THE contract to clean York's public toilets is to be put out to tender after filthy facilities marred the start of the city's summer tourist season.

Coun Derek Smallwood, City of York Council's executive member for the environment, has publicly apologised to residents, visitors and businesses for the service's failure.

An Evening Press investigation highlighted how cleaning staff shortages had left public toilets across the city in a mess over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend. Used syringes and bags of rubbish lay uncollected, while a vandalised chemical toilet was left unchecked. City tourism bosses feared the fiasco could have harmed trade.

Prompted by our expos, Conservative leader Coun John Galvin tabled a motion to last night's full council meeting to highlight the serious concern sparked by the situation and to call for the contract - which is currently awarded to the council's in-house commercial services group - to be put out to tender to other service providers when it comes up for renewal at the end of 2003.

The motion was unanimously backed by members of the authority.

Coun Galvin said: "I am delighted that Councillor Smallwood, as executive member for the environment, has apologised publicly and I commend him for doing so. This is what grown-up politics in local government is all about.

"There was obviously a breakdown in the system which should not have happened.

"Steps are being taken to make sure this never happens again and I am delighted about that."

He said he felt sure the situation would improve dramatically over the next 12 months.

At the time, the council said the lapse in cleaning standards had been a "one-off" caused by staff shortages among the contractors.

Coun Smallwood, who had immediately ordered an investigation and received a four-page report, said: "All I can do is apologise to the citizens of York and to the visitors for the complete failure of our contractor on this occasion. They found that they had a management problem before the Easter weekend but they didn't bother to tell us they had a problem and the consequences were that the whole thing failed miserably.

"Obviously we have taken measures to make sure that can't happen again."

He added that in the longer term lessons would also be learned from the best value review of street cleaning, which includes public toilets. The review report, by consultants Capita, is due out in about two weeks.

Updated: 11:43 Wednesday, May 01, 2002