SWINDON Council is to spend an extra £100,000 on making the town more attractive to visitors and businesses and has pledged to tackle the blight of the town's gum-covered pavements.

The money, which has been released from council reserves, is being spent in addition to the £1.8m the authority spends every year cleaning all parts of the town.

It is the first time the council has undertaken such an intense clean up and follows calls on the council to rid streets of the blight of gum.

A group of MPs met yesterday to discuss how best to make Britain's streets cleaner. They suggested gum should be reclassified as litter so on-the-spot fines could be issued to those who drop it on the pavement.

They also recommended that local authorities be given powers to ban the sale of chewing gum in areas where the problem is most acute and petitioned manufacturers to make the product less sticky.

Last year, the then mayor Stan Pajak (Lib Dem, Eastcott) called for a change in the law to allow local authorities to issue on-the-spot-fines to people caught dropping chewing gum.

Current mayor Derek Benfield (Lab, Covingham and Nythe) backed him and said: "Chewing gum is worse than litter and is the blight of Swindon town centre. The whole problem needs to be addressed and we welcome investigations into what can be done. Something needs to be done. I know certain schools ban chewing gum, but I don't see how you could control the ban. We should be looking at the cause rather than addressing the effect."

To date Swindon Council has spent nothing on specifically tackling the problem of gum, but other councils spend thousands of pounds blasting gum off the pavements with special high-powered equipment. Aberdeen City Council and Woking Borough Council use machines that emit a high-powered jet stream to remove gum, while in Bristol chewing gum is frozen off with special equipment before being cleared.

Bins specifically designed for chewing gum have already been installed in Bournemouth.

John Short, director of Swindon Services, said: "The clean up is in response to the public and the need to make the place much cleaner and more attractive to businesses and the public. Chewing gum is a nightmare, a blight on the town centre and looks terrible when people walk through central Swindon."

South Swindon MP Julia Drown said: "There's no doubt that chewing gum is a nuisance when people don't get rid of it responsibly."

North Swindon MP Michael Wills said: "I will write immediately to Wrigley's asking them to use their enormous resources to find a way of making it easier to clean the gum up. It's a huge problem, but I don't think banning people from using it is a good thing."