Work, house prices, schools and crime rates often play the biggest roles in deciding where we live. However, things like recycling, clean areas and air quality are becoming increasingly more important to homeowners.
With all this in mind, we examined a number of English cities and towns to find out which ones were the cleanest.
Based on waste expenditure, air quality, recycling rates and overall cleanliness and tidiness, which are England’s cleanest cities?
Each local authority may assign a percentage of funds towards waste management and climate change costs as they see fit. So which areas invest the most into these services and initiatives?
Air quality has a significant, proven impact on our quality of life. Poor air quality can lead to (and aggravate) a number of respiratory illnesses, so it should be an important factor for people when choosing where to live.
While all of our 40 cities have good air quality scores, some cities scored better than others. In the case of the air quality index, a score between 0-50 is considered to be good. The lower the number, the better the air quality.
Of the 40 cities, four achieved the best air quality score of 19, indicating that these places have excellent air quality. These cities are listed below:
Most of us try to do our bit for the planet by filling our recycling bins each week with rubbish that would otherwise end up in landfills. However, some cities seem to recycle far more than others.
In the final part of our study, we looked to local residents to find out how clean they thought their towns and cities were. So without further ado, which places were ranked the best by locals?
After ranking the cleanest English cities, we wanted to see how their rankings compared to their average house prices. Is there any correlation between cleanliness and property price?
Looking at the top scoring cities, we can see that they have fairly low house prices. The average price of all 40 cities is £241,052, while the top scoring city of Newcastle has an average house price of £173,968. Telford, which ranks second, has an average house price of £190,055.
House prices at the bottom of the list however, tend to be higher than those with higher Clean City scores. Portsmouth has the lowest score of 2.67 and an average house price of £231,027, while Ipswich has a score of 3.08 and an average house price of £207,519.
Waste management expenditure figures sourced from the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government’s local authority revenue expenditure and financing data, released in June 2021 and refers to the total expenditure of each relevant authority within the county in 2019-20.
In instances where a council spends £0 on a certain service, this is because these services will likely be covered by another authority.
The annual average air quality index scores were taken from Plume Labs with a lower score indicating a better air quality.
Recycling rates were taken from the government’s quarterly local authority collected waste management statistics and refers to the total tonnes of household waste sent for recycling, composting or reuse for the three-month period of April to June 2020.
The clean and tidy score is an average of user submissions according to Numbeo’s Quality of Life Index Average house prices are taken from the government’s UK House Price Index for 2021.
To get our final score, we assigned a normalised score out of 10 for each factor before taking an average of all of these scores, to give a final score out of 10.
While we began by looking at the 100 most populated cities and towns across England, we removed any where data was not available, leaving us with 40 cities in total.