City Council to tackle overgrown grass

Plymouth City Council is pulling out all the stops to make sure the overgrown grass around the city is cut over the next few days.  Bringing in additional temporary staff and upskilling other street cleansing and grounds staff is the solution to addressing the issue.

Councillor Michael Leaves, Cabinet Member for Street Scene and the Environment, said: “A majority of the City’s grass is cut over an 18 working day cycle (Mondays to Fridays).  We do not cut at weekends as we want residents and visitors to be able to enjoy the local amenities and we don't want to disrupt that. We are on the case and the aim is for the full City grass cut to be complete by the middle of next week, weather and machinery permitting. That’s six million square metres of grass, and we are doing all we can to make sure it gets cut as quickly as possible.

“The grass took on a growth spurt during May, particularly and the team recently took on grass cutting in the cemeteries which obviously has to be done very carefully and sensitively.

“Other factors that have resulted in us falling behind have been because of changes to work patterns, required because of changes in the growing season and some of the more experienced members retiring.  New staff need training and obviously this is best done whilst undertaking the work so they get to know the areas they’re going to be covering. This is an honest assessment of why we’ve fallen behind and for that we apologise.  We can do better and rest assured, we are definitely prioritising this.

“We have a full schedule of where we are planning to cut the grass over the next few days so we should be able to give people a pretty accurate idea of what day we will be in their area cutting grass, if they are interested.

“We are on our third cutting cycle since March and will move onto the fourth cycle very shortly – and we will also be re-doing areas that you and we are not happy with such as long ends springing back up and bits we’ve missed because of parked cars or if the grass was not cut as well as it could have been first time around.”