Redhill chewing gum clean-up: £12,141 grant, work this month

Redhill’s pedestrianised town centre is getting a specialist deep clean this month, paid for by a £12,141.86 grant the borough council has won from the national Chewing Gum Task Force (council announcement, 4 August).

Reigate & Banstead Borough Council announced the award on Tuesday 4 August. The Task Force was set up by the government’s environment department, Defra, and is administered by the charity Keep Britain Tidy, which hands councils grants for two things: removing the gum already trodden into the pavement, and signage designed to stop it coming back.

What the money buys

The council has set out the sequence: “Later this month, there will be a specialist, deep clean of the pedestrian area to kickstart the campaign, followed by bright signage on lampposts with a simple message to ‘Bin your gum’.”

The signs are not an afterthought. In areas funded in earlier rounds of the scheme, monitoring found a reduced rate of gum littering of up to 86 per cent in the first two months, according to the council’s announcement. Across its first four years the Task Force has awarded grants worth a total of £6.46 million and funded the cleaning of over 4.15 million square metres of pavement.

The scale of the problem is national. Keep Britain Tidy’s figures, cited in the announcement, put gum staining on around 77 per cent of England’s streets and 99 per cent of retail sites.

Cllr Hannah Avery, the council’s executive member for neighbourhood services, said: “We believe this funding can have a long-term impact in Redhill and local people will be inspired to keep the town centre cleaner and chewing gum free.”

Allison Ogden-Newton OBE, chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy, said: “While chewing gum litter remains a stubborn eyesore in our public spaces, the good news is that this scheme is already driving major improvements.”

Part of a longer tidy-up

The grant builds on work the council has already done in the town centre: 32 solar-powered big belly bins were installed across central Redhill in 2024, which the council says has helped to reduce litter.

What it means for you: if you shop in the pedestrian area, expect cleaning crews and freshly stripped paving at some point this month, followed by the new lamppost signs. The deep clean is a one-off; whether the pavements stay gum-free depends on what happens after it, which is exactly what Keep Britain Tidy’s two-month monitoring will be watching. Gum is litter in law, and the bins are already there. The council’s other everyday street services, from bin collection days to town centre parking, are covered in our local information pages.

Sources

• Reigate & Banstead Borough Council, New funding will help Reigate & Banstead Borough Council tackle the sticky issue of chewing gum on Redhill streets, 4 August 2026 (grant amount, timetable, statistics and quotes)

All figures are as published by the council on 4 August 2026. The council has not announced an exact date for the deep clean beyond “later this month”.