Call for Slough residents to use fireworks responsibly after major clean-up operation

A council officer said he was ‘shocked’ at the amount of fireworks that had to be cleaned up in Slough following the recent Guy Fawkes Night celebrations.

The issue was discussed during a meeting of Slough’s Corporate Improvement Scrutiny committee on Tuesday which heard about the challenges facing the council’s waste management team.

Councillor Chandra Muvvala (Ind, Langley Marish) said that during the festive season there is a lot of debris from the fireworks and he asked the meeting what sort of challenges this posed to the council’s waste collection operations.

Matthew Hooper, the council’s director of environment and highways, said: “I was pretty shocked at the impact that the fireworks have on our operation.

“The day after we had to take all our street cleansing crews off of street cleansing to clean fireworks that had been left on street corners.

“We don’t want to stop people celebrating but we want to get better messages out there around how to do it responsibly.”

The meeting also heard about Slough’s poor recycling rate, which at 23 per cent is one of the lowest across the South East.

The average recycling rate for the South East is 45 per cent while the national average stands at 44 per cent.

One key issue concerns the recycling of food waste.

Since June 2024, the borough has been trialling a weekly food waste collection service across five neighbourhoods.

This is in preparation for the Government’s new recycling scheme, making it a statutory requirement that all boroughs must have weekly food waste collections by April 2026.

But Cllr Christine Hulme (Lab, Herschel Park) said food waste is still not being recycled correctly in parts of the borough.

She said: “Food waste is still being thrown on the street. There is an infestation of rats now around Chalvey and I don’t just mean in people’s gardens, I mean in the street.

“You’re putting things in place that residents are clearly not using or ignoring. We need to look at the level of enforcement available.”

Mr Hooper agreed and said that solving the issue does come down to enforcement.

The meeting also heard what steps are being taken to tackle fly-tipping in Slough.

On a typical month, Slough Borough Council can receive up to 200 reports of fly-tipping, which costs the local authority between £3000 and £6000 to clean up.

Cllr Gurcharan Manku (Con, Langley St Mary’s), lead member for environmental services, said earlier this year the council introduced a specific collection crew tackling reports of fly-tipping.

A report updating councillors on the council’s waste management and recycling services said residents in Houses of Multiple Occupation (HMOs) are responsible for a ‘disproportionate levels of fly-tipping’.

Cllr Zaffar Ajaib (Lib Dem, Herschel Park) wanted to know what the council is doing to tackle this.

Mr Hooper said: “HMO licensing conditions are being changed to make sure that we’ve got more powers to enforce against landlords who don’t adequately deal with the waste that’s generated from their HMOs.”

Cllr Dhruv Tomar (Con, South Central) called for a more proactive approach to recycling, such as introducing reverse vending machines which reward residents with vouchers if they recycle containers.

Mr Hooper said that these machines are part of the Deposit Return Scheme which will be coming forward in 2027.

It will increase the price of certain products to incentivise people to return the containers and get that money back.

But he said: “In order to get supermarkets and other organisations to invest in [these machines] it needs to be worth their while. We need to start the conversations with supermarkets [now].”