The Executive Member for Waste, Recycling and Environment to be available to answer questions from Members of the Letchworth Committee regarding the Waste Contract.
Decision:
Councillor Michael Weeks, Executive Member for Waste, Recycling and Environment, thanked the Chairman for inviting him to address the Committee regarding the issues and problems encountered following the introduction of a new Waste Contract.
Minutes:
Audio recording – Start of Item – Session 3 – 1 hour 44 minutes 31 seconds
Councillor Michael Weeks, Executive Member for Waste, Recycling and Environment, thanked the Chairman for the invitation to address the Committee and gave a verbal presentation regarding the issues and problems that had occurred since the introduction of the new waste contract as follows:
· The waste contract was in some disarray, for which he apologised;
· The issues were operational and the Council did not have a lot of control over these issues;
· The main issue was regarding residents who had paid on-line for brown bin collections that had not been collected;
· The data regarding several thousand properties was not transferred to the Urbaser system;
· Some of the rounds were not accurately recorded on Urbaser’s system resulting in areas where streets were missed;
· Whilst it was believed that most of the staff would transfer to Urbaser a number of staff did not do so for various reasons;
· The new vehicles were not in place at the start of the contract resulting in a lot of hired vehicles being used;
· The hired vehicles were not up to the job, but these had now been replaced with more appropriate vehicles;
· The delivery of food caddies was 1500 caddies short. This was solved by borrowing stocks from East Herts District Council;
· In response to these issues, Urbaser made the decision to collect every brown bin. This was seen as an opportunity to catch up, although this had now ceased;
· Urbaser were throwing tens of thousands of pounds and as much resource as possible at the contract.
· There were a lot of new and agency staff and Urbaser were undertaking appropriate staff training;
· NHDC Waste Team was short staffed and were working hard.
A statement was issued yesterday as follows:
“Councillor Michael Weeks, NHDC’s Executive Member for Waste, Recycling and Environment said:
Unfortunately, at the start of our new contract with Urbaser there had been some issues with the reliability of data held for those customers who have signed up to the garden waste service, this had led to a number of brown bins being missed on several collection dates.
Urbaser had been working hard to catch up with collecting missed bins, however, given the inconvenience this caused, last week they decided to collect any brown bins that were put out for collection.as a short term measure whilst the issues were worked on.
Urbaser were now confident that they had identified the data issue and therefore they would shortly be reverting to only collecting brown bins that had been paid for. The operation would be kept under close review.”
In response to Members observations, concerns and questions, the Executive Member for Waste, Recycling and Environment advised:
· There were penalty clauses in the contact with Urbaser, but it was not the appropriate time to discuss this;
· The contracts for staff working for Urbaser had not changed;
· Brown bins should be marked with the house number;
· Urbaser were trying to ensure that each round had at least one experience person on the crew.
Councillor Needham advised that staff had been TUPEs over to Urbaser on the same contract and that Urbaser had held staff meetings and were under the impression that staff seemed happy.
Staff in the East Herts area had not had issues and had transferred over without issue. Staff in the North Herts area seemed to have just not tuned up on the first day and the reasons for this needed to be investigated.
The crews were being paid for the time worked, it was custom and practice in effuse teams that, if the required work was finished early the staff could go home.
Urbaser had put together the implementation plans and NHDC officers had reviewed them.
Members agreed that the implementation of the contract should be reviewed in the future, however it was important at this time to work on getting a workable service.
The Chairman thanked Councillor Weeks for attending the meeting.