‘The smell of neglect’ has spread across Slough, a councillor has said as she called for more to be done to keep streets clean.

Labour Party opposition councillors called on council leaders to bring in more litter bins and launch a ‘street cleaning taskforce’ to review street cleaning in the borough at a meeting on Thursday, September 19.

Labour group leader Pavitar K Mann said councillors had received ‘rising complaints’ from residents about rubbish. She said: “We’ve seen overflowing rubbish and flytips increasing and even recently the smell of neglect seems to permeate our town.”

She added: “Our residents should be able to take pride in our neighbourhoods. We all deserve to live in an environment that is clean, safe, and inviting. It directly influences how safe residents feel and their overall pride in their communities.”

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Councillor Mann said council staff ‘work tirelessly under challenging conditions’ to keep the streets clean. But she claimed that a reduction in staffing numbers ‘means there are less people to do an increasing workload.’

But Conservative council leaders defended the council’s action on street cleaning – claiming that they have improved the service.

Gurcharan Manku – the councillor responsible for cleaning – said he doesn’t ‘need to take lessons’ from Labour councillors.

He said the average response time for all requests to the department was 12 days, that refuse collectors had only missed 28 bins in August, and that staff had removed 80 tonnes of flytipped waste in the last three months.

He acknowledged that the council was making £71,000 of ‘efficiency savings’ in its environmental services budget this year. But he said calling this a cut was ‘fake news’ and that the council was ‘minimising the impact of these on frontline services’.

Council leader Dexter Smith also said that statistics showed ‘improving performance’ in the street cleaning service.

But Labour councillor Robert Anderson said the council still had to face up to the ‘perception’ among residents that streets are dirty.

He said Conservative councillors ‘They must know how from their own inboxes just what a problem the state of the town is at the moment because it’s 90 per cent of my casework’.

He added: “You can trot out all the figures if you like but if the perception is wrong, the perception is what you have to deal with. And that is where we are now because everybody knows the town looks an absolute state at the moment.”

Conservative councillor Zaffar Satti argued that it was up to residents to keep Slough tidy – and that improving town cleanliness is ‘a matter of changing the behaviour of the people’.

Labour’s proposals were defeated, with Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors voting against them.