A litter-stricken area of Liverpool is to be cleaned up by a new campaign which was launched at the weekend.
The ‘Don’t Mess With Tuebrook’ campaign was started by Carol Sung to try to raise awareness amongst residents at how dirty their streets have become.
Mrs Sung, the Labour Party candidate for the Tuebrook and Stoneycroft ward in the next council elections, and her team managed to collect 25 bags of rubbish from Breckside Park in an hour of cleaning.
She told JMU Journalism: “Some spots are lovely, and then you’ll see other spots and you’ll think ‘What’s going on?’ We are going to run this campaign until we’ve got some way of getting rid of all this grot.
”This is one of the reasons I got involved in the first place, because of the way Tuebrook is looking. Let me tell you, there are easier ways of spending your life. I’m a grandmother, I retired 10 years ago, I enjoyed my retirement.
“If it shows my interest in the area, and people understand that, great. If people think it’s just a gimmick, well then there’s nothing I can do about that. It’s what they think.”
However, the sitting councillor for the area, Steve Radford, said that the council should be doing more about dirty streets across the city.
The leader of the Liberal Party group in Liverpool added that the problem should be with the cleansing contractors the Labour administration have chosen.
He told JMU Journalism: “Anybody could turn up anywhere in the city and say obviously that they want to have this area cleaned up. But I think what the bigger question is, why have cleaning standards dropped to an all-time low?
“We run the biggest community skip programme in the city as ward councillors here where people can help themselves to the skips and we’ve been doing that for about eight years now. We don’t need an election gimmick.
“It’s very good for a Labour candidate to say how terrible the streets are, when they’re running the council. They’ve got a Labour mayor who wanted all the powers and he got the contract. So the question is why aren’t the cleansing contractor being terminated of their place?”