Sheffield Council spends over £8 per person on cleaning the city's streets of litter

Shock statistics also revealed the authority's total bill for street cleaning topped £4.4 million in just one year.

Sheffield spends one of the most for any of the UK's biggest cities but forks out less per head than 14 London boroughs and places like the Isle of White, Middlesborough and Stoke-on-Trent.

Figures show City of London Council spend £660 per resident on street cleaning whereas Herefordshire County Council spend just nine pence per person.

Using figures from the latest census and the total street cleaning bill for one year, Sheffield Council spends a total of £8.09 per head.

Council bosses in Sheffield have taken a strong stance on litter louts after naming and shaming people who drop litter on the city's streets.

Over 800 people were hauled in front of Sheffield Magistrates' Court in 2016 after failing to pay a fixed penalty notice for dropping litter.

The figures revealed by councils across the country amount to around £1 billion a year to clean Britain's streets - enough to fund 33,000 nurses.

Bosses from campaign group Keep Britain tidy said the RSPCA, revealed over 5,000 reports of injuries to animals involving litter.

A report compiled by the litter campaign group was released in line with the announcement of their next big national spring clean event on March 5.

It builds of the success of 2016’s national clean-up, which saw 250,000 people get stuck in to clean up their communities, including hundreds of school children, thousands of community groups and 400 local authorities across the country, who between them collected more than 300,000 bags of rubbish.

Keep Britain Tidy Chief Executive Allison Ogden-Newton said: “The Great British Spring Clean is about getting all those people who care about their environment to take action. We know that more than 50% of people are concerned about the appearance of their local area and so we want them to feel that they can do something about it and they are not alone in caring.

“If 500,000 people help us pick litter for just two hours each that means that our country will benefit from one million hours of clean-up care.”

Sheffield Council has been contacted to comment on the figures.