STREET cleaning in Ceredigion is to be scaled back as the council’s technical services department tries to make budget savings.

The number of hours of weekend and bank holiday cleaning will be cut and the council will also reduce the amount of cleaning at its offices.

And the council will even stop entering the Loo of the Year Awards to save just £2,000, despite consistently succeeding in the awards in recent years.

The steps are being drawn up as the technical services department tries to cut its budget by £2.4m by looking at making savings across a range of areas.

The authority’s controversial contract with PricewaterhouseCooper had put forward a range of proposals that would see services privatised, but that was ruled out by the council leaving the department having to find cuts.

Work has now been done to find the savings with the outcome being a drop in the amount of street cleaning, a cut of over 50 per cent to the toilet maintenance budget and getting town and community councils to provide floral displays instead of the county council doing so.

A report that went before the council’s thriving communities scrutiny committee heard that there will be a reduction in the number of street cleaning staff employed by the authority with a reduction of cleaning hours over weekends and bank holidays.

The council will also seek to reach an agreement with the Trunk Road Agency for the TRA to pay a fee to the council for cleaning of litter from roads.

A suggestion that the council would not clean the streets on one day a week was dismissed as it would not be “politically or publicly acceptable”.

While the council has said it hopes cleanliness standards will not suffer too much, the report admits that there is likely to be a public backlash.

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