Extra funds approved to fix botched recycling scheme

Richard Evans, local democracy 

Senior councillors have backed plans to spend an additional £1.067m on a “botched” recycling scheme every year.

Denbighshire Council’s cabinet also agreed to borrow an additional £1.299m in capital expenditure to fund eight new recycling vehicles as well as new drivers and loaders.

The council rolled out a new Trolibocs system in early June in a bid to improve recycling rates in the county, but the scheme has been beset with problems, with residents facing missed collections and council staff resorting to remixing recycling that has already been pre-washed and separated by residents.

Over budget

Councillors heard the recycling scheme is already running £640,000 over budget.

Originally the authority’s new scheme incorporated 20 new recycling rounds, but councillors heard how this was not enough coupled with a lack of investment.

Consequently, the number of rounds increased to 31 during the crisis.

The revised scheme will now see the council roll out between 26-28 new recycling rounds, although details are yet to be finalised.

At a meeting of the cabinet on Tuesday, cabinet members rubberstamped the decision to invest more money into the recycling scheme.

No timeline

Speaking after the meeting, independent leader Cllr Huw Hilditch-Roberts accused the council of not having a firm plan in place.

“I understand there is a need to sort out the recycling system; however, from the cabinet approving the budget today, they have no guarantees, no timeline, and no plan in place to say when the recycling will be fit for purpose,” he said.

“It is still all based on assumptions, the same as when the scheme was rolled out at the beginning of June.”

A report issued to councillors ahead of the meeting said: “The decision sought by this report will enable the waste service to implement the amended waste collection routes placing the service on a more sustainable basis and reducing the current levels of expenditure.”

Additional resources

Speaking at the meeting, cabinet member for recycling Cllr Barry Mellor said: “There is no avoiding the fact that the permanent solution requires allocating additional resources to the service.

“That’s an uncomfortable truth, but it’s a reality of the situation we face.

“We need to take a decision to provide the permanent solution and put the new service on a sustainable footing, and the proposal on this paper provides that permanent solution.”

Corporate director for the economy and environment Tony Ward added: “A lot of work has gone into revisiting the model over the past couple of months.

“What we have now that we didn’t have before is the experience of what’s happened since the roll out.

“So prior to the change, despite the huge amounts of work going on in planning the service, everything is a theoretical model until it is being rolled out.

“What we now have is the experience of what actually happened following the roll out, and we can see exactly what is happening every day on every single recycling round so we can see exactly which rounds have been doing okay, which ones have been quite close to finishing, and which are quite a long way away, and we can also examine the reasons why in quite a lot of detail.

“So we are working on the basis of real evidence, of what the service is like, and real life rather than basing it on assumptions, which was the case prior to the roll out, which gives us a lot of confidence that this solution will work.

“There is risk in any change.

“This is another change, although it is a much smaller change, so again, this gives us confidence that this change can be managed and managed successfully.

“We know when there’s any change implemented that brings risk.

“But we are confident we have got the plan in place to deal with those issues quickly and successfully so that this new service hits the ground running.”

Missed collections

Mr Ward also said he couldn’t promise collections would never be missed, claiming every authority across the UK experienced missed collections.

Speaking during the meeting, Cllr Hilditch-Roberts slammed the scheme.

“What I find really frustrating is that I’m sat here being told by officers that the roll out was all based on assumptions and we hope that this will work. Assumptions is the mother of all mistakes,” he said.

Cllr Hilditch-Roberts then said a disabled woman in Denbigh had 118 uncollected incontinence pads.

He added: “The model in front of you is a model based on assumptions, not metrics.

“You can’t tell me when you can get the wagons, and you can’t tell me when you’re going to get the staff.

“This is a figure that doesn’t have the metrics behind it.”

Mr Ward then warned the new system wouldn’t solve problems immediately.

Switch

He said: “Introducing these new rounds isn’t like flicking a switch and everything’s going to be perfect when we do it.

“But we are confident we can deal with these issues, and within weeks of these changes, things will settle down, but I’m not going to give you a date when everything is going to be OK again, but we are talking about weeks rather than months moving to that sustainable (model).”

Cllr Terry Mendies said he feared the council would be asking residents for more money in six months’ time.

“It is clear the residents have been paying for a service that they simply haven’t had,” he said.

Cllr Bobby Feeley accused the cabinet of being “irritated and defensive” in response to criticism, calling the situation a “disgraceful state of affairs”.

Chief executive Graham Boase added: “The question is when will it be right? What day will it be right?

“Tony (Ward) has said it will be a matter of weeks, but it’s really difficult to say it will be a set date because by giving you a set date, you’re setting yourself up to fail if it is a day or two after that because there are lots of moving parts.”

Mr Boase then said it had been a difficult time for officers, councillors and residents.

Cllr Hugh Irving added: “I’m concerned we are pouring more money down a black hole, and that is not acceptable to residents.”

The cabinet unanimously backed the decision.