Why are Liverpool’s streets so dirty?

“It was getting me down, every day it was just absolutely filthy. How can people live like this?” I’m speaking to Vicky Osayande, the founder of Litter Clear Volunteer, a litter-picking group that operates across Liverpool. She first created the group in February 2021, after noticing rubbish piling up on her walk to work.

As she dodged empty crisp packets and bottles, grime caked on roads and graffiti tags adorning Great Homer Street, she says what was once a pleasant stroll became “disgusting”. “I walk because I like to switch off in the mornings with a nice journey — that’s why I don’t take the bus,” she says. Instead, the depressing nature of seeing our city in such a state left her irritable and angry. 

Vicky is far from alone in her disdain. According to annual surveys by Liverpool Council, satisfaction across the city in terms of street cleanliness has dropped in recent years, hitting just under 40% in 2024 — compared to the local government benchmark of 61%. An assessment of 300 sites across Liverpool last year also found that our litter and graffiti problem is three times the national average, and last year alone the council received over 20,000 calls about fly-tipping. 

Upon his arrival into Lime Street station in 1995, US journalist Bill Bryson described Liverpool as looking like it was having a “festival” of rubbish. So what is it about Liverpool that leaves our streets feeling especially grimy? 

That’s today’s story, which is the first edition of Answers in The Post — our new feature looking at some of your big questions about how Merseyside works. 

But first, your Post briefing — which includes some very interesting revelations about the future of Peter Mitchell’s Big Help empire…

Your Post briefing

Falling like dominoes…The Charity Commission has launched an inquiry into Liverpool charity CG Community Council over issues with its governance and property management. Keen Post readers might remember this name — CG Community Council was one of the many charities and organisations linked to Big Help Project, and was previously overseen by former Labour councillor Peter Mitchell and his wife, sitting Labour councillor Colette Goulding. Despite its mission statement of “advanc[ing] education and provid[ing] facilities for health, recreation and leisure-time”, CG owns the leasehold for 16 properties that were used to house vulnerable tenants. As a result of the Charity Commission inquiry into Big Help Project, CG Community Trust was banned from selling or otherwise disposing of those homes without prior consent. Now, a new inquiry into CG will establish if trustees have complied with “their legal duties in respect of the administration, governance and management of the charity”, in particular if the charity is accounting for its funds and assets, and if it has suffered "a financial loss as a result of any misconduct".

Elsewhere in the Big Help empire: As if things couldn’t get any worse for Mitchell and co, The Post has received a copy of a letter sent to employees of the Big Help group last week, alerting them of unpaid pension contributions. On top of this, staff also missed out on their payday last month, with an email sent to workers to apologise. “Due to circumstances beyond our control, we have not received monies due to us,” the email said. “We are working tirelessly to get this resolved.” We asked Big Help about this, but they didn't answer our email.

Is the empire about to crumble? According to staff members, bailiffs repossessed Big Help’s offices on Boaler Street last week, as well as several other properties previously used by them. Those same Boaler Street offices are already up for sale on estate agents Eddisons website for a little under £2m. What a steal — if you fancy entering a bid, take a nosey around here. 

Know any more about this story? Email abi@livpost.co.uk. 

Is Liverpool’s reputation as a grimy city justified?

In the first official edition of Answers in The Post, we’re investigating the city’s troubled relationship with litter and grime, and what is being done to counteract it. 

Not a homegrown problem?

One key reason our city ends up strewn with rubbish is our booming visitor economy. As the fifth most visited city in England for international visitors, and the third most visited by people from around the UK, each weekend thousands flock to the city to enjoy its bars, restaurants, clubs and — as the litter on the streets afterwards will tell you — its takeaways. 

In 2022, the region attracted nearly 60 million visitors in a single year. Of course, this is great news financially. Take Eurovision for example; in 2023, the contest delivered a £54m economic boost to the Liverpool City Region. We’ve continued to reap the rewards —  a new study from the combined authority published in March found repeat visitors injected an additional £11.1m to the local economy in the last 12 months alone. But boy, do these walking cash bags leave a lot of rubbish behind them.

As environmental psychologist Lee Chambers tells me, the transience of people in a city can influence their behaviour. “Tourists are simply less attached to a place than a resident would be,” he explains. Without the emotional attachment of calling a place home, people are more likely to treat their surroundings poorly, he suggests — whether that’s littering or causing other damage to our streets. 

Then there’s the ‘broken windows’ theory: when an environment is damaged or dirty, it encourages others to behave in the same way. “It gives people an environmental cue that actually, they’re not creating a problem — they’re just adding to a situation that already exists so the impact of it would be minimal,” says Chambers. 

The solution to this is simple: keep things clean. If an area is “kept in pristine condition”, Chambers adds, “we’re a lot less likely to challenge that [with littering or vandalism].”

Our students

Similar to tourism, the transience of our student population is also a factor. There are around 30,000 students in Liverpool every year, most of whom live in shared accommodation such as houses of multiple occupation (HMOs). 

Areas with lots of HMOs are typically the spots with the highest levels of fly-tipping and litter: Smithdown Road, Toxteth and the city centre all topped recent polls by residents as the worst affected areas. 

