East Herts Council confirms dozens of households still need new bins

Dozens of households in East Herts are still missing bins – six weeks after the roll-out of the new waste collection service.

Cllr Tim Hoskin (Green), the district council’s executive member for environmental sustainability, told a meeting of its overview and scrutiny committee on Tuesday (Sept 16) that around 60 households were short of one of the required bins.

He said that the majority of missing bins were brown food caddies, and that the council was “working through” the issue despite “a stock shortage”.

According to Cllr Hoskin, 99.92% of required containers have now been delivered, up from 97% when the new service by waste contractor Veolia began on August 4.

With each household requiring two food waste caddies – a small green one for inside and a larger brown one for outside – as well as a new purple-lidded bin for non-recyclable waste, Cllr Hoskin said the rollout meant a “staggering” 200,000 items needed to be delivered.

Talking about the initial 97%, he said: “That sounds quite high, but when you consider that’s 97% of quite a large number, it left a significant number of households without the means to fully participate in the new scheme.

“Approximately 1,600 households didn’t have the combination of containers required by August 4.”

The council had prepared for early teething problems, with Liberal Democrat Cllr Joseph Dumont, the executive member for corporate services, confirming it had anticipated a rise in customer service queries and had hired four additional temporary staff members ahead of the rollout.

When it became evident that the number of customer service queries – over 1,000 a day at one point – was “far in excess of what was anticipated”, two further temporary staff members were taken on.

From mid-August, daily review meetings began between senior councillors and officers, as well as Veolia, to help iron out issues with the rollout.

A new form was developed to enable residents’ concerns to be passed directly to the contractor, rather than having to go through customer services.

Cllr Hoskin revealed Veolia had “been able to draft in additional resources” to get containers to households at weekends, on top of their usual weekday collections – all at Veolia’s expense.

Residents have also raised issues about “broken” brown food waste caddies. Cllr Hoskin said: “We’ve been collecting faithfully back in all the brown food bins that people have said are broken.

“The vast majority of them aren’t broken and can be repaired, but there are a number – and that is in excess of 200 at the moment – where there is a potential manufacturing fault. We’re engaging with the production company and will explore whatever means we need to.”

Cllr Hoskin also spoke to councillors about early issues with the actual collection rounds: “The introduction of food waste [collections] and a three-weekly cycle necessitated the redesign of virtually all our collection rounds.

“The approach taken by the contractor was to leave an experienced team member as a catalyst for the team and then build other team members around it. We lost local knowledge through that process.

“The three-weekly cycle team do the… cycle week after week in your area, so there’s a chance to build a relationship with them as a resident, but also for them to get familiar with the quirks of each round. I think that’s probably a better design than we had previously.”

Another problem had led to some communal properties initially receiving collections at incorrect frequencies.

Cllr Hoskin said the issue had arisen from “data transfer” problems: “It defaulted to a three-weekly cycle instead of a weekly or fortnightly [cycle], which was the desired or established routine. That created a great deal of angst for residents, some of whom were in sheltered housing with elderly residents.

“It’s something that shouldn’t have happened but did happen. Those have been corrected and extra collections have been organised to get them back on to the appropriate schedules.”

On the positive side, Cllr Hoskin said that the introduction of food waste collections and the increased amount of cardboard being collected had seen the amount of non-recyclable waste reduce, with “positive benefits” – including financially – for East Herts.

“We get paid for the cardboard we collect and we have to pay less for residual waste,” he said.

Praising Veolia as “a good partner”, Cllr Hoskin said: “They’ve been very straightforward in owning the issues they’ve created and funding the solutions behind resolving those issues.”

A further update on the rollout of the bin collection service will be provided at a committee meeting in November.