THE streets of a Teesside town are their cleanest yet.

A survey of Middlesbrough's streets have shown them to be almost spotless.

The council measures street cleanliness on a system devised by national environment watchdog, Encams.

Originally, 43 per cent of the town's streets failed to come up to standard. A year ago, that figure was reduced to 28 per cent.

Latest figures show that has gone down again to 18 per cent.

Councillor Bob Kerr, executive member for the environment, said: "The good news is that streets are getting cleaner across the town.

"We are improving faster than the targets the Government is setting. We knew the situation where four in ten streets failed to make the standard just wasn't acceptable for us or the local people.

"So we set about reorganising our cleaning squads, giving each of them a particular area of town to look after.

"We also began to inspect the streets every day so problems were identified quickly."