'Community Champions' at Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council
Serco has found that local people as the key users of local streets are almost always best placed to know where the environmental ‘grot spots’ are and many are keen to play a role in helping to keep the local environment clean and litter free.
In partnership with Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council, Serco enlisted the help of local volunteer ‘Community Champions’ who, whilst out and about are happy to take digital photos of environmental defects such as heavy litter, graffiti, fly posting and fly tipping.
The cameras capture the GPS coordinates of the photo location, which are relayed to Serco’s service desk. Details are then transmitted to a rapid response team via their vehicle satellite navigation systems for immediate clean up.
The benefits of the scheme for community and council include:
- High profile community engagement raising local, regional and national awareness of the good efforts and performance of the partnership
- Greater localised monitoring allowing us to deal with more incidents of litter, graffiti and fly-tip hot-spots more rapidly
- A cleaner local environment, after the initial hard work the local environment looks and feels much cleaner.
- Faster location and rectification of defects using GPS technology to precisely identify and locate ‘grot-spots’.
- Allows officers and Serco supervisory staff to spend more time on pro-active preventative education and enforcement tackling environmental issues as source.
- Full transparency and auditability of results through the use of ICT solutions which capture digital before and after images of reported defects and made available to the public through a dedicated Community Champions website.
- Fully integrated with Serco’s service solution with a rapid response cleansing hit-squad equipped with in-vehicle GPS designed to deal quickly effectively with all reported incidents.
- Fully consistent with Government and Audit Commission aspirations to get local people more involved in local services with implications for CPA and service inspections scores.