PEOPLE living across Greater Leys are invited to join officers for a much-needed sprucing up of their estate.

The latest Clean Green Oxford drive was launched at The Barn in Nightingale Avenue on Monday and will see efforts concentrated in the area's streets and green spaces over two weeks.

As well as getting the estate looking its best, there will be a focus on environmental issues and education to get people thinking about the long term.

John Tanner, Oxford City Council's board member for clean and green Oxford, said: "We want the Leys clean-up to involve everybody, staff and residents.

"We want to make sure that people don't drop litter, nobody allows their dog to foul and people recycle more.

"We will start by asking people politely to do the right thing, but if they don't we will certainly be issuing on-the-spot fines."

Teams from the council's environmental health and street cleaning departments are being drafted in from across Oxford to focus on the Leys for a fortnight.

Efforts are being supported by the two housing associations operating in Greater Leys – Catalyst and GreenSquare.

Over the course of Monday teams from both firms spoke with residents in Nightingale Avenue about three key issues: litter, fly-tipping and dog fouling.

GreenSquare community involvement officer Lew Fryer said: "Greater Leys was definitely a good choice of location; it's quite bad at the moment.

"The parks and some of the nature areas like Spindleberry need a clean-up, and some of the alleyways as well.

"People are all mentioning the same hotspots and we need to re-educate young people to use the bins, pick up litter and clean up after their dogs."

Ines Kretzschmar, community investment coordinator at Catalyst, said her team would be focusing on trimming back overgrown shrubs first planted in the mid-1980s.

She said: "Originally the shrubs were planted when the estate was founded as an anti-social behaviour measure, so people couldn't climb over walls.

"But now they are overgrown and catching litter. We will cut them down and some of them will be replaced with other plants."

In the past, large-scale community clean-ups organised by Catalyst and GreenSquare have taken place on individual streets.

At the last event in Falcon Close, Blackbird Leys, more than 50 households got involved and filled a total of five skips with rubbish over a single day in April.