Snow Friends
Snow Friends are local residents who volunteer to clear snow and ice in their street, by working with a local community group or Residents Association, in partnership with us. Salt supplies and shovels are available free of charge to these groups. We can only guarantee 1 bag of salt per household for the season although we will try to provide additional bags, if available, following further snow fall.
As a Snow Friend, your help will enable our Winter Gritting and Snow Clearance Operations Team to concentrate on the Borough's priority routes - the main road network and pavements in town centres, schools and transport interchanges. A detailed map of our gritting routes is available.
Each group is led by a co-ordinator who will:
- liaise with us and their group.
- promote the scheme to neighbours
- inform us of the streets their group is willing to remove snow from.
- take receipt of supplies for their group and arrange for their distribution/collection
- receive snowfall forecast alerts for the borough
- feedback their snow clearance success to the council.
Interested in becoming a Snow Friend
The Snow Friends network has been established for this winter 2011/12 and salt and snow shovel supplies have been allocated to local snow friends co-ordinators. But residents can still take part by contacting their local co-ordinator.
If you want to become a Snow Friend for next winter, or if you want to contact your local snow friends co-ordinator, please complete the Snow Friends form.
You can find out more about the scheme in the Snow Friends leaflet.
Snow Friends has become even more popular this year, with around 3500 Snow Friends volunteers agreeing to work together with other like-minded residents, to clear streets and pavements of snow for the benefit of their local community. The amount of interest has been outstanding, with many local residents joining together to create a 'mini' community of Snow Friends, and we now have 179 Snow Friends groups within the Borough.
You may like to find out more about our work with other volunteers like Street Friends who help us by reporting problems such as graffiti in their street, while Friends of Parks care for their local park or green space in practical ways like picking up litter and planting bulbs.