Laura Robertson-Collins, the council’s cabinet member for neighbourhoods, says that all of these places are “very high intensity in regards to requiring resources”. She says that for a lot of international students and students from elsewhere in England, they may not be aware of which colour bins to use for their waste, and this can create problems in the way litter is then recycled or disposed of. 

On top of this, she points out that students can find themselves put under huge pressure by landlords at the end of their tenancies, forced to clear out an entire home with nothing more than their regular bins to dispose of bulky items. This is why the council has begun working with universities and student unions to prepare for “move-out” season in June, creating reuse programmes for crockery, clothes and furniture that would otherwise be fly-tipped or left piled up by bins in alleyways. 

A homelessness epidemic

In 2023, Liverpool Council declared a homeless and housing emergency, with statistics showing the number of rough sleepers in the city had risen by more than 40%. As of last December, more than 3,000 people across the region — including around 1,400 children — were without a permanent address. 

One of the most visible aspects of the current crisis is the problems associated with waste. Unlike residents with a fixed address, the homeless have no recourse to organised rubbish pick-ups, meaning they resort to using public bins — which often overflow during busy periods — while litter accumulates in public parks and encampments. 

Again, Lee Chambers points out that this behaviour often “creates permission for other people to do the same thing”. When public bins aren’t emptied often enough, or are limited in busy areas, people will start to place their rubbish next to the container. Before long, the broken windows effect comes into play — devaluing and damaging residents’ perception of a place.

Chambers is keen to stress that “given the inequity that we have in society, we should not resort to blam[ing] homeless people” for the accumulation of litter in our public spaces. The build-up of this kind of waste can itself exacerbate the spread of diseases and pests such as rats, only making life harder for those struggling with homelessness. Instead, a strategy to better look after the vulnerable is needed to prevent homelessness and the deterioration of public spaces. 

When we asked Liverpool Council about this, they told us that there are 1,750 public bins on the city’s streets and a further 250 across the city’s parks that “get emptied regularly”. “Everyone in public areas can and should use these for their waste,” they added.

Are our services truly failing?

Despite satisfaction with Liverpool’s cleanliness dropping to under 40%, the most recent statistics on how well we manage our grime tell a different story. An annual review by the neighbourhoods scrutiny committee into Liverpool Streetscene Services Ltd — the council’s subsidiary company responsible for cleaning our streets and managing waste — claims that in total, there are less than 50 missed bins per 100,000 collections. While fly-tipping may be a prevalent issue — with over 16,000 reports last year — 80% of these incidents were responded to in less than five days, and between 2023 and 2024 reports of fly-tipping actually dropped by 6%. And in the last two years, the number of complaints to the council about littering overall has dropped by 25%.

While this may be the case, the gap between the resources needed and the budget available has grown, leading to fewer refuse staff being directly employed to clean up the streets since 2016. This decrease in people seen to be “on the ground” could account for the perception that we’re not doing enough to tidy up Liverpool — and as Chambers points out, budget cuts to public services like this can often leave people feeling “hopeless”. 

“When people are living in a time of crisis, their behaviour becomes more polarised,” he explains, and points to the rise of grassroots litter-picking groups — like Vicky’s Litter Clear Volunteer — across the city. On the one hand, people are being driven to become more environmentally conscious, while on the other hand, people who have never engaged in negative behaviours begin “covert” or “passive” littering. “People leave their wrappers to just blow away,” Chambers says. “It's not as visible or as big of an action as deliberately throwing something on the floor, but it's still littering.”

So what is being done to tackle the problem?

There are a number of big changes planned in a bid to improve how residents feel about the city. Most notably, after nine years of Liverpool Streetscene Services Ltd overseeing cleaning and bin collections, Liverpool Council will be taking back full control of operations by the end of this year. While the council told us there would be “no immediate difference in the collection of waste and street cleansing operations”, over the following months “a great deal of work will be done to align teams to provide greater control, capacity, and flexibility to make sure that services meet the different needs of each neighbourhood”.

Councillor Robertson-Collins says the reason behind the decision was, in part, due to new government legislation requiring weekly food waste collection from 2026, and new national recycling targets. In her view, bringing these services back into public control will allow the council to have more oversight and hit these targets easier. However, as Lib Dem councillor Kris Brown is keen to point out: “This brings another level of additional accountability and responsibility for the council”, who will need to step up and become the "facilitator of change” to avoid further scrutiny.

On top of these changes, a new group of external litter enforcers will arrive in the city over the summer. This is in addition to a million-pound investment by the council for 12 enforcement officers internally to prevent further fly-tipping, dog-fouling and other environmental offences. If approved later this month, these officers will be assisted by an increase in fines for those offences — a rise from £80 for littering to £200. 

While Robertson-Collins is optimistic these changes will work towards achieving a cleaner city, whether they are enough to challenge the belief Liverpool is dirty or unkept remains to be seen. “We live in this throw away society,” she says, pointing towards the summer period where litter in green spaces often hits new heights. “People go into the parks and just leave all their rubbish, and why do people do that?” she says. “We've got to really start making sure everyone's responsible for their actions, because we can't carry on treating our city and the world that way.”

Thanks for reading this week’s Answers in The Post. If you’ve got a burning question about Merseyside that you want us to dig into, follow this link to submit it.