Council expects hiccups when new bin collection launches

Richard Evans – Local Democracy Reporter

A council’s head of environment says there will be more missed collections and hiccups when the local authority launches its new, revised bin and recycling rounds on November 4.

But he said he was confident that the revised scheme would work and the council would be in a ‘normal situation’ in a matter of weeks.

The original scheme was launched in June, but the service’s launch was labelled as a disaster with widespread missed collections.

Consequently, the authority’s chief executive and leader made public apologies as the service ran £640,000 over budget and residents reported rubbish piling up on pavements attracting flies and vermin.

Then earlier this month, the cabinet agreed to spend an additional £1.067m on the ‘botched’ recycling scheme every year in a bid to fix the issues.

The cabinet also resolved to borrow an additional £1.299m in capital expenditure to fund eight new recycling vehicles as well as new drivers and loaders.

Waste

Denbighshire’s communities scrutiny committee was tasked with scrutinising the new revised weekly Trollibocs recycling service and associated waste collections.

The committee met this week at Ruthin’s County Hall HQ where it considered the report and confirmed it had taken into account a wellbeing impact assessment.

But during the debate, Conservative and backbench councillor Brian Jones told senior councillors and recycling chiefs they risked more backlash from the public if waste collections continued to be missed.

The new revised bin and recycling rounds are due to be introduced on November 4, but Cllr Jones already feared the council was under immediate pressure to deliver a reliable service.

Scrutiny 

Cllr Jones said the recycling service would have been better starting the new rounds quietly, rather than announcing it and putting the service under immediate public scrutiny.

“As a general observation, if it was me, I would have rolled into this new round working in a more low-key way because I think you might have put pressure on yourselves,” he said.

“I accept you’ve got confidence it’s going to work, but maybe you should have slipped it in, rolled it in as a mix and match and not made the statement ‘we’re going to start on 4 November’ because all eyes will be on it, and if there is hiccups, it’s going to hone in more bad publicity for you.”

“If you’ve brought some rounds together where one round has been working very well but then you’ve matched it with some round that wasn’t so good, are you confident that sort of thing is going to work?”

He added: “Or are you going to dig yourself in a hole where, after early November, you’re going to be firefighting again and trying to get back on track?”

Corporate director for economy and environment Tony Ward responded.

Risk

“We are confident, Brian, as I’ve said about the new rounds; however, changing anything comes with a risk, doesn’t it?” he said.

“And we fully expect that there will be some level of hiccups or some missed collections when we introduce new hours. We’re still having some missed collections now, so this is going to happen, and we always have had missed collections. As I said in cabinet, even in what people refer to as the halcyon days of the blue-bin regime, we always had missed collections, and the data shows that.

“So we will have them; however, we’re confident that they will settle in really quickly, those new rounds, and I’ve said, within a matter of weeks, we expect to be in what we would consider a normal situation.”

He added: “I agree with you on the low-key aspect of it. It would have been much better. The trouble is that members have been constantly asking us when the new rounds are going to be introduced, so we have to answer, don’t we?

“From a resident’s perspective, we hope that nobody will see any difference at all, apart from the people who have unfortunately still had an inconsistent service.

“They will find that they’re getting a consistent service. The people who are getting a good service and have been since the beginning, we hope they’ll see no difference. It won’t matter to them that the rounds are different.

“They’ll just still get their bins emptied. That’s what we hope for. We don’t really want fanfare around the introduction of the new rounds, but members want to know because it’s obviously an issue of great importance and interest.”