the city’s budget.

Jon Molyneux said the amount of money needed to maintain the roads is an "eyewatering sum" and that more investment is needed in active travel and low traffic neighbourhoods to stay on top of the issue.