A LITTER-busting Bolton Council boss will be stalking the corridors of a town hall in the Far East after winning a tidiness award.

Trevor Leese, who won People and Places Manager of the Year award from The Tidy Britain Group, is on his way to either Hong Kong or Singapore.

The council official will see at close hand how the administrators of huge cities with limited space deal with environmental problems.

Mr Leese said: "They have massive problems with waste. I want to see how they tackle it."

He won a free trip to anywhere in the world after scooping the top manager award this month.

Bolton Council also won the prize of the People and Places Programme of the Year award, in a competition which included more than 100 local authorities and environmental managers. Mr Leese said: "I am very pleased we managed to achieve the top two awards.

"We have been doing them for four or five years but never managed to win.

"It reflects the work done by community groups and businesses, not just the council.

"We have been building up a partnership over the past five or six years."

But the council won the awards despite the Bolton Evening News's exposure of "grot spots".

Our photographs showed litter strewn across roads and pavements in Kearsley, Tonge Moor, Deane and Halliwell.

And it is just four years after the Tidy Britain Group branded the whole town a "grot spot".

Council chiefs have also come under fire for "spoiling" the appearance of Bolton's showpiece town centre by cutting back on street cleaning.

But Mr Leese hit back saying the council had made huge improvements in the town's cleanliness.

He added he was confident that new figures from the Tidy Britain Group out next week, using the same index which showed Bolton up as a "grot spot", would this time give the town a clean bill of health.

The manager said: "The cleanliness index is a measure of how clean the town centre area is. At that time it was pretty poor.

"But since then, we have put in measures to improve the situation.

"We are confident from doing our own monitoring that our score will be much improved."

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.