A year ago, Glasgow City Council announced a £7 million street cleaning blitz. The press releases were optimistic. The language was bold. The message was clear: Glasgow was going to get on top of its rat problem. Twelve months later, the rat population has soared to record numbers, and I am starting to think the rats did not read the press release.
A City That Cannot Keep Clean
This is not a new problem. Anyone who has walked through certain parts of Glasgow after dark knows the score. The bins overflow. The food waste piles up. The rats multiply. It has been this way for years, and a one off spending commitment was never going to fix it.
Seven million pounds is real money. It bought new cleansing crews, additional bin collections, and a public awareness campaign. What it did not buy was a fundamental change in how the city manages waste. The structural problems remain: too few bins in the wrong places, inconsistent collection schedules, and a commercial waste system that treats the public realm as someone else’s problem.
Why the Rats Keep Coming
Rats are not complicated creatures. They go where the food is. If you leave food waste on the streets, they will come. If you provide warm underground spaces with easy access to sustenance, they will breed. Glasgow provides both of these things in abundance, and no amount of money will change that without a complete rethink of the city’s waste infrastructure.
The irony is that Glasgow is a city with enormous ambition. It hosted COP26. It is bidding for international events. It markets itself as a world class destination. And yet it cannot keep rats off its high streets. There is something deeply embarrassing about that, and I think the council knows it.
What Seven Million Should Have Bought
If I had £7 million to spend on Glasgow’s streets, I would not have spread it thin across existing services. I would have invested in underground waste systems like the ones used in Barcelona and Copenhagen. I would have mandated sealed commercial waste containers in every food district. I would have created a dedicated rapid response team for the city centre.
Instead, the money went into doing more of the same, and the results speak for themselves. Record rat numbers. Record public complaints. And a council that is running out of excuses.