A MACHINE to remove chewing gum from the city’s pavements and a mini-fleet of vacuum cleaners will soon be introduced on Bradford’s streets.

Bradford Council has revealed that it recently purchased a chewing gum removal machine that will be introduced in the city centre next month before being rolled out across other town centres.

If follows recent work by the Bradford BID team to clean a number of city centre streets.

The announcement was made in response to a question at a full Council meeting on what was being done to make the city’s streets cleaner.

Five year plan to clear gum from city centre streets

Members were told that as well as the gum remover, the Council recently purchased four “electric vacuum machines” to clear up small items like cigarette butts from streets.

Councillor Michelle Swallow (Lab, Clayton and Fairweather Green) had asked "what strategies the Council is going to employ to get our city pavements looking nice, with particular problems being gum and cigarette butts."

A response said: "The Council has recently purchased four electric vacuum machines to specifically target small items of litter such as cigarette butts.

"In addition we have also bought a new chewing gum removal machine to tackle this perennial problem.

"It is the intention to introduce the new equipment into the city centre in mid August when staff have been recruited and trained. If successful we will look at rolling this out across the district centres."