Street sweepers have teamed up to blitz problem areas in the early hours each morning in a new scheme.

Enfield Council has created seven four-strong teams to start at 6am on weekday mornings sweeping and picking up litter in areas such as Edmonton and Enfield Lock in a bid to make them clean before locals leave to go to work.

The Enfield Independent joined the Fore Street Tidy Team this morning to help clean up the scores of cigarette butts, takeaway wrappers and other litter that had built up overnight – a key concern highlighted in a survey of taxpayers.

The new project means workers who used to patrol a patch alone in shifts throughout the day struggling to make an impact on the litter are now working together in a team.

Manager David Coventry, who leads a team of 130 full-time staff, said: “It’s a simple idea and I don’t know why other boroughs don’t do it – it’s something that loads of people wanted fixed and it’s democracy in action.

“When you’ve got one person doing it, by the time they’ve finished all the litter is back again. But this morning, when this team is done you can look left and right and it’s completely clean.”

Litter picker Peter Smith said that he enjoyed working with his colleagues rather than alone, and that it was more effective to tackle the problem, which included dealing with human faeces left in the street.

And van driver Michael McDowell, who has been in the job for two years, agreed, saying: “It’s much better and I enjoy it more – you had no hope going up and down here before on your own.”

Each worker covers an average of three kilometres a day, and the teams, which are backed by mechanised sweepers, link up with other council departments in bad weather to help grit streets.

Councillor Chris Bond, cabinet member for environment, said the project did not cost the department, which has a budget of £4.6million a year, any money and it was an innovative way of improving the service without spending more.

He added: “Obviously residents want clean streets in the borough and the workers helped come up with the idea, because they face this job in tough conditions every day.

“We’ve found that using Tidy Teams gets the streets cleaner quicker and keeps them cleaner for longer than the traditional method of using lone sweepers and we’ll be rolling this approach out across the borough so everyone sees the benefits – it’s just about modernising it all.”

By the time the Fore Street team had finished its work this morning, the street was noticeably more litter-free as commuters left to travel to work.